Kabataang Makabayan (KM) – Negros unites with the broad masses of students, parents, and teachers in opposing the burdening program of DepEd in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. The alternative mode of education pushed by DepEd, with online, modular, and TV/Radio based learning is untimely, costly, and inaccessible alternative especially to the toiling masses in the farms, countrysides, and urban poor.

Education remains to be a privilege and not a right in the Philippines especially after the policy of “distance learning” of the Department of Education (DepEd). The bogus and fascist Duterte regime has consistently situated the exploited classes in dire hunger and poverty upon the imposition of anti-people policies that only serve his reign and the ruling class of despotic landlords, big bourgeois compradors, and bureaucrat capitalists.

In the neoliberal design as dictated by Duterte’s imperialist US masters, solutions of his neglectful regime remain to be business and not service-oriented in answering the people’s demands during the crisis and emergency caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The intolerable and anti-people “distance learning” of DepEd further proves the continuing colonial, commercial, and fascist system of education in the country.

A huge part of the youth will be deprived of their right to education especially because their families have not yet recovered from the negative effects brought about by the pandemic and the militarist lockdowns that have dislocated their families’ livelihoods. Many of them will be forced to quit school because they cannot afford to purchase gadgets (computers, tablets, or smartphones), a TV or a transistor radio. Other than that is the requirement of a good signal, internet load, electricity, expenditure for those availing piso-net, and even transportation. A proof of this is the 50% decrease in enrollment in Bacolod City alone.

This educational program further ecposes the negligence and abandonment of the government in answering the perennial problem of education in the country in where it is still not free, of low quality, lacking in facilities, and passes the burden to the parents’ to shoulder fees. Instead, this program focuses on serving capitalists and the few who can afford that can be educated and finish school.

Today, that the worsening socio-economic and public health crises brought by the harmful pandemic and of the bloody Duterte virus in society, continue to prey on the youth and the masses through widespread landlessness, unemployment and systemic attacks and violations of human rights. The Negrosanon has been enslaved for centuries because of the hacienda system in where they experience semi-feudal and fascist exploitation from the landlords and big hacienderos.

As revolutionary youth with a historic role in society, it is only just that we take part along with the wide masses to uphold the national democratic revolution that carries with it the program for genuine land reform and national industrialization that can solve the roots of the nation’s problems.

As a special sector that penetrates all classes in society, we have a significant duty in making history and that we need to strengthen and expand our ranks along with the exploited classes to launch widespread struggle based on the line of the national democratic revolution. Push for a nationalist, scientific, and mass-oriented education- the type of education that teaches the abolition of land monopoly and one which serves the broad masses! Overcome and topple down the corrupt, neglectful, inutile, and tyrannical reign of the US-Duterte regime!

Youth and students, serve the people!
Take part in the making of history!
Join the New People’s Army!