THE ALLIANCE of Concerned Teachers urged the Second Congressional Education Commission to evaluate how education helped in the development of the country’s agricultural and industrial production.

“It is not enough to assess why the employment rate of our K-12 graduates is starkly low, and the attrition rate of those employed is high. It is more important to analyze how education served to be a tool for economic development through boosting local agriculture and building local industries,” Vladimer Quetua, the group’s chairperson, said.

“While a dominant majority of more than a million of K-12 graduates we produce each year remain unemployed, our agricultural production is dipping and many of our micro, medium, and small enterprises are closing down. The education curriculum is geared towards making our graduates compete for jobs in multinational companies and abroad, instead of developing our local production,” Quetua added.

ACT also stressed the importance to redesign the country’s economic program towards developing local production to create more jobs and overhaul the country’s education system to support the program for national development.

“There are great opportunities in agriculture only if the government would seriously develop our agricultural production from its backward state today, instead of prioritizing importation. Right now, there is no senior high school track for work in the agricultural sector,” Quetua said.

“There should be great opportunities in local industrial production given the richness of our natural resources, only if the government would sincerely support our struggling local businesses, instead of favoring the multinational companies. Flourishing local production can result to continual job generation and address the country’s underdevelopement, which is the main objective of education,” he added.