School Hunting

Deciding on a school for an early grader took me a year.  In the UAE where classes start in August, I’ve done my share of searching on the internet highways and byways, phone calling, studying a potential school’s curriculum, observing how its students behave, asking around about religious instruction and school discipline.

Our tyke, who has had two years of pre-school in a Cebu school for girls, is now with us.  She’s still away from first communion age, but I presume that her time in her first school is sufficient for her first memories of schooling? the prayers, games, dances, coloring books, reading and numbers.

The sufficiency, obviously, is something we forced upon ourselves as a matter of conviction for lack of a better choice.  It is either she continues to be away from us in a school of our choice in Cebu, or with us in a place where schools are many but difficult to choose from.  The former may make us strangers to the kid, the latter may raise our blood pressure.  There’s no contest there; blood pressure or no, we can’t be strangers.

Children can’t help but get older and gain knowledge.  Unfortunately, the package includes biases.  More unfortunate, biases are unwittingly introduced by adults.  Yet I can’t blame the Filipino mother I met whose daughter, reared as a Catholic, married an Arab reared in Islam.  She cried a river.

Every parent has his own illusions when it comes to his children.  I’m no exception.  The world could be our tyke’s playground, and so I wish for her to be an upright cosmopolitan Filipino.  Presumptuous, maybe.  But what’s a cosmopolitan but one with the attitude of a world citizen, expansive and free of constricting biases?

A cosmopolitan is far from one whose horizon ends at the tip of his nose and takes as truth what he’s fed, sans consideration for the many other sides.  If that sounds too ambitious, consider how simpler the world would be if we uphold more the sameness of human beings and their religions rather than the differences.

But the way things are, I might as well have John Lennon’s Imagine as an anthem.  It’s too ideal, because I, too, am burdened by my own biases and fears.

There are traditions to uphold and adhere to.  In these I never made nor intend to make compromises.  Religion and empathy are paramount.  (Just be kind to everyone, human or animals, and you’ll turn out all right, as our father was fond of repeating. And oh how it rings.)

It isn’t that some schools teach different values, which happen to be universal and traverse all religions.  I just am not too sure about school protection from bullying and safety on the road hereabouts.  Credit it to my lifestyle that encourages a stage of siege? hardly out of the house, no reason to be out in the first place, and there’s the outside temperature, the arid desert air…

I can go on and on with the downside such that I’ve been blinded enough to miss the upside.  There’s a choice of different curricula, from British and Indian to American, French, Japanese, Russian and, of course, Filipino.  My preference for an early grader is still a sectarian school, Catholic, and Filipino, which doesn’t exist here.

Then there was this front-page news that a graduating Filipino gradeschooler, an only child, was run over by a car within the school campus.  She was to be crowned as the school queen the next evening and was graduating as the elementary valedictorian.  The picture of her grieving parents on the paper was enough to melt one’s knees.  That did it.

My school hunting ended where I started? no enrollment for her here as yet.  We opted for home schooling and distance learning until she finishes primary school.  The steep tuition we could bear.  (Who says education is cheap?)  As for our doubts if this is best for the kid, we’re bound to know soon.  Thankfully, my kid sister is around to help.  I’m still learning patience on how to teach a left-handed kid to write Nanay when she insists on Yanan.

It’s a whole new world for us, this home schooling with modules and kids’ computer and internet connection for once-a-week lessons with her teachers in Cebu.  But we felt relieved of our fears.

(5 Aug 2007)