Stop red-tagging in Manila schools
In behalf of teachers in the Lumad schools in Mindanao, we, the Save Our Schools Network, join the various universities of Metro Manila in condemning the red-tagging of their schools by the Duterte regime.
We exhort all in the academic field--teachers, professors, students and non-teaching personnel--to assert academic freedom and the protection of the students’ rights to ventilate ideas and opinion.
We support Prof. Danilo Arao’s statement that we are for transformative education and that the red-tagging is restrictive to that pursuit. In participation to nation-building, students should be encouraged to express their opinions and opposition to the anti-people policies of the current regime. Many of the red-tagged schools have produced esteemed nation-builders and heroes, and to vilify them is tantamount to attacking academic freedom and silencing dissent.
We stand with you to not to be coerced to collaborate with the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in the witch hunting plan of Red October concoction. For many of us, it is a desperate plan to replicate nationwide the ignominious and condemned martial law of President Rodrigo Duterte’s idol, the late President Ferdinand Marcos.
The Duterte regime attacked the Lumad community schools systematically in the entire Mindanao to break the defenses of the tribal communities to their respective ancestral domains. Having an educated and defensive Lumad community is the least Duterte wants as he offered the entire Mindanao frontier to foreign investors for his vision of the ‘island development’. The target developments centered on the all ancestral domain of the Lumad tribes.
Martial law in Mindanao essentially killed hopes of majority of Lumad to fully own and advance as people. Many were killed and arrested while their homes and farms were destroyed by the AFP. Thousands of Lumad families and teachers have exodused to evacuation camps bringing with them their schools.
The Duterte regime have persisted in destroying what have been collectively established by the parents, students and teachers, their community schools. Instead of appreciating the support service the schools have contributed to the “change” Duterte had touted from his Day One of presidency, he instead viciously ordered their decimation by a more intensive militarization ever encountered by Mindanaoans.
We exhort fellow educators to protest and tell the president and the AFP to stop red-tagging schools, stop the witch hunt of militant and genuine opposition, and throw into the dustbin this Red October invention. We must be vigilantly opposed any maneuvers of the Duterte and his AFP cohorts to impose martial law regional or nationwide. There should be a nationwide and an international campaign to end martial law in Mindanao.--LEAH