EDITORIAL - Pushcart republic

The pushcart classroom advocacy of 2009 CNN hero Efren Penaflorida has found an adherent in a Cebuano teacher named Bridette Llorente. Llorente is in the process of soliciting funds to sustain her initiative - teaching out-of-school children for two hours every Saturday.

Needless to say, the initiative of Penaflorida and his latest convert, Llorente, deserves all the help it can get. People who help pick up the slack left by government, in whatever form of service or endeavor, are doing laudable work. But they cannot do it alone, so others need to pitch in and help.

By others, however, we mean anyone except government. These volunteers cannot and must not go to government for help because it is precisely due to government's shortcomings that they felt compelled to step up to the plate and do what they can.

Not that it is a crime to do so. But if they go to government for help, and government obliges them, it would be the biggest folly of all. What these volunteers are doing are merely stop-gap measures, temporary acts of charity meant to fill the gaps in what the government should be doing as a matter of official policy.

If government obliges these pleas for help, it can only come in the form of what is being solicited, meaning help to sustain stop-gap measures. And that is something the government cannot do. Government cannot be reduced to performing stop-gap measures. It cannot adopt the pushcart system to replace real education.

Sadly, Penaflorida a few years ago did manage to convince some dimwits at the education department to actually embark on its own pushcart system. Wow. Instead of government doing what it can so that there will be no gaps for people like Penaflorida to fill, it actually embarked on a program patterned after Penaflorida's.

Instead of progressing, government has retrogressed. Instead of building more classrooms so that there will be no more Penafloridas going around in pushcarts to bring school to those who cannot be in school, the government actually went on a pushcart-building binge.

We do not mind if we fill this country with pushcarts, so long as it is a private initiative, funded by private sources, and operated by private volunteers. But if government jumps in instead of doing what it should be doing, then heaven help us because we must be a people who are truly queer.