My ideal world

"How did your kid do?"

"Not very well."

"Why?"

"His grade decreased from 97 to 94."

"What did your boss say?"

"We're getting him a tutor."

My friend got alarmed when he heard this conversation between two yayas at his son's school. He jokingly asked his wife if they were too lenient on their six-year old boy. I would have suggested that they report the parents of the boy whose grades decreased to Bantay Bata.

I have always believed that the purpose of school is to learn and have fun. I felt like nominating myself as Mother of the Year when my son liked the pre-school I picked for him so much that he felt sad when classes were suspended during a typhoon. Unfortunately, some people put more emphasis on getting their children to graduate at the top of their class and forget about why they are being sent to school in the first place.

One of the most traumatic experiences I had as a grade school student was finding that someone had erased my answers from a Math test. Whoever did it must have thought that I was a threat to his/her getting the highest grade. Erasing my answers seemed like a logical thing to do. I was only eleven years old when this happened.

In law school, we derisively called people who picked professors who gave high grades "forum shoppers." "2.0 lang ako," they would wail. It was amusing to see them at the end of the semester waiting at the College Secretary's office and checking out the rank of their nearest competitors.

I must admit that being an honor student (or better yet, a valedictorian) has a lot of advantages. It carries with it a presumption (perhaps unfairly) that that one is better than his batch mates. When I applied in law school, the interview panel simply asked me what I thought about the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and what the last book I read was. My interview was over in less than ten minutes. Most of it was spent on banter about where to find second-hand books in good condition. Some of my friends were grilled for almost an hour (complete with bitchy side comments).

In law school, graduating in the top twenty meant getting invited to apply at the big law firms. We received invitations to lunch at their plush partners' lounges, for cocktails in board rooms catered by restaurants we only read about, and to dinners in fancy hotels we could not afford on our students' allowance.

For some, not being an honor student could mean the end of a dream. I met a doctor who studied at the UP College of Medicine. She narrated how competition was so fierce in getting accepted into this school that when she took her pre-med course, she dropped subjects if she was in danger of getting a grade lower than a 1.5. She recalls that she felt that if she did not do this, she would not stand a chance of making it to her medical school of choice.

I still maintain that the only presumption that honor students are entitled to is that they test well. However, until other standards are developed to determine whether or not a person is suitable for admission to a school or for hiring by an employer, high grades will remain the criteria by which people are picked. I just hope that parents of school-age kids know better than to apply the same standards to their children.

In my ideal world, all parents would have this mantra: "School is for learning and having fun." Becoming an honor student should be a side effect of the learning process, never the goal.

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