We must reflect on the state of the Filipino family, which forms every person long before they begin their educational…

It is sad that people die in school.

By school, we mean that community formed through the gathering of students, teachers, and staffers for the pursuit of learning.

Historically, school has meant the place where that community gathers. But even before distance and remote online learning came to be, school, as a society, has always tended to transcend the campus. As a student, I was someone’s classmate even though we lived in different parts of a city. As a graduate, I belong to alumni communities with continuing ties to the schools where I obtained academic degrees. My former teachers will always be “Miss,” “Madame,” or “Sir” to me. Whenever I look at the facade of Colegio del Santo Niño across from Cebu City Hall in the presence of a companion who would not have known, I would point to windows of the second-floor rooms that I frequented in grades 5 and 6, which were respectively named after Sts. Thomas of Villanova and John Stone. I am still part of the school through the Class of 1994 whose members are in the country and abroad.

The word “school,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, has ancient Greek roots and, surprisingly, meant leisure or doing what one does when one is at rest, especially engagement in elevated conversation. School was, to the Hellenic people, a form of luxury, a reality experienced freely, with pleasure, and in moments free from stress.

Only because of its reuse in differing contexts in different countries with differentiated histories has “school” come to mean a social structure where teachers, students, and staffers interact with the conferment of certificates or degrees of education as a climax.

But regardless of whether we use an ancient Greek or contemporary lens in contemplating the school, the deaths in June of basketball players of Ateneo de Manila University in Aurora and of students of San Jose National High School in Tacloban City, Leyte, still wound our collective consciousness. Their passing shakes our understanding of what a school is. Death has no place in our imagined environment for the conduct of pleasurable learned discourse or designs for the formation of intelligent, cosmopolitan citizens.

Persons, with their intrinsic, immeasurable dignity, make schools what they are, and their demise, more than anything, is what diminishes communities of learning. Educational trends — Outcomes-Based Education is the in thing at the moment — will come to pass. Mission and vision statements — servant-leadership, a child of the 1970s, for example — will one day become obsolete. Performance measures — some universities have made strong statements about why they prefer exclusion from international rankings — will morph or may turn out to be flawed. Pseudo-sciences — like the decaying-West-centric-and-largely-Anglophone, ideologically-colonizing idea of ever-increasing numbers of genders inflicted on hapless scholarly communities in the guise of promoting equality, non-discrimination, and diversity — will be overtaken by new forms of intellectual dishonesty although truth and true love have never been scarce. But the vocation of schools, of being a second home to those who seek the truth in community, will last.

And this is why we find it repulsive when children die in school. It is supposed to be a place where everyone has the opportunity, through learning, to grow into the fullness of being human, know how to live well, and spend years steeped in the practice of living well with one another.

The family is the first school of life and love, and while reactions to recent deaths in Philippine schools, whether investigations of possible hazing in the case of the deaths of the Ateneo athletes or debate about banning certain computer games to prevent young people’s desensitization to violence, may be necessary, the character of every student and school worker is molded in the family.

The lives of shooting victims in Tacloban City and those who drowned in Aurora in the context of their schools as societies would be twice wasted if we let knee-jerk talking points dilute our discussion of school security. Beyond questioning the role of the media, including computer games, in grooming children for murderous rage, or the performance of school administrators in regulating extra-curricular activities and screening employees such as coaches, we must reflect on the state of the Filipino family, which forms every person long before they begin their educational journey, formal or otherwise, long before they become custodians of lives as education professionals.

Do we love our children from the moment of their conception?

Do we make it a point to let them know that they are loved?

“It is not enough to love the young,” St. John Bosco said. “They must know that they are loved.”

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