Memories of early schooling
By Noralyn Mustafa
Inquirer News Service

IN MY second year of high school, the first thing we did before classes was to knock down and clear the mounds made by mud crabs the previous night. Our schoolhouse was a squat, one-story structure with nipa roof and walls of beaten bamboo over an earthen floor. The classrooms were built around a quadrangle in the center of which was our library, also of bamboo, including the benches.

But we forgot all about the mud holes the moment our teacher brought us to the courtroom where Shylock, the merchant of Venice, demanded his pound of flesh; and where we listened in awe to Portia as she countered with "the quality of mercy is not strain'd"; and where we empathized with the character of O. Henry.

Home Economics classes for the junior and senior years were held a short distance away, in a wooden structure that used to be the school's division office, while those for freshmen and sophomores were farther away, in a wing of the present division office. On rainy days, we had to wade through the flooded athletic field to get there.

Here we learned how to make polvoron, nougats, macaroons and bread pudding; bake ambrosia and pineapple upside down cakes; to cook aroz ala valenciana and morcon; to produce a "balanced meal" and compute a balanced budget; to hand-sew a set of apron, pot holder and -- believe it or not -- a "headband" which had to be worn for cooking classes, a complete layette, a chemise and two kinds of dresses.

We were also taught how we came into being, starting with lessons about the male and female reproductive organs, and proceeding to conception, to birth; how to feed and bathe a baby (each of us had to take turns bathing the doll with the whole class voicing their observations and comments, on which our grades were based).

The objective seemed to be that if you got married right after high school you'd land on your feet, ready to face the world.

Convocations and other school activities took place in the grandstand in the athletic field fronting our school. Here we staged plays and tableaus, delivered our campaign speeches -- with "inspired plagiarisms" from the writings of Jose Rizal, Manuel Quezon, Claro M. Recto and Carlos Romulo -- for the student government elections.

There was no laboratory to speak of and the science teachers had to bring microscopes and test tubes to class if only to show us how the instruments illustrated in our textbooks looked and felt in real life. Yet our teachers were able to make us see our place in the universe and the animal kingdom, and to nourish our sense of wonder at the whole miracle of life from the amoeba to the durian tree. But life had not been that miserable.

I spent my freshman year in a wooden two-story building that had a big library next to the laboratory and a well-equipped kitchen for Home Economics. There was no gym, but we had a basketball court in the quadrangle.

Our school was located "out in the country" but near enough for us to walk home although we had a school bus that brought us to and from school in the morning, at noon, and afternoon, for which we paid in chits, just enough for the salary of the driver and for the cost of the gas. Packed lunches were unheard of.

Here we took turns reciting Mark Anthony's oration before the class, and listened, speechless, as our teacher described Omar Khayyam's "False Dawn," while asking us to memorize, for life, the stanza that he thought was the message of the entire Rubaiyat: "I sent my soul through the Invisible/ Some letter of that after-life to spell,/ And by and by my soul returned to me/ And answered, 'I myself am Heaven and Hell.'"

Best of all, the school stood on a huge campus that smelled of wild flowers and acacia blossoms. Part of our extra-curricular activities was tending a vegetable garden where we also planted peanuts and camote. If you got on the first trip of the bus at 6:30 a.m., you could visit your "plot" and check out the buds that sprouted the night before, while marveling at the colors of the rainbow, flattered by the sunrise on the dewdrops still cradling in the leaves and grass.

But then that early in life, I learned that all good things must end, and for me it ended that afternoon of my freshman year with the last flag ceremony on the last day of classes, before "summer vacation." I cried with unbearable sorrow.
Things got a little better in my senior year. We had a new building by the sea, constructed on the same spot where the pre-war Sulu High School had stood and where my mother graduated from.

Only the sound of waves crashing against the boulders intruded into our thoughts as we produced the school paper in a cubicle by the library without a typewriter. How we did that and how we all turned out to be still amaze me.

We qualified to study in the best universities in Manila and elsewhere; some of us now live and work abroad. We became fairly successful professionals, diplomats, businessmen, politicians, bureaucrats, (and one penurious journalist); and homemakers who brought up healthy, bright and responsible children, and who didn't get hysterical when abandoned by a househelp.

"We" received our education in the public school. I wouldn't have had it any other way. Now we -- in the poorest provinces of the country, where even schoolhouses are few and far between, and where going to school in peace is a priceless privilege -- cannot afford the time and the expense for pre-school and additional years of secondary education. Just give us well-educated, well-trained and committed teachers, and good, well-printed textbooks. That's all.

Comments to rubaiyat19@yahoo.com