educational borders

There are some things that continuously boggle my mind.  One of those things is how there can be abundant opportunity and wealth adjacent to crippling poverty.  As I was driving to Antipolo yesterday I was listening to Immortal Technique’s “The Point of No Return.”  The man is brilliant.  His music has the ability to connect you to the lives of people you have never met.  It provides insight into the emotion felt by those on the other side of the window. 

“Living in the hole, lookin' at the world through a crack…Concreate jungle, guerilla war out in the streets.”

When this song comes on all I can imagine is a ballet danced by the ignored masses.  A strength captivating the spotlight.  Yet, their power wasn’t enough to stop my bus, or any other passing vehicle.  Hundreds of people packed into homes made of trash and kids playing in a once flourishing jungle shredded by bulldozers and suffocated with cement. 

There is one neighborhood that looks like a complex labyrinth from the street. I wish I could walk its’ allies and meet its inhabitants.  I wish I could hear their stories and have the chance to exchange our humanity with one another.  Instead I just pass them on my way to Antipolo. 

This space stirs something inside me more than some of the others. I think it’s because it borders a complex that represents progress and change and future, yet the two communities are segregated by societal hierarchies too great to allow a fluid movement of people from one time to another.  Instead, their faces remained trapped behind the bars of wealth, class, and college degrees.

The haven on the other side of this neighborhood is headquarters for CHED (the Commission of Higher Education).  Literally aligned on an invisible line that separates two groups of people as distinctly as the wall between the U.S. and Mexico, these two places stand.

CHED’s mandate:

*Promote quality education

*Take appropriate steps to ensure that education shall be accessible to all

*Ensure and protect academic freedom for the continuing intellectual growth, the advancement of learning and research, the development of responsible and effective leadership, the education of high level professionals, and the enrichment of historical and cultural heritage.

Right next to a population of people who will most likely never have the opportunity to step foot on a college campus live inches away from a clean green field that welcomes its’ wealthy visitors through large stone walls.  The passing of degrees, a mere piece of paper signed from one man with a title to another man who will soon grow into that given title, cement the world into socio-economic castes.