the Constitution the faith of what has been an extra-constitutional political settlement hoping to resolve the four-decades old Mindanao conflict. What I am trying to impress upon you, ladies and gentlemen, is that the realization of the minority people’s right to education hinges strategically on the availability and responsiveness of appropriate governance structure that is in place. IV. Comment on De-sagregation, Integration, Cultural Autonomy and Promoting Harmony It is true, indeed, and we commend the Philippine government’s efforts of recognsing minority education as alternative learning system. However the plan of mainstreaming or integrating the madaris, without the sound governance structure that enables the Bangsamoro to effectively participate in defining, setting and managing the details of its fiscal concerns, will be ipossible to sustain, let alone ensuring that such “mainstreamed madrasa” indeed reflects the minority Muslims’ educational needs in terms of content and curriculum. For one, how can we harness the religious tithes of zakat, sadaqa and waqaf that have long been sustaining the traditional madaris if we are not allowed to set up our own education financing and governance systems that is based on the Bangsamoro system and ways? Secondly, how can the Bangsamoro Muslim intellectuals and scholars, i.e. the ulama and asatidh, be able to effectively participate as one consensual body in drafting the content and curriculum of the so-called “mainstreamed madaris” when the Darul Ifta, the Muslim religious councils and religious bodies such as the leagues of ulama and, perhaps more importantly, the community-based and barangay (village)-level indigenous peoples’ tribal council of elders and grassroot traditional leaders are not active part of the education governance mechanism such as the literacy councils and school boards, let alone, being recognized as local governance structures to effectively represent the minorities’ voice in decision-making processes? In this effect, we highly recommend that the draft must emphasize and render in stronger, more succinct terms, demanding the political will of the State to implement to the fullest its commitment to minority right to education as linked to the right to self-determination. V. On Content and Delivery of the Curriculum for Religious Minority Education: The Bangsamoro Experience In developing appropriate content and for effective delivery of minority education curriculum, we affirm the important role of minority experts and the necessary intellectual environment. There should be healthy scholarship based on indigenous and minority knowledge and wisdom. It is important that States must provide the enabling condition for increasing minority peoples’ capacity for knowledge production and reproduction and ensuring a healthy intellectual environment for minority scholarship to flourish and allowing its unhampered transfer and dissemination across generation. Conversely, States and its apparatus must not exert undue and uninvited influence or any form of imposition on minority education by endorsing certain ideologies in minority curriculum. To do so would be tantamount to impingement on the right of minorities to determine what content is appropriate and relevant to their social and cultural settings. This observation and recommendation is especially directed at governments and countries that, in their ardent desire to combat terrorism and implement counter-terrorism measures, have been unwittingly using social institutions such as education, the media and institutions of scholarship to promote certain political agenda especially to influence its citizens to support its current national security campaigns that have been specially discriminatory to religious and ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples struggling for their right to self-determination.

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