EDITORIAL - Secretary of disconnect

This is not complaining. This is not blaming. This is not finger-pointing. This is just in reaction to developments over which this paper has neither influence nor control. To those calling for an end to "the blame game," maybe they should pray instead for an end to crazy developments from happening.

After assessing the sheer devastation that visited the Visayas on account of Yolanda, the Commission on Higher Education has indefinitely suspended all institutional operations in all typhoon-ravaged areas under its jurisdiction. In simple terms, what the CHED is saying is there will be no classes until these areas recover.

There is wisdom in the decision. Students and teachers alike in the devastated areas have not only lost their schools, they could even have lost the will to live, many of them having lost entire families and entire communities.

In fact, academic matters could be the least of the problems facing people in the devastated areas. Far more immediate concerns that face them are matters of survival -- food, water, shelter. Then there are matters of health. There is even the matter of security.

In other words, until some semblance of normalcy returns to these areas, there can never be held any productive classes. There are no more schools as many of them have been flattened by the storm. And even if there are, what can possibly transpire inside a classroom full of traumatized and orphaned individuals.

But while the CHED has seen the impossibility of holding further classes for college students, at least until early next year, along comes Education Secretary Armin Luistro, whose department has control over grade school and high school, ordering that classes must resume as soon as possible, perhaps next week.

Where in the world is Luistro coming from. Oh yes, we do know that where he comes from, there is so much cloistered comfort not available even to many men of the cloth. But that is not what we mean. We would like to know where he is coming from because he seems so neither here nor there, not just now but ever since.

Why, in Jesus' name, is Luistro ordering the immediate resumption of classes in the typhoon-devastated areas? What does he hope to accomplish by that? Does he even know what happened? Was he even aware of Yolanda? Does he ever watch the news?