The graduates’ unsung heroes

STUDENTS who have just completed their primary, secondary and college education – dressed in their Sunday best and togas — take the spotlight as they march on stage and receive their diplomas during their graduation rites.

Parties will be held afterwards in celebration of students bidding goodbye to one chapter and saying hello to another in their young lives. Our graduates surely feel both joy for their achievement and relief for having hurdled the challenges along the way.

Equally happy and relieved, albeit in their more subtle ways, are the parents — or surrogate parents — who have put these students through school. They will be sitting among the audience, clapping and cheering for their children. For them, this day is the ultimate reward for sacrifices made to produce, even through the most difficult of times, the finances required in sending a child to school – from tuition fees, to schoolbooks and uniforms, baon, and the frequent miscellaneous expenses that go with the cost of education. Most of them would have given up many personal needs for the sake of the requirements of their children in school.

But many a parent would also be absent and will just have to settle for photographs and tales from the family about this special occasion as they would be away, working in a distant land, counting among our almost eight million overseas Filipino workers (OFWs). Our graduates’ challenges, though real in their own sense, would gravely pale beside the sacrifices that our OFW parents have to endure. More than anything else, they often have to bear alienation in the foreign country where they are as well as a certain level of alienation from their own family back home.

And so applause and cheers are in equal order for the graduates’ parents — and the aunt, uncle, sister or brother who have chipped in hard-earned money to ensure that a member of the family is able to enjoy the right and privilege of getting an education.

They deserve an outpouring of praise not only for their sacrifices but more so for what drives them to endure these difficulties: a belief that educations remain an important key to a better life and the development of the country.

They are the graduates’ unsung heroes.

Back to Homepage

Share your Comments or Reactions

comments

Powered by Facebook Comments