PHILIPPINE POLITICS

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27124, 21 August 1953, Page 2

PHILIPPINE POLITICS

WOMAN SENATOR’S ACTIVITIES

“At present, we are in the midst of a political campaign for the Presidential elections in November, and I am very glad to tell you that our women are taking their share of the responsibility with dynamism and intensity,” writes Senator Geronima T. Pecson, a member of the Philippine Senate, in a letter to Miss E. B. Lea. of Auckland, international secretary of the New Zealand Pan-Pacific Women’s Association.

Senator Pecson, who is chiefly interested in the promotion of education, science, culture, health and welfare, had the distinction, at the closing of the last session of Congress in Manila, of having presented the greatest number of Senate bills to become law. One of these, a policy on elementary education, provides for seven years of free, compulsory education. Automatic salary increases for teachers was the subject of another bill, and a further bill was introduced to place the nursing service on a professional level. Senator Pecson is a member of the UNESCO Philippine Educational Foundation, an organisation which has appropriated an additional amount of 10,000 Philippine dollars for the printing of readers in the vernacular for the use of community schools for fundamental and adult education.

Other educational changes for which Senator Pecson was responsible were the raising of the status of the national normal school to that of a college. and the conversion of manv academic schools to technical or agricultural schools.