BACK TO HISTORY (AND OTHER CLASSES)

(FROM A WEEKEND NOTE, THE EDITOR'S LETTER IN STYLE WEEKEND, A LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE PUBLISHED EVERY FRIDAY IN MANILA BULLETIN, 6 JUNE 2008)

Throngs of young people are heading back to the campus next week. For most students, except for those at De La Salle University, this is the very last weekend of this year’s glorious summer vacation.

BLURB
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet. —Aristotle

When you think about it, school is the realm of the past and the future. The present, in the mind of a student groaning under the weight of homework, school projects, and endless lectures, is when the bell rings to signal recess or, better yet, when it rings to signal class dismissal. That’s when you can do what you want when you want to do it, which is now, whether it is to watch the new Indiana Jones or to go on a beer session with friends or to play Grand Theft Auto IV on Xbox 360 or to simply hang around your bedroom and wish it were summer all over again.

But in the classroom, from Monday to Friday or from Monday to Saturday, you have to shuttle back and forth between yesterday and tomorrow, trying to commit to memory the adventures of dead people (history, social science, literature) or the rules made eons ago (language, manners, religion) or otherwise trying to imagine what’s ahead (science and technology), even as this whole ordeal is really about preparing you for the future that has yet to come and arming you with the tools you might need to make it there (mathematics, philosophy, logic).

Oh but if I were young again, I would have a better appreciation of Wharton or Collette or Shakespeare and I would never trade in a school hour spent on the reign of the dinosaurs or the beginnings of our solar system for the pleasure of cutting a class, only to spend the hour my parents paid for dearly to learn how to smoke like James Dean. But then in my youth even James Dean was history.

Sometimes, I find it strange that nowadays people in their 20s cannot relate to stuff that happened only two decades ago, even as practically every aspect of this generation’s version of now is a recreation of then, which is why your latest rap song has tinges of Madonna’s hits before the first of her many self-reinventions, which is why Bevery Hills 90210 is up for a remake, which is why your latest American Idol chose to sing Collective Soul’s “The World I Know” on performance night before the finals. Even during Philippine Fashion Week only a few days ago, many designers presented a loot from days gone by, from tribal touches (Butz Fuentes) to butterfly sleeves (Kenneth Chua), from graphic prints of the ultimate contravida icon Bella Flores (Happy Andrada) to impressions of the long retired dandy (Odelon Simpao), his bow tie and all retrieved from the closet of time.

Indeed, there is no escaping what’s behind us as we go forward into the unknown. Sometimes, I think school’s main goal is to help us come to terms with the fact that everything we are now, everything we know now, everything that is available to us now is the fruit of the labors of our past, including, for the most part, our very freedom. It is so that as we march on into a future of our own making, we would accord those who have gone before us a modicum of respect.

Of course, like our predecessors who broke free from the shackles of tradition to make things better, we have every right to march to the beat of our own drums, but we do need to take some time to thank the one who long ago invented them.

And that’s probably why we need to spend the first 20 years of our lives chained to our desks within the four walls of a classroom, poring over books written under what we believe to be different circumstances, reliving lives long ended, learning lessons others had to suffer to learn, following rules made long ago, as we dream to be free, to make our mark, to make life a little better for us and, often without exactly meaning to, for the generations to come.

A
post me at aapatawaran@yahoo.com