Philippine News Digest 77
June 01 - 09, 2004
Contents:
Death
squad strikes anew
Indigenous
kids suffer racism in schools
School woes the same year in, year out
Death squad
strikes anew
Four
persons, including a 12-year old boy were killed by motor-cycle riding
gun-men over the weekend in Davao City even as city police chief Conrado
Laza stood firm on his earlier pronouncement that there was no death
squads operating in the city. The series of vigilante-style killing
momentarily stopped at the start of the election campaign in February. In
January, ten persons who were allegedly involved in crimes were killed.
The existence of death squads in Davao City has been the subject of
Preda's alternative report presented to the United Nations Human Rights
Committee in Geneva last year. Source: Anthony S. Allada, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 1 June
2004 and report from Preda.
Indigenous
kids suffer racism in schools
Forty
to fifty percent of indigenous children drop out of school before
graduation because they fail to assimilate with their classmates due to
racism in textbooks as well as the government teacher's biases against
“minorities,” according to an exploratory study commissioned by
Tebtebba Foundation and conducted by University of the Philippines
Professor Raymundo Rovillos. The trend is more peculiar in the Southern
Philippines where indigenous peoples are segregated from mainstream
communities. It also revealed that language is key to integrating
indigenous children into mainstream society but formal education
discourages indigenous school children from using their culture, their
languages and their customs in accessing rudimentary lessons in reading,
writing and arithmetic. Source:
Vincent Cabreza in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, 9 June 2004.
School woes
the same year in, year out
The same problems like late enrollees, lack of teacher and classrooms marked the first day of classes in public elementary schools June 6 despite the hiring of new teachers and 1,620 new principals and additional budget of P2 billion to build about 5,000 new classrooms. The number of students in public schools increases by five percent a year because many were transferring from private schools. The Department of Education expects about 5.2 million students in public high school to return to school when the school year for the secondary level opens on June 21. Source: Report from the Philippine Daily Inquirer
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