The lessons learned during the childhood years stay with us for a long time. They’re just so difficult to forget. Take our first weeks of elementary school at a formerly all-boys’ school in Matina as example. For ones 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 list of rules that come at you, is the more traumatizing follow-up punch that’s least expected.
From the headmaster down to the teachers and the boy scout master, a torrent of whats and what-nots were 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 liked to say. But better yet, I’d tag it as pummel into pulp or submission.
“The truth is, our generation may not have had a choice in living and enduring that particular era. It’s also for this reason we feel a certain pride in these battle scars we carry.”
To think, at one time, the 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. The result? Ask me to sing it today and I’d start cringing at the first line.
Though not familiar with schools nowadays, what I know is, during our time, there was not much fuss about “sensitivities”. In fact, grade school (and later high school which was worse) felt more like a military camp to us, with our teachers as on-ground MPs. Unlike the softer system of today, we were meted a row of punishment; from writing out our offenses a thousand times on sheets of paper (which improved penmanship, some say), to duck-walking among others, and lastly, actual caning using a long slat of bamboo for major offenses, just short of expulsion.
Despite all the makings of a medieval age setting, our primary and secondary school of old were really not that bad even if they were compared to today’s modernist-woke-politically-correct standards ek-ek. Just ask any survivor from that time. The truth is, our generation may not have had a choice in living and enduring that particular era. It’s also for this reason we feel a certain pride in these battle scars we carry. Thicker hides baby.
When one finally thinks about it, the theme then may have been a roughshod imprint of discipline to make us mindful of rules because understandably, the generations before had just been World War-scarred, and our era to them, was an unfurling of sorts. Last night during our gig at a local bar, I met a bunch of batch 85s who laughed heartily when I said mine was proudly 71. Just think, it had already been four years since our high school batch celebrated our 50th year anniversary. That’s fifty long years of water under the Bankerohan Bridge. Today, our bunch of graders who first entered the gates of that Matina grade school half a century ago are scattered all over distant lands. It just boggles the mind to ponder, our grand and great grandchildren, wide-eyed and all innocent to the world, now occupy the same ground we used to stand on.
These eighty-fiver newbies can laugh all they want. In the end, veterans rule. Thicker hides baby.
