Tempers are rising around the campus despite the cool weather recently. People are losing their cool. It’s all because of this one blog entry posted last Saturday. In it, the author addresses all UP students pompously saying “Education is NOT a Right!”

The title is infuriating by itself, but with its body, the entry is humorous, if not inciting sleep. It might be that for an average student, the entry’s cloud of intellectual talk is thick, enough for that student to switch tabs on his internet browser. However, if you ask a social science major to decipher it, all the entry’s technical points are easily countered.

The entry has been disquieting for a number or people that it garnered over three-hundred comments both from trolling UP students defending the people’s right to education and from those defending the entry’s claim. The entry itself is quite harmless and disinterested compared to the comments of the claim’s supporters.

One commenter put on the name “Abolish the University of the Philippines”. He argued all UP students are leftists, “die-hard Marxists” (implying intentionality) or not. He says this is so because UP’s intellectual freedom is within a “sphere of some predesignated [sic] leftist ideology.” He says UP’s curriculum, particularly that of the social sciences, “has Marxist assumptions at its core.” However, it was not stated whether the commenter knows what he’s saying because he is one of the drafters of UP’s curriculum or not. It was war at comments area.

It seems the author of the blog, Froilan Vincent Bersamina (NOT from UP, in case you’re wondering), took from the mentioned commenter’s name. He posted another blog entry saying that all state universities and colleges should be privatized. He believes that this “legalized form of stealing”--taxation to put others in school--should stop. Such thinking could make one’s jaw drop and call on his maker after.

For argument’s sake, let’s say that Bersamina is right. OK, education is not a right and people should be made to pay near-impossible amounts of money to be in school. Is that the right thing to do? Will it not bother anyone’s conscience?

Bersamina is basically saying we should not educate someone for free; we should let him struggle to find a way to afford the tuition, or to bypass it (Bersamina says “private charity” is the only way to do this). If he doesn’t find a way, then he’s stupid and we should just let him suffer his stupidity. It would be, no doubt, inhumane.

(by Paul Dawnson Formaran)

7:06 AM | Thursday, August 5, 2010