It is merely not enough to just sit and appreciate the run of the years before one’s eyes… to lamely witness your children, nephews and nieces, grandchildren and greats even, as they grow up from being babies, up to the time they go to school… without imagining how it was when you were their age.
It’s like picturing myself inside the old Victoria Plaza once again, sitting on a bench in front of its carousel, watching my children ride the colorful horses. The thing is, each time they turn momentarily out of sight, when their horses return, new riders appear to take their place.
That’s it in real life: children grow so fast that by the time you return your gaze to look more closely, they’ve already grown, not only a few more centimeters but literally changed before your eyes. And all the while, it seems you’ve not even moved from your spot.
So while I now watch the young before us, I can’t help but wonder: how different is their time now compared to the time we had as children?
The lessons learned during childhood stay with us for a long time. They’re just so difficult to forget. Always fresh in my mind is my first weeks of elementary school at a formerly all-boys’ school in Matina as an example.
For those who had not been well-oriented and prepped by a year at kindergarten, shell-shocked might as well be the closest feeling at just being in the center of it all. While the size of both the school premises and its student body may truly make one’s jaw drop, the militarist rat-a-tat of rules that come at you is the more traumatizing follow-up punch that’s least expected.
From headmaster down to the teachers and boy scout master even, a torrent of whats and what-nots was fed on us as daily fare.
At that early age, I reckoned right away, Jesuit education (perhaps like others in that era) revolved around numbing repetitive exercises, much like kata reps, ensuring we do not forget. Practice makes perfect, a prefect of discipline liked to say. In my opinion, I’d tag the process as pummel into pulp or submission.
Absurd and cruel as it may have been, at one time, the whole student body was forced to sing the national anthem at least fifty times until we got the lyrics right. For that, two class periods were suspended. Ask me to sing it today, and I’d start cringing at the first line.
Though not familiar with today’s school system, I can say that during our time, there was not much fuss about “sensitivities”. In fact, how we felt appeared as the school’s last priority. Grade school and high school (which was worse) felt more like military camps to us, with our teachers as on-ground MPs.
Unlike a softer system today, we were meted a menu of punishment; from writing out our offenses a thousand times on sheets of paper or on the board (which improved penmanship, some say), to duck-walking and kneeling for hours among others.
Lastly, there’s the actual caning, using a long slat of bamboo reserved for major offenses, which was just short of expulsion. Totally unheard of and unlawful today.
Even as my generation is wont to say we were survivors of that medieval setting, I wonder as a father, uncle, or lolo, if I would be willing for my children or the generations after them to undergo the same.
I still have to ask the present-day parents that. In my mind, I still haven’t tired of that park bench at Victoria Plaza.
