Expect more violence as election draws near

Relatives had warned Rachel Arenas, congressional frontrunner in Pangasinan’s 3rd district, to not go on campaign sorties anymore. It wasn’t so much because she was leading the surveys anyway than the race’s entry into a critical stage. Two weeks to Election Day is always perilous. By then, after a year of posturing and 30 days of stumping, contenders already can sense the outcome. The trailing ones, if smart and sporty, would withdraw, but if desperate, would kidnap or ambush the rival. Violence already had flared elsewhere — in Kalinga, Nueva Ecija, Puerto Princesa — and the Pangasinan zone composed of San Carlos City, Malasiqui, Bayambang, Sta. Barbara, Calasiao and Mapandan was a usual election hotspot. So her strategists wanted Rachel to stay in safe quarters.

But she was adamant. She was a special guest to crown San Carlos’s fiesta queen last Saturday night and thus had to go. There were known threats on the life of Rachel’s party mate, mayoralty bet Jullier Resuello, and to her own security. They are up against brothers from the Soriano political clan in a fight that the press has predicted to be searing. Only last week two aides of their chief campaigner, Jullier’s dad the incumbent mayor Julian Resuello, had been found slain in a ditch just outside town. But Rachel roundly had promised hungry voters to help uplift their lives, so what more a commitment to grace a beauty tilt?

Friends (including my wife and me) offered to escort Rachel. Dancing was in full swing at the jam-packed plaza 10:15 p.m. when she and the Resuellos stood up to shake hands with the partiers. Suddenly someone fired gunshots, killing a bodyguard and hitting the older Resuello in the chest. Panting from avoiding the stampede, we gathered newsbits. Also wounded were a policeman, two men and two girls. Rachel and Jullier were unhurt, but the mayor is in critical condition. The assassin, obviously to inflict the most damage, had used dumdum bullets that explode upon firing and again upon hitting target. The gunman got away, but witnesses had recognized him.

The violence aimed not only to cripple Rachel and Jullier’s campaign, but also to scare voters against electing the frontrunners. San Carlos citizens have locked themselves indoors, ABS-CBN News flashed. Rachel and Jullier’s election victory are foreseen, but for now violence won in the city and the rest of the district. Expect more maiming and killings in other parts of the country on the run up to May 14.

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President Arroyo and the education department required since last year not only vigorous teaching of English but also its use in Science and Match classes. It’s wrong, according to Miriam College president Patricia Licuanan, national artists Bienvenido Lumbera and Virgilio Almario, U.P. sociologist Randolph David, La Salle University writer-in-residence Efren Abueg, and WIKA Inc. president Isagani Cruz. The overuse of English not only defies the Constitution but also further deteriorates Science and Math teaching. The academics are petitioning the Supreme Court to stop the shift to English as medium of instruction.

Arroyo fired off Executive Order 210, for heavy emphasis on English, upon learning that thousands of job seekers in call centers and US nursing slots were flunking language proficiency tests. The DepEd in turn ordered schools to teach Science and Math only in the foreign tongue. The orders aim to produce graduates who would fill up call center jobs, the academics lamented. And that is also the objective of a bill of Rep. Eduardo Gullas of Cebu in Central Visayas, where leaders prefer English to what they deride as a Tagalog-based and hence unrepresentative Filipino national language. But overdoing English would stunt Science and Math learning.

UNESCO studies have long concluded. Pupils learn to read and write faster if in their native tongue, say, Ilocano, Tagalog or Pampango, Bisaya, Bicolano or Ilonggo, Tausog, Maguindanao or Maranao. That is why the 1989 Education Commission, of legislators and linguists, recommended child instruction in their regional language and teaching of English only as a special subject. Youngsters think faster, clearer, deeper in a comfortable lingo than if they grapple for words, meanings and pronunciations in a borrowed one. This was proven by higher Science and Math scores in Bukidnon, where the Summer Institute of Linguistics teach tribal children in their native Manobo.

When instructed in uncommon English, pupils tend to slide down. Of every ten children who enter Grade I, only five are able to finish Grade VI; only two move on to high school and one attempts college. In Negros Oriental where English is preferred, 135,000 kids have to be fed lunch daily to keep them in 527 public schools.

It’s bad enough that children are under poor teachers; it’s worse if they are forced to think in a strange culture.

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