Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 4) — Forty-two percent of adult Filipinos think the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program should be an optional course for students, a survey by the Social Weather Stations said.
The study also found that 35% of Filipinos believe that ROTC should be made compulsory for senior high school (SHS) students, while 22% of the respondents said it should not be in the SHS curriculum at all.
The study surveyed 1,200 adult respondents and had a sampling error margin of ±2.8%.
It comes in the wake of calls to renew mandatory ROTC for SHS students. The return of ROTC is a priority measure of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
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Last December, the House of Representatives approved on third reading the National Citizens Service Training (NCST) Program in order to replace the National Service Training Program (NSTP) Act and reinstate military training in curriculum.
A similar measure dubbed the ROTC Act was filed in the Senate on March 21 and has been approved on second reading.
Mandatory ROTC was first abolished after former President Gloria Arroyo signed the NSTP Act in 2002 in response to public clamor to reform the program following the brutal killing of University of Santo Tomas student Mark Welson Chua.
Chua, a 19-year-old mechanical engineering student, was a cadet who exposed to The Varsitarian, UST’s campus paper, practices of corruption and extortion within UST’s ROTC unit.
After he blew the whistle with a fellow cadet, Chua went missing the following month. His decomposing body was later found floating along the Pasig River in March 2001.
The Varsitarian reported that Chua’s body was hogtied and rolled in a carpet, with his face wrapped with silver duct tape.
