this story originally appeared in the philippine daily inquirer on September 10, 2002.
Who the hell invented schools? Like any other sane student, I have often asked this question. In fact, I ask myself this question every time my mother rouses me from sleep and tells me it is time to prepare for school.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t totally hate school. I mean, there are certain things about it that I like and actually look forward to. For one thing, I like the school programs, you know, with all those good-looking frat boys shaking their booties on stage. There are also the field trips, the fairs with all those free stuff and, believe it or not, I actually like a few (emphasis on few) of the professors (read: those who do not give surprise quizzes or chapters and chapters of reading assignments). Come to think of it, I like everything about school-except for the exams, quizzes, recitations, book reports, assignments. In other words, I hate anything that requires the use of even a small percentage of my already fast-diminishing intelligence.
From whatever angle I look at it, I can’t see the logic behind requiring the youth to spend 17 to 18 years of their young lives studying. I can understand the need to study in elementary: a person needs to learn how to read, write and count after all. But high school? And college?
Life is short
Everybody says life is so short and one has to live it to the fullest. So I ask, can you live life to the fullest if the years of your life when you’re strongest and healthiest are spent inside classrooms studying the equation of a circle or the composition of rocks? If we’re actually to live life to the fullest, then we should be bungee jumping somewhere, running with lions in Africa, climbing Mt. Apo, seeing the castles of England or diving off some cliff in Acapulco at this very moment, and not sitting inside a room with a three-decade-old contraption our school administration has the gall to call an air-conditioning unit.
Now you’re probably thinking, “If you hate school so much then why don’t you just drop out?” The truth is, I’ve asked myself that question over and over again, and, after hours, days-even weeks-of soul searching, yoga and meditation, I’ve come up with five possible, but not really sensible, explanations as to why I tolerate school.
First is that my mother wants me to go to school, and in our house, nobody-and I mean nobody-messes with her. (This is not to say that my father is ander de saya, he just, well, he just lets my mom have her way).
Also, I have this gut feeling that if I were to refuse to go to school, she would get a gun, point it to my head and drag me into the classroom. I mean, the woman really freaks out when I skip school even for a day. She lectures me all day long about how important a good education is if you want to succeed in life, how education is the only thing she and my father can leave me since we’re not really rich, how education is the only thing other people can’t take away from me and all that stuff. So you can imagine how she would react if I told her I wanted to quit school altogether and become a spy.
Allowance
Reason number two would be the money. How else would I get P180 every day by just sitting inside a classroom and pretending to listen to boring professors give another ho-hum and sleep-inducing lecture? Let’s face it, times are hard, and without the allowance I get for going to school, where else can I get the cash to pay for the food I eat, the movies I watch or the CDs I buy?
The third reason would be the BMW Z-9. Yes, that new and improved version of the BMW Z-8, the car that James Bond drove in “Tomorrow Never Dies.” You see, I’ve found out that I have only three ways of owning that wonderful piece of machinery. One is if somebody is generous (or should I say dumb?) enough to give me P5 million, and two is if I win that much in the lottery. Since those two events are very unlikely to happen since (a) in a world full of idiots, there still is no one so moronic to give that so much money away and (b) I have never in my life placed a bet on the lottery, then I am left with only one option, which is to study hard, find a good job, and save a lot (actually several tons) of money.
The fourth reason I still am in school is that, like I said earlier, I want to be a spy, an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency to be exact. (Don’t worry, readers. If I ever get to work for them and they ask me to spy on the Philippines, I’d resign on the spot.) From what I’ve read in Tom Clancy’s novels, I don’t think that the CIA does not accept college dropouts. And besides, only people with quick reflexes and sharp minds are invited to join the agency. What better way is there to develop lightning-fast reflexes and an alert observant mind than being always on the lookout for the cell-phone snatchers, bag snatchers and pickpockets that roam Taft Avenue, Padre Faura and Pedro Gil?
Making Filipinos proud
The fifth reason is that I want to accomplish things that will make every Filipino proud, something that will make everyone in the world forget all the booboos the Philippines has made in the past and say: “Ah, the Filipino! Now that’s a great race!” Call me an idealist, but I believe that in a country run by trapos, businessmen with more foreign blood than Filipino and a joke of a president (sorry if I offended any Gloria fans out there), I can still make a difference. But to do so I would need to know more than basic writing, reading and counting skills, hence the need for me to stay in school.
Let me summarize all those five points. I stay in school because I need to do so in order to fulfill my dreams and my hopes (and not to mention keep my mother happy).
Now, ladies and gentlemen, those are my five reasons, but like I said before, I don’t think they make much sense. But, hey, so does school. I don’t know why other students tolerate school and I can’t expect any of them to have the same reasons like mine. But please, and I don’t mean to sound like a naive nationalist, let one of them be the same as my last.
