Adults willing to sit for months in village assemblies to learn how to read, write and count, responded well when teachers used concepts like “peace†or “kapayapaan†in lessons.
“We introduced concepts like ‘human rights,’ and even ‘autonomy,’ although that was a hard concept to absorb,†Bernardo said.
She said many Filipinos assume that separatists characterize the peace and order crisis in Mindanao, when it is criminality and clan wars that define violence there.
Many of the graduates were women, Bernardo said, which comprise the highest volume of illiterates in Mindanao.
Many of these women are mothers who may impart lessons about peace and human rights to their children, she said.
The foundation’s graduates have also formed bonds, enabling the government to organize them into economic cooperatives or organizations, she said.
Bernardo said a survey of their former pupils has established that many pursued reading or counting lessons so they could vote properly, handle their financial transactions and avoid being duped, and to be able to send text messages instead of make expensive calls using their mobile telephones.
She said some ARMM beneficiaries of the government’s conditional cash transfer program complained of being shortchanged because they could not operate an automated teller machine (ATM).
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Topic: Bangsamoro problem: 715,228 illiterates (Read 985 times)