I heard the news! The Ateneo high school is going coed! Well, actually it’s now effective only for what they call “senior high school” or Grades 11 and 12 (what used to be 3rd and 4th Year high school in the old days). That’s gonna be quite a treat for a bunch of oversexed students from the once boys-only Jesuit school. Imagine, after ten years of being isolated in the middle of the Ateneo’s sprawling campus in Loyola Heights bordered by a cemetery and a squatter area on one side, Katipunan Road on the other and a border with Miriam school and La Vista on the other, our young Atenistas will finally be getting their own chicks to ogle!
Social dynamics of students in coed schools stereotyped in Hollywood movies may be sending the wrong messages to the Philippines’ youth.
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My point is, these were high school “first year students” (Grade 9, in today’s new parlance), mostly 13- to 14-year-olds. Imagine that. Just turned teenager and already such horny toads! What the future holds for the incoming crop of AHS girls in the coming school year!
Poor 11th and 12th Grade girls coming into the AHS then. They won’t see nor hear the end of it. They’ll have to put up with what is likely to be a lot of schmoozing from their male classmates and lots of ogling coming from the lowerclassmen. I mean, as some female friends of mine have attested to after coming out of teaching stints at the AHS, it can be a bit challenging getting boys who have been in sword fights with one another for years to see the ladies as anything but an object of conquest.
Come to think of it, I think this goes a long way towards explaining why the guys and gals from the Colegio San Agustin (CSA) which is the only other A-List private school I know a bit about that originally had a coed system seemed to have been a lot more well-adjusted when we first entered what to me at the time came across as the Wild Wild West of college life in UP Diliman.
The trouble is with some parents naman kasi is that they expose their kids to all the intriga about having boyfriends and girlfriends at an early age. Well, to be fair, it’s probably because most Pinoy kids in “good” homes often get left to the devices of their yayas and house help for extended periods everyday at such young ages. Ayan tuloy rather than see having friends of the opposite sex as being such a wholly natural and platonic thing, there is already so much sexual tension at an early age what with all the uuuyyyy sila na and may girlfriend ka na ba? grilling you get from aunts and uncles at family reunions. I mean, come on, can’t we hang out with boys without having to deal with all that tsismis from our own relatives??
My GRP fellow contributor ChinoF even once went as far as posing the question Does Filipino Society treat Children Poorly? Poorly, that is, in the sense that by being made into the objects of their parents’ own sexual frustrations, they, in the process, themselves get damaged for life…
Even within families, children are used for adults’ pleasure. At parties, they are sometimes made to dance the Ocho-Ocho, Spaghetti Dance or other funny dances just to make the adults laugh. I find that rather unkind. Adults like these only treat children as a source of entertainment, and not as the future. Thus, the disrespect that media shows in children may or may not be a reflection of treatment in the family.
This distasteful approach to raising Filipino kids could even be the root cause of what we called the Philippines’ culture of kabadingan and kalaswaan. It makes sense though. If kids are exposed to worldy stuff at an early age in a way that makes such things look like they are the really “important” stuff in life — the whole point of it even — it’s not surprising that many Filipino boys grow up to be such oversexed buffoons who take pleasure in baldly ogling and making boso the girls. Small wonder then that this uuuyyyy attitude that kicks in whenever a girl and a boy are seen together is what Kris Aquino now applies to her own brother, no less than the President of the Phillippines. Politics in the Philippines certainly reflects the character of the society that puts up with it.
Perhaps the passing of a Reproductive Health bill may have been a great development that puts the Philippines on the right track to long-overdue modernization. But there’s still a lot of work to do getting the society itself up to scratch to deal with “modern” stuff. And one of the really important things, I think, is getting Filipinos to have a healthier regard for sexuality. The ironic thing here is that for the larger population who study in the coed public schools of the Philippines, they may already have what their richer compatriots in gated communities whose children get chauffeured to their fortified private schools don’t: a nonchalant attitude towards learning stuff in mix-gendered classrooms.
