The administration of the Catholic-run St. Scholastica's College in Manila has been getting a lot of online flak after some politicians allegedly used pre-teen school to attack the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte. Photographs showing the underage school kids displaying placards accusing Duterte of being a dictator went viral in social media, as has the complaint of at least one parent of two students aged 14 and 15 has denounced the nuns of St. Scho for enlisting the school children in the partisan political effort.


At the center of the controversy is Senator Risa Hontiveros, who visited the school and posed with the placard-wielding children, who were supposedly participating in a "Youth SONA (State of the Nation Address) 2017" last July 18 at the school's campus. Hontiveros even posed with some of the kids, who were described in various captions as supporting the senator's opposition to the Duterte administration.


The complaining parent, who identified himself as Ryan Alingarog, accused St. Scholastica College president Sister Mary Frances Dizon, OSB, of "maliciously misinforming" parents to give permission to attend the anti-Duterte rally at the school, which they thought was an ordinary activity.


"Can you please ask Senator Hontiveros to stage a protest action on her own and not to include our children?" Alingarog wrote. "Why are you using our children?"


The complaining parent, in an expletive-laced social media post, accused the Benedictine sisters at the school of not taking into consideration the consequence of exposing their children to partisan politics. He said Dizon and her fellow administrators exposed their children to online "bashing" because they could be mistakenly identified as endorsers of Hontiveros' anti-Duterte politics.


"I am an educated individual, I also graduated from a Catholic school. But my school protected us from politics. They only taught us values, gave us the tools, the knowledge so that in the future we will know how to decide," he wrote.


Now, I went to a school where political activism, especially the anti-government kind, was tolerated by school administrators. But I think even the University of the Philippines would not defend the use of children below the age of 18 to participate in student protests, simply because they are too young to fully appreciate the issues involved and too easily swayed by their teachers and school administrators.


As one pundit noted, what Hontiveros and the St. Scholastica College administrators did is the educational equivalent of the conscripting of child warriors by Islamic terrorists or Communist cadres. It is, in a word, unforgivable.


Sources: 

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Unforgivable, July 20, 2017, <a href="https://goo.gl/TwHgLj" class="news_link" target="_blank" title="Source">Jojo Robles</a>, Manila Standard
</li>
</ul>


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Senator Hontiveros' dangerous partisan politics using children is unforgivable