Make resolutions for children

One of my old poems for the New Year starts with: “When the New Year unfolds, resolutions come in, when resolutions fold, changes are in.” I realized it was perhaps, a sort of a wishful thinking for some teachers and elders like me. Year in and year out, we lay down the same resolutions all over again but the ones fulfilled are few and far between.

 When I read what James Baldwin said: “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them,” it came to me that parents and teachers have to make up some resolutions for the children, instead - who need to be protected from all forms of abuses and treats at this time - war, poverty, calamities, trafficking and improper education.

Education.  Aside from the onslaught of technology which goes viral on the youth’s learning, their values are relative to media. Their literacy is channeled through TV, movies and other forms of mass media which is even made worst with the effects of the latest high-technological cellular fad. See the kind of learning the young people - who no longer come down to reading - are geting these days, as well as the values they have inhabited from the media?

 My esteemed Thomasian poet, National Artist for Literature Cirilo F. Bautista wrote: “Media have asserted their dominance over our consciousness and we have visual, rather than textual, imagination. We are inclined to grasp ideas through pictographic means not through visual relationships…unlike other countries where reading is a necessary requirement for civilized living. Reading for them is a weapon against a seduction of mass media.”

Educational and moral philosophers John Dewey, Lawrence Kohlberg and Jonathan Baron who labored under this task of designing a program of moral education may lend a hand.  They taught that formal education and the value of what was to be learned became a fact of life for teachers.  This fact gave teachers license to exercise paternalistic control over students to help them manage their environment more effectively.  On the question of ethics and the failure of the parents to guide their children, they become beholden to teachers who teach good conduct, much more form their children’s civilized language.

Language. While the Americans taught us their own language in the classroom, they amused and brainwashed us, too, with their culture like being polite with our spoken and written language - unlike what the youth are being bombarded with nowadays.

How could we explain that cursing and polluting the air with foul language tossed off by no less than the top officials of the land, is a case of pulling rank and ganging up against the youth? How could we explain that in getting emotional, they should never give in to their wrath, that to spew expletives is rudest and disrespectful? How can we keep them down to think - that it’s all the rage to put up with curses, that it’s normal to act up and vent their anger for their emotional health?

Health. This is an essential concern in everyone’s home. Parents must start to offer and train kids to eat vegetables, fruits and healthy foods at younger age.  Today, even children and teens have contacted diabetes, heart ailment, urinary tract infection, and high blood pressure due to imbalanced and poor nourishment.

Teachers need to play as a support group to parents on children’s health. They must be dedicated to teach the kids, from urban places at most, to maintain a pollution-free environment, to dissuade them to pollute the atmosphere which destroys the ozone layer and causes climate change.  Teachers can very well weld power for the government to religiously support decent medical and dental care to children far and wide.

Time and again, may our fellow teachers also resolve to pay attention to develop the right sense of history of the students, and may the parents exhibit the positive Filipino culture for the the children to model themselves after them.

Pit M. Maliksi is an alumnus of the University of Santo Tomas and Central Texas College. He was hailed as the Most Outstanding Professor for 12 years at PUP-Sto. Tomas, Batangas, of which he is the municipal librarian, and an English teacher at La Consolacion College, Tanauan City.