JOURNALISM CARAVAN

Cabuyao City Division

July 22, 2017

EDITORIAL WRITING. Write a critical editorial about the controversy below.

Desperate politicians attempt to use children in their anti-government protest actions because they
cant seem to convince any adults to join their cause anymore.
The administration of the Catholic-run St. Scholasticas College in Manila has been getting a lot of
online flak after some politicians allegedly used pre-teen school to attack the administration of
President Rodrigo Duterte. Photographs showing the underage school kids displaying placards accusing
Duterte of being a dictator went viral in social media. There have been complaints from group of parents
with their children who are students of the said school ages 14 and 15 denouncing the nuns of St.
Scholastica for enlisting the school children in the partisan political effort.
At the center of the controversy is Senator Risa Hontiveros, who visited the school and posed with
the placard-wielding children, who were supposedly participating in a Youth SONA [State of the Nation
Address] 2017 last July 18 at the schools campus. Hontiveros even posed with some of the kids, who
were described in various captions as supporting the senators opposition to the Duterte administration.
The complaining parents, one of them identified himself as Ryan Alingarog, accused St. Scholastica
College president Sister Mary Frances Dizon, OSB, of maliciously misinforming parents to give
permission to attend the anti-Duterte rally at the school, which they thought was an ordinary activity.
Can you please ask Senator Hontiveros to stage a protest action on her own and not to include our
children? Alingarog wrote. Why are you using our children?
I am an educated individual; I also graduated from a Catholic school. But my school protected us
from politics. They only taught us values, gave us the tools, the knowledge so that in the future we will
know how to decide, he wrote.