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.
Satirized even in songs sung during rallies, public school teachers were and are the favorite whipping boys of our society. We easily blame them for anything. We ascribe to them the problems of our development. We even blame them for any moral crisis that grips our communities. That fateful day, they demonstrated. I do not remember anything anymore but the sight of teachers, their clothes wet because of the rain and their shoes soggy and battered because of constant use.
We praise engineers and soldiers when the most dramatic of calamities fall upon us but we have forgotten the teachers that first taught us how to read and write. They belong to the everyday. Their works are not seen as awesome.
One institution has not forgotten some of them. Along E. Rodriguez in Manila, there is a place called Quezon Institute or QI. In that sanatorium can be found a corridor made for teachers alone. It is called Teachers' Pavilion and it is for teachers who are afflicted with tuberculosis. In that ward you can listen to stories about how some of these teachers got sick. Some became too weak and became sick. Some fell ill because they had to walk miles and miles. One became debilitated because one day she had to rush her classroom to save the books and instructional devices during a storm. We remember them in their disease.
But I am proud always of teachers. I have a mother who is herself a teacher. She retired in the late 70s because she had arthritis and a heart ailment. When my father died, we talked and she decided to teach again. She made the entrance to our room into a tiny classroom, enough to accommodate 8 to 10 children. They are pre-schoolers whose mothers do not have the time and resources to tutor them and prepare them for formal schooling. My mother has only one request that their parents plant moringa or "malunggay" as tuition for the children's schooling. Otherwise, they do not pay anything. We give them bags and provide the merienda each day.
My mother heard also the comments of Rosanna Roces. My mother also heard that Rosanna Roces, when asked to make a public apology, said that the public apology should come from teachers.
This is my mother's third year of teaching. She is 84. And she does not care about any apology. She is after all a teacher.