Young, Poor and Unschooled

By Perla Aragon-Choudhury
Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project

QUEZON CITY — Pepe, 12, is busy helping his mother package loose garlic cloves for sale. “Before I go to school,” he says,” I put the cloves in plastic packs and staple them onto strips of cardboard. And when I get back home, I walk with my mother to the stores around Tandang Sora.”

Working in this main thoroughfare of Quezon City with his mother, Pepe endures the fierce afternoon sun, as shown by his dark brown skin. But he is proud to have finished Grade 6 — and happy that his cousin Jeffrey will return to school after dropping out last year.

Pepe and Jeffrey descended from tenant farmers who once toiled the land here before it was converted into subdivisions for the burgeoning population in the Philippines.

Their grandmother talks of a time when the family had enough for all their needs. But today they have lost the lands and their livelihoods to become tricycle and jeepney drivers or sidewalk vendors who are not allowed in to sell at the nearby private market.

Pepe is not the only working-class student determined to stay in class. In a garbage pile near a big drugstore along Tandang Sora, Mac-Mac, 12, checks for plastic bottles to sell. “I can get a good price for the mineral water ones,” he says indicating a junk shop along Visayas Avenue.

Mac-Mac is a fifth grader at a public school and proudly claims his teachers have awarded him `Best in Science’ and `Top Five’.

“I want to be a doctor and treat people even if they are too poor to pay,” he says as he carries a sack which once held the rice that the poor of Manila now queue for outside of the National Food Authority (NFA) on Visayas Avenue.

A kindly meat vendor in the nearby market worries out loud about the future if the children who work the streets here instead of being in school. “Just like the gangs in Oliver Twist, they’ll probably lack the proper values, character formation, discernment and life skills,” says Francisco Mondragon, 60.

“By late afternoon they are here at the market, asking for what we will discard,” says Mondragon. “How will they get the jobs that just might lift them out of poverty if they’re out of school?”

Shirley too works in the market. Poverty forced her to quit high school after her second year and she is now married to a seasonal construction worker earning what she can through buying and selling on fish to her equally poor neighbors. She makes very little in the way of profit.

But she hopes at least her children with get a better chance of schooling than she ever did.

“I’m lucky that one of my sons impressed his teachers during the entrance interview at the rich pre-school in our area, and got a scholarship. I hope that he can still get one tomorrow when we enroll again in his new school. If not, he might have to quit.”

The problem is education in the Philippines is free in principle –but not in practice. Pupils are routinely denied schooling for failing to wear the proper uniform or having the proper stationary or supplies.

Shirley’s sons and a great many other children like them across the Philippines are being denied the right to an education which is contrary to Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which states that “everyone has the right to education.”