Our government must strive hard to enable our universities to catch up with the global standards, where the Philippines is lagging, if we intend to be economically strong and globally competitive.

What the graduates have in mind is what Jose Rizal once said: “The youth is the hope of the fatherland.”

We were sent to school so we could equip ourselves with adequate knowledge and skills in preparation for the important roles we have to play in society — to turn into reality the prophecy of our national hero — that we indeed can be the hope of our beloved country.

To our parents who are always beside us, there will be more years of struggle. But we are confident that we will triumph because we have parents like you.

We may sometimes commit mistakes but you are always there to understand us and for that we are very grateful. We cannot imagine the world without you as our parents. We no longer ask for more because your presence, Mom and Dad, is more than enough for me.

Philippine universities should strive to catch up with the global standard!

The home and the educational institution must join together in forming and developing creative minds and distinct human personalities that will energize the county into productivity and worthwhile citizenry.

While it is true that we cannot parallel rich countries in terms of material wealth and power, we can stand on an equal level with them where creativity is concerned.

Our universities should provide all possible educational facilities that are conducive to the blossoming of creative minds to the maximum degree.

However, such creativity of the minds should not be nurtured and should not flower only in the realm of the arts, but it should be highly encouraged and developed at the maximum level in the scientific and technological fields of human learning.

For the creative is concerned with the practical, the concrete, the logical, the imaginative, and the abstract. It is the creative power that jogs students out of passivity, out of the mechanical ruts, out of humdrum and monotony. It is the creative mind that makes familiar things strange and worthwhile.

It is also the creative that gives new instruments for thought that encourage the desire for innovations.

For, in hurling its spectacular challenges to scale the higher ladder of human aspirations, to pierce the realm of the unknown to open new roads to progress and success, the creative leads the individual to all kinds of conceivable human incentives and makes him alert, curious, responsive, independent, original, and pioneering in nature.

Foremost of all, the university must give creative minds to an excellent teaching staff, whose rare qualities will be brilliantly reflected in its products. Creative minds, the university must remember, cannot thrive where there is bigotry, tyranny, persecution, where there is destructive criticism, intolerance, and condemnation; where obsolete, incompetent, and antiquated teaching methods still prevail.

Only by providing students with superior teaching staff, carefully chosen from several qualified men and women, can the university utilize the creative approach to the development of the hidden potentialities and capabilities of the young students. Such a superior teaching faculty can instigate in the young untapped creative mind a strong desire for the creative approach that will induce originality, responsiveness, and recognition of the limitless powers of a creative mind in producing tangible and intangible results.

When all of these are achieved, then and only then can we see the tangible evidence of the creative minds in the finished products finding their way to the world market today, in the massive buildings of architectural beauty, in the numerous industries that will make use of our natural resources and stabilize our economy, in the amazing discoveries that will solve the riddle of illnesses, in the literary and artistic work that will mirror the beauty of the Filipino soul.