young radicals

LFS members boycott NCAE
Tells DepEd to ‘stop acting like a recruitment agency’

High school members of the League of Filipino Students (LFS) boycotted the National Career Assessment Examination (NCAE) today and instead trooped to the Department of Education (DepEd) to protest the career exam.

“The DepEd has turned into the country’s largest recruitment agency for multinational companies,” said Vencer Crisostomo LFS national chairperson.

“We must remind Jesli Lapus that the Department’s job is not to create cheap semi-skilled labor for call centers and voc-tech companies but to provide quality education for our students,” he explained.

The students led by LFS boycotted the exam in belief that the NCAE’s goal is to “discourage the students from taking up college courses and is instead an authoritarian measure to force them to take up voc-tech.”

“The DepEd want to force us to go to voc-tech instead of going to college just because that is what’s in-demand. But what will happen if five, ten years from now the market changes its demands and these jobs goes out of uso? What will happen to those students that we misled into not taking up college?” he explained.

Crisostomo said “that it is not the government and the DepEd’s job to dictate what jobs or career paths the students must take. Rather, the DepEd should provide our students, through basic and secondary education, the basic knowledge and skills to prepare them for whatever life choices they would like to take.”

He said that the DepEd might even be considered violating important provisions of Batas Pambansa 232 or Education Act of 1982, stating that “no one should dare mess with students’ rights to choose their college specification preferences.”

“This is another case of blind adherence to recommendations of IMF-WB and ADB, that our role in the global market is to provide ‘cheap semi-skilled laborers,’” he said.

Crisostomo also called for public access and transparency in the results of the exam. “Given the record of this government in its puppetry and blind worship of foreign, pro-globalization dictates, we will not be surprised if the exam results were twisted and/or tampered to support these recommendations,” he said.

The LFS vows to block the passage of the NCAE as a mandatory exam in Congress. “With the support of our teachers, school administration, and parents, will strongly oppose the proposal to make the NCAE mandatory. We are confident that the sentiments of most parents, teachers and high school students nationwide are with us,” he said.

“The ‘job mismatch’ they are talking about is above all in the DepEd secretary’s office. There is indeed a job mismatch, when a government department which is supposed to provide us with quality and affordable education for Filipinos, chooses to play the role of a recruitment agency for call centers and multinational companies, making sure they have enough cheap labor workers at their disposal. This is deplorable,” said Crisostomo.