Your dreams can change the world

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats



Don’t live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable.—Wendy Wasserstein

You graduates are very privileged to have the gift of education, more important than you can imagine, and the exciting adventure of life is about to begin.

I disagree with others who would advise you to "enjoy life" while you’re still young, since many people consider the "pursuit of happiness" as the greatest goal of our earthly existence. I urge you to be heroes — to be catalysts of social, moral, cultural, economic and even political change. Nelson Mandela was right when he said: "Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world."

For generations, Dr. Jose Rizal and countless other idealists have repeatedly predicted that young people would be the hope for a better Philippines, but how come this lofty dream has not yet been realized after so many generations?

Why is it that many of our best-educated people — from scions of colonial-era landed families or even European-schooled ilustrados to the brightest 20th-century lawyers or economists — have tragically failed the Philippines by pursuing their family’s or their own self-interest above the national interest and the public welfare?

US President Theodore Roosevelt once cautioned his fellow Americans in a sobering and spine-chilling warning which we should also heed here in the Philippines. He spoke about the perils of highly-educated but cynical and unethical leaders: "A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad."

How will you, the graduates of the new millennium and the YouTube generation, prove yourselves better than so many previous batches of college graduates? Please be different from most of our politicos who, I’ve discovered, have two sides to their brains — on the left side there is nothing right; and on the right side there is nothing left! Be different.

Your college education is not only a privilege. In the context of our semi-feudal, socially unjust and tragically classified this year by Western corporate executives as "Asia’s most corrupt" society, where the majority of the people are so poor they couldn’t afford formal schooling, your education is a social responsibility. You have a moral obligation to make use of your precious education, not only to realize your personal or family advancement, but to help uplift the rest of Philippine society.

According to the statistics of the Philippine Business for Education (PBEd), a broad coalition of business chambers and top business leaders lobbying for comprehensive education reforms, by your very graduation, you are part of the elite. You are extremely blessed to have graduated from college, because one of 10 Filipinos has never gone to school in their lives. That’s equivalent to 6.8 million people.

Based on the same PBEd studies, you are privileged because one in six Filipinos is not functionally literate (a total 9.6 million people), one in three children is not in school right now (11.6 million of the youth), one in every three entrants to Grade 1 drops out of school forever and fails to complete elementary education, and 200,000 or eight percent of all six-year-olds don’t enter the formal school system at all.

According to data from Parents Enabling Parents (PEP) Coalition, you — the college graduates of batch 2007 — are extremely privileged, because over one million Filipino students nationwide had their education traumatically stolen in recent years by several fraudulent pre-need companies that failed to fulfill their contractual obligations. Since these pre-need victims couldn’t get swift justice, their PEP Coalition is now an underdog party-list group running in the May elections and hoping to bring their struggle all the way to Congress and also to uphold other consumer concerns.

As you celebrate with your classmates and loved ones this joyous and unforgettable graduation milestone, please do not forget those many millions your age and even younger who could not afford to study but have to spend their days and nights as child laborers, child beggars, juvenile delinquents, young rebels in the mountains, substance abuse dependents, vagrants or ambulant sampaguita vendors.

If you, the very best and brightest of our youth, will not fight for a better future for the multitudes of the disadvantaged and the downtrodden in our burgeoning urban slums and impoverished rural barrios, then who can and who ever will? And if not now, when?

Cherish the privilege of your education. Consecrate your lives by making a positive difference in our society — whether as future leaders, professionals, homemakers or in whatever other vocations you choose. Work hard. Be the very best at what you do. Pursue non-stop learning after school. Don’t surrender to cynicism or moral compromises. Don’t give up your youthful idealism. Dare to dream. Let us change the world for the better!

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Thanks for your messages, all will be answered. Comments or suggestions welcome at willsoonflourish@gmail.com or wilson_lee_flores@yahoo.com.