Frustrated artist doing geek for a living.
I think its very important to educate children from a young age about sex – because they’re going to learn about it no matter what you do, its a fact of life, its how you got here. If you don’t talk to your kids about sex they’re going to learn about it through the thoroughly messed up prism of ocho ocho or that eggplant-as-a-penis version of musical chairs Filipinos play. If your son is going to be publicly circumcised at age twelve and the girls who walk by the very public places (by the river in the case of my barangay) are going to see it happen, they might as well know what those things down there are for besides the toilet. This doesn’t mean that your kids should obsess about sex. On the contrary, once they know the reality of how a woman get pregnant they will properly able to fear and respect the act that that leads to the pregnancy, and abstain or wear a condom.
That’s the irony I realized looking back to when I was growing up. Rather than be forthright when discussing sex, parents would rather waffle about it or, worse, dismiss the topic altogether.
So rather than confront the reality of a very likely sexually active teenager and open the gates to a frank discussion about safe sex, Pinoy kids are left guessing or experimenting in an unsafe environment.
yes I would say western media is sending the wrong message to filipino youth,and unfortunately they are too young,inexperienced and perhaps naive to understand the impropriety of it…just this week,on two separate occasions while walking down the street in Manila,young kids perhaps 12 or so yrs.old,approached me and said”hey what up nigga?”as they gesticulated with what appeared to be some kind of gang kung fu…beating their fists on their chests,contorted hand and finger symbolings….they obviously thought it was cool,and that I’d be impressed….well I first of all was less than impressed,and saddened that people in these parts have been desensitized to such a derogatory word….anyway i guess what Im saying is,it really isnt the kids fault…the media is leading them around by their noses,the kids don’t know any better,and are led to believe that all things American are cool….how sad…..
Yeah, sad isn’t it? Coolness at the expense of class. The tragedy there is that in actuality, it isn’t even cool at all, because the kids don’t even know the deeper context in the use of such words.
They’re no better than parrots…
Biffa I hope you understand when I say that I, as an American, am offended if you’re suggesting that western or American media is deliberately spreading the word nigger and bad behavior to Filipino youth. Yes, we have some ugly media here, just like Filipino media has ugly aspects such as six year old strippers on eat bulaga. Oftentimes the offensive movies and music that children sa Pinas so frequently ape is actually MUCH less accessible to children in America. It is much harder to torrent things illegally here and our ratings systems truly prevent children from accessing certain media. In america, if a bus driver put on a horrifically violent or offensive movie on the bus TV, the passengers would throw a riot and demand it be turned off (its actually unpopular for there ever to be TV on public transportation as it bothers many passengers and makes the journey less relaxing).
In short, America and even pinoy media are not going out of their way to cram this garbage down anybody’s throats. Filipos go OUT OF THEIR WAY, actually, to consume this kind of stuff. Offensive content is everywhere in the Philippines because it is what sells. Its actually damning of Filipinos that they think “nigga” is what all black people say, it shows ther racism because they only identify the black race as the crimimals in bad music and movies.
The west also produces amazing educational content and documentaries. The world is not to blame for the Philippines poor standards. You’re big kids now, you’ve been making your own laws for over half a century.
Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
That’s the ultimate tragedy of growing up in the Philippines. They are brought up by the media and the church to perceive sex as this evil and totally worth it act.
The greater tragedy is how parents wants their kids to enjoy sex… and immediately get furious with them when they impregnate/get impregnated.
With learning about sex, they should also learn about foresight.
Education starts at home –with parents as the first teachers.
We cannot and will not be able to control what our kids learn from their environment everyday. But, we, as parents should be responsible enough to instill good principles on them in the right way. If a kid knows something is wrong, he/she will mostly turn away from it.
“Youth is wasted on the young…” they usually say…those were the days…enjoy your youth. If you come to the adult world…responsibilities will be on your shoulder
So what is the right message?