Horror stories from high school

By John Anthony S. Estolloso

The first week of October of each year marks the culmination of a month-long celebration of our educators and their profession. Sentimentality aside, it also seems a fitting occasion to look back to seedy experiences that seem to fester and perpetuate themselves even in the current state of our education.

Truly yours does not intend to glamorize whatever screwed-up shenanigans our schools were wont to practice – and for one who has experienced being required to bring plants to beautify the drab walkway of our high school in preparation for a supervisor’s visit, the writer can readily attest to these eccentricities.

That we were assigned to submit cleaning paraphernalia or potted plants as projects in various subjects was nothing new: try as I might, I still cannot find a viable reason on how brooms and coconut husks have any relevance to the content of the poetry we were discussing that time. Worse, the croton shrubs probably found their way to and became a permanent fixture in the teacher’s residence, after a momentary display to impress some visiting dignitary.

As if to deliver a worthy punch line to the travesty, we then ponder in shock why students stumble on the rudimentary principles of the sciences, mathematics, or even basic linguistics.

I had this teacher before who spent the entire school year – from the very first day to the last session – sitting down and reading each line of each page of the history textbook verbatim. No discussion, no critical questions raised. She just read from the book: that was all she did and all she was able to do at her best.

Think about it: she literally read through the school year. If this will not kill any appreciation for the study of history, then we can but hope that there might be some iota of wisdom in her teaching strategy (or the lack of it). On hindsight, it was probably this subconscious reason why I took up Social Studies for graduate school: a certain nagging compulsion to prevent this waking nightmare from respawning itself.

This is emblematic of the sorry state of the nation’s basic education. Besides the glaring lack of infrastructure, poor implementation of the curriculum, inadequate faculty and personnel support, and the general depressing feedback about graduates’ dreadful literacy and numeracy skills that trickle from universities and colleges, there is also the imperative deficiency of philosophical consciousness of what education entails.

Hence, it is not enough for teachers merely to inculcate good manners from students or demand obeisance and respect from them. To intellectualize and dignify the learner as more than a mere automaton in the assembly line, to uphold the sapient aspect embodied in each field of knowledge, and to practice the virtues necessitated in these disciplines: such are why schools function as a social institution.

However, this valuing of education must first come from our mentors. Do our teachers also cultivate their craft? Do they pursue further studies to augment their skills and not just to get a promotion and pay raise? Do they enrich themselves with tools and content vital and crucial to the profession? When was the last time our teachers read a thought-provoking book? Or watch a play or listen to music and poetry or attend a conference about something they are passionate about?

The hurtful apex of our scholastic tragedy is when we become too comfortable with the status quo and thus resign ourselves to admitting that this is ‘quite normal’. By then, we have to dig ourselves out of the quagmire lest we shall drown in the decay.

Until we are out of that mire, we will always have the irrelevant floor wax and dustpans as projects for science, math, literature, or history. We will always have faculty soliciting for potted plants and extra funds come the supervisors’ inspection. We will always stare with disbelief at high school graduates who can barely stumble along a reading text in English or Filipino. We will always encounter college students who can hardly string together a coherent sentence. We will always fare badly in the literacy examinations.

We will always meet lost souls fumbling with a microscope in a university lab. We will always ask why our students have the temerity to plagiarize and cheat. We will always ask how this allowed students to pass high school. We will always question why our graduates are not ready for the workplace. We will always ask how alumni fail to secure stable professions while their records flaunt high marks. We will always ask why they are hellbent in leaving the country after graduation.

We will always encounter teachers buried in clerical work when they should be preparing for their lessons. We will always struggle with bureaucratic red tape in proposing innovative programs for students. We will always be enmeshed with the incessant paperwork and the futile exercise of documentation. We will always ask why our educators are overworked.

To cap this litany of woe, we then look forward at school year’s end to listening teary-eyed to another I-barely-survived story in a valedictorian’s speech and applaud loudly because we are emotionally entertained while numbed of the critical facility to question why this must happen on the first place.

These continue to happen – and will happen again, unless we do something about the systemic rottenness in our schools embedded deep in a normalized mainstream that runs more after grades, scores, rankings, and ratings than actual learning, application, and nation-building.

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Our ‘horror stories’ in high school need not be October’s Hallows’ Eve fare. Our educational experiences ought to be intellectually inspiring and formative to our students’ characters and not just feel-good performatives done to get the approving nod from the powers-that-be. In the intellectualization and transcendence of the Filipino learner, the teachers are lynchpins to this aspiration – but do they get the support and inspiration they need?

[The writer is a language and literature teacher in one of the private schools of the city.]