WITH no less than President Arroyo publicly announcing that there will be no more EDSA Revolutions, Pinoys might want to remember what happened 21 years ago.

In 1986, after evidence of massive cheating in the snap presidential elections, almost two million Filipino civilians surrounded Camps Crame and Aguinaldo along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) to protect military rebels and demand the ouster of President Marcos. From February 22 to 25, the crowd kept vigil and stood in front of the tanks to keep soldiers from shooting.

The whole military slowly became united in withdrawing support from Marcos, who eventually fled to Hawaii with his family. Not a single shot was fired and no one was seriously hurt. It was active non-violence at its most intense, and many nations cheered the Filipinos for showing it to the world.

Pinoy style non-violence (“people power”) became an inspiration for the world. The Berlin Wall fell almost the same way. For a few years we became the living torchbearers for the power of active non-violence in social change. Gandhi would have been proud of us.

At home, President Cory Aquino’s government wrote a new constitution that enshrined “people power” as an agent for change. And the framers of that same constitution put public school education to have the biggest share in the national budget. That constitution was ratified by the people and is still in effect. So as far as national aspirations goes, education (and not debt servicing and corruption) is where we should put the material gains of our democracy, won through active non-violence.

Last February 17th, a forum for active non-violence in Philippine education was held by Ang Komunidad para sa Ikauunlad ng Tao (The Community for Human Development), an international group which struggles for non-violence all over the world.

During her opening remarks at the forum at Commonwealth High School in Quezon City, Ang Komunidad President Karina Santillan stated, “If by violence, we mean our experience of personal pressures and social contradictions, it is not hard to see that there is indeed violence, even in our schools and institutions of learning.” She adds that The Community’s purpose is to bring into the open experiences and ideas from concerned individuals so that peaceful solutions could be implemented.

Guest speaker Professor Jose V. Abueva of the University of the Philippines and now of Kalayaan College in Marikina City, said institutions, especially on the government side, are in deep doodoo. The government, which is in crisis mode, faces a lot of serious problems that are affecting the quality of education in the country. The population is growing faster than the government’s capability to build school buildings, hire more teachers and buy more books. For this, Abueva blames the “hypocrisy of leaders.”

For his part, Dr. Taha Basman, UNESCO commissioner and president of Philippine Islamic Council, gave firsthand experiences of ethnic discrimination against Moslems Born in Marawi in the 1950s, said that during those days he found it hard to enroll in a local public school because his parents couldn’t produce his birth certificate. It was only in the latter part of the decade that government started (slowly) issuing birth certificates in far flung areas. (During the term of the late Education Sec. Raul Roco, the requirement for birth certificates was dropped because, as the late secretary had said, if the child is already standing in front of the teacher trying to enroll, then he didn’t have to prove he was born. An affidavit from his parents is enough.)

There were other forms of discrimination Basman and his family saw and experienced, including:

• the depiction of Moslems as bandits or the “enemy” in textbooks;

• one of his daughters being punished for not joining a field trip during the Moslme holy month of Ramadan;

• the last line of the national anthem which says, “Ang mamatay nang dahil sa iyo.” Moslems believe that they should die for no one else but Allah

• Moslem holidays not being observed save for the recent declaration of Eid Il F’tr as a national holiday. The other important day in Islam, the Eid-Ul-Adha (day of sacrifice of Prophet Abraham), is still not a a national holiday;

• baccalaureate prayers during graduation do not include Moslems;

• teachers who seem ignorant and uncaring of the nuances Moslem students observe.

The observations of guest speakers to the forum buttresses Ang Komunidad’s view of violence in education as a trident. According to Santillan, it pierces students, teachers, and parents in three ways: a) physically and psychologically, b) economically, and c) racially, sexually or through religion.

It is also clear that Pinoys have to live with the fact that the Arroyo government is missing the point entirely. It was brought to power by Edsa 2, another non-violent uprising, and all it can think about is discouraging another “people power” to avoid getting toppled. If only this government would go back to the spirit behind Edsa 1, it would find the essence of non-violence as a guiding light, which could help it give more attention to education rather than public relations.?

For more information on Ang Komunidad, email ok.human@gmail.com or join humanist_forum_phils@googlegroups.com.