Tripartite Schooling
Threefold In One
The concept of school garden is not something new, but recently the Department of Education intensified its school-based food and nutrition program by transforming the useless botanical gardens on public elementary and high schools into a more profitable one – a more intensified vegetable gardens. Vegetable gardening will become part of public schooling and the Department of Education is pursuing a campus gardening programs for students, teachers and parents to fight hunger and poverty and poor nutrition or poor health conditions of the three parties (students, teachers and parents)
School Gardening
Vegetable gardening on public elementary and high schools will integrate the three prime programs of the Philippine into One site:
(1). Fighting illiteracy and elevating the standards of education in the Philippines.
(2). Fighting hunger and poverty among the poor Filipinos
(3). Fighting malnutrition and sickness due to hunger and poverty among the poor Filipinos by teaching and feeding them to eat healthy nutritious foods like fruits and vegetables.
See, this program of the Department of Education(DepEd) is truly “very good” for not only it integrates the three prime programs of the Philippine government but also it will yields a very nice synchronized results which every new Philippine administration would like to achieve among the poor ones in the country.
For how can the Philippine government fight illiteracy and improve the intelligence of every poor Filipinos if they don’t eat proper nutritious food on their meals but always hungry and resort to junk foods due to financial destituteness and always sick or ill.
The school-based food and nutrition program of the Department of Health answer these problems without spending much billions of budgets.
(1) To fight the lower standard of public education in the Philippines is to improve the mental wellness of every poor student through promoting eating nutritious foods like vegetables and eliminate hunk foods. High standard of education do not entirely depend on how high quality and advanced the educational tools one is using to teach the students, rather it depends on the mental capacity of the students to grasp and understand what is being taught to him/her. Mental alertness is needed to absorb and understand the knowledge being taught; and in order to do this, proper nutrition and nurturing of the mental faculties of the students is needed. Moreover, if the child is mentally gifted, his or her gift should not be nurtured by junk foods rather by real nutritious foods that will empower more his/her mental gifts.
(2). Financial destituteness or financial poverty is not a hindrance to nurture one’s mental gifts and mental faculties if one only resort into eating fresh organic fruits and vegetables than buying expensive and costly foods in the supermarket which sometimes do not have nutritional value at all and one’s money just wasted away. The program of the Department of Education will help minimize expenses of financially poor families by providing free vegetables that they could cook as their meals for their families, as well as minimizing their hunger due to expensive process foods and fresh foods in the market.
(3) Moreover, it could also help minimize expenses due to sickness and illness in buying medicines by eating nutritious healthy foods every day.
Let us just hope that this program of the Department of Education will really be successful and will gain a lot of support and cooperation from the teachers and parents and other Philippine departments like the Department of Health, as well as to media to promote the program; For the program is not a small thing, rather a big program that has a big impact on the socio-economic condition of the Philippines.
