Because She is a Teacher

By now you must have known how a washed-up starlet in this brainless program called "Showtime" lectured on how students should curse their teachers for not teaching them right. It was a long talk and, at a certain point, she offered an advice to everyone: Wikipedia.

Soon, bloggers and the entire expanding Internet universe started to be filled with hate letters to the woman. The chorus is that the woman should apologize to teachers for generalizing about them. Soon, the MTRCB stepped in and decided to suspend the program. Immediately, the show, which has non-singers commenting on singers and non-dancers evaluating dancers, was off the air. Axed.

The celebration of mediocrity ceased. The recriminations started pouring in and out.

The misplaced self-righteousness of a woman hungry for celebrity is not the only thing at the core of this moral crisis. At the center of it all are other things: the lack of role models in our society. Where that modeling takes place, they are in the world of entertainment and show business. There is the other issue of media classification, which I call de-facto censorship.

An institution called the MTRCB is given the mandate to order what we can see and what we can consume as media consumers.

I do not like what Rosanna Roces, for that is her screen name, said about teachers being "repeaters." Teachers, according to her, just repeat what they have learned. They do not, in a sense, check what they are teaching. The errors are then repeated, transferred. If you did not know her, you would have thought it was the Secretary of Education declaring the insipid tradition of teaching in this country. But much as I do not like her posturing that fools us into believing she has a brain, I do not agree to having an official group to decide for us our taste.

We deserve someone like Rosanna Roces as we appropriately deserve also a program like "Showtime" and other brainless TV programs. No one should tell us what we should like. One man's trash is another man's treasure. One woman's pig is another woman's pearl.

As for the teacher, then it is a different matter.

Years back, I saw a demonstration by teachers. In our country, until that day, teachers never demonstrated as a group. They never had voices. Marginalized, the best and true profession had become during the 70s one of the lowest academic degrees a student could get.