How we fought back our BE

The reason I am writing this blog post is in order to make a record of how we fought back our BE at 1999. I started this thread at our MIT forum from 2 years ago but not much response I received from there. I stopped writing that thread in half way but MIT ning network will be another chance for me to continue to write this post. Thanks to Ko Nyein Khant for encouraging me to write a blog post. The reason I am here today, we are here today is because of putting afford into cooperative and collaborative work to success of this activity. Salute to all 8th Batch MIT students from here who actively participated in this activity thanks to all 7th batch MIT students who kindly guided us in this activity. We passed our BEHS exam at 1996/1997 and we were qualified to study at MIT, YIT. Because of 1996 DEC Student uprising, all universities were closed from 1996 DEC to 1999DEC. So we had to start our first year at the end of 1999. At that time, our MIT ,YIT had been moved under Ministry of Science and technology, previously was under Ministry of Education. According to their new system, all MIT , YIT students were not allowed to start their first year and second year study at university and they had to attend at GTI according to their region. So for the first 2 weeks, we were put into the same class with GTI students but school authority promised that we will have to study directly to BE with their new systems. However we all were not very clear of their system and nobody can answer clearly our queries about path to BE degree. After 1 month, there was one announcement stated that we are not allowed to study BE degree directly and we have to study like GTI student. They put all of us to their current system GTI>GTC>BE. We all were get shocked and angry hearing that news. Then we started to organize the students who are interested to do the volunteer and discuss about this issue. Finally we agree to sign a petition and send our appeals letter to 5 peoples , GTI principal, Rector of MIT, Minister of Science and Technology, U Thaung and General Khin Nyunt who is the chairman of National Education Committee. There were a few considerations about our signing petition. 1. We don’t want anyone to be a leader that avoids the targeting of individual by MI agents. 2. There are risks to be investigated by MI agents whether our activity is related with any political movement. 3. How to organize the rests of the students and highlight the rights we are supposed to get. 4. How to make the immediate actions on the school principal and class teachers in order to show that we are not following their new systems. 5. Contingency plan what if our first appeal letter fails. We discuss again and again and finally we were able to conclude the actions and strategy we are going to move on. 1. As nobody must be designated as leader, we will have to do our signing petition as like each student write their own appeal letter to the authorities and send by them selves. We all agree that this strategy can get rid of the suspicion of the authority to be investigated who is leading and who is organizing. From the rest of the student’s view, a small group of peoples are just helping them to write an appeal letter and make a copy for them.. So we wrote an appeal letter and make 5 copies for each student. In our MDY, there were all about 300 first year students. We made 1500 copies of appeal letter and we even helped post office staff to put in to the letter box and make the registration of all letters. 2. We all understand that there was a risk of expelling from school, as a worse case scenario arrested by authority. We decided to write this appeal letter as a request letter that highlighting the rules and statement at University Entrance Guide Book. We didn’t state any words that we cannot accept their new system to us . The following are a few words in our letter. a. We all would like to study and attend the university peacefully at anywhere, anyplace (we purposely put this words because we know their idea of separating the students and we guess that we should focus only on one thing that what we really need) until we finish of studying the BE degree as stated in our University Entrance Guide Book while without involving in any political movement(their favorite words). As this letter is the very gently request letter to authority, that make impressions to all students that there is no harm to send this letter to authority. 3. We managed to gather all students in a hall and explain the plans and action we are going to do. We focused to explain the rest of the students about the disadvantages of 3 years closing schools and very unfair manner to all of us by putting together with 1999 BEHS GTI students.(no offence to any GTI students, just asking our rights). Of course there were a small group of people who couldn’t accept our movement and wanted to follow new systems by accusing us that we are afraid of disqualified for BE. Nevertheless, we managed to collect about 200 over petition letters. 4. For immediate action to school authority, we agreed that after we sent letters to 5 persons, we will not be attending class until we know the result of our appeal letter. We sent an official leave letter to GTI principal and stated clearly the reason of taking leave. 5. At that time, we don’t have proper contingency plan. But we manage to draft out our contingency plan if our first appeal letter fails. a. Send second letter to 5 persons again. b. Send third letter to 5 persons and one special appeal letter to Head of SPDC. I heard this kind of movement was not only at MDY, Sagaing and YGN students also sent their appeal letters to authorities. After two weeks, Ministry of Science and Technology announced that we are allowed to study to BE directly but we will have to study our first and second year in GTI according to our region. But we will be taught with the same module and same syllabus that were assigned for MIT and RIT. At that announcement date, you all can guess what we did..:D Of course we all were drunk under U Pain Bridge wearing while color shirts. Those were all beautiful moments of my very beginning MIT student life. That’s not the end of the story, I still have a few blog post to write. “How we met U Thaung”, “How we humiliate a teacher who encourage us to join to USDA”, and “How we react to U Kyaw San (Ex-MIT rector) who force us to use MTU instead of MIT”. I will be glad to write if you all are interested to hear about all our exciting moments.