Rains, guns, mosquitoes

They sound almost like biblical plagues with deadly mosquitoes and infants killed in the night rains. But they’re happening, with parents and teachers fretting about the children.

At the same time, the incidents seem to be taking on a pattern, running the risk of fatigue on the part of teachers, administrators, students, and parents. Most worrying is the growing incidence of violence instigated by children against children.

At the schools I teach at, we insert lessons on these plagues and try to work out preparedness measures, involving all levels from kindergarten. They’re not always violent, but our faculty and staff are well aware that incidents could escalate in terms of frequency as well as intensity. The risk of “copycat” incidents across different campuses is also very real.

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Most shocking are the violent shooting incidents in the Philippines involving young students killing students using firearms (in the most recent rounds of killings, all the incidents involved guns, except for one, which was a stabbing).

School administrators promised quick action, but the incidents happened right before the “summer” break, purging public memories and affecting investigations. The Department of Education needs to keep national monitoring mechanisms to make the investigations more useful. I recall that bullying was cited in some of the investigations and, notably, the student gunners were the original victims, seeking vengeance. Add to this are young students fascinated by frats and sororities and hazing or initiation.

Some years back at the University of the Philippines, one particularly violent incident involved students from medical fraternities, with some evidence that the violent blows were intentionally intended to harm vital and sensitive organs (for example, the kidneys, genitals).

Then there are the military and police academies, which seem to be the most grisly.

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This year, we have new “hybrid” institutions. I refer to the violence inflicted on varsity team members, involving two popular basketball players who drowned during a team-building activity at a beach resort. Students did not seem to have been involved, but two team coaches have been arrested and face charges for neglecting their wards.

Also disturbing were the hazing events attended by fraternity alumni, which sometimes included “famous” ones holding high positions in public life, precisely the ones who attracted neophytes hoping to build connections for life after graduation.

Don’t we ever learn? We might want to learn from the United States, which first exported frats and hazing. What caught my attention this year was a shooting that killed four people. The gunman, Colt Gray, was 14 at the time of the shooting spree. He was convicted last week and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. His father was also convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison on the grounds that he had bought the firearm as a gift and was aware that the boy was exhibiting signs of mental health problems.

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This is only the second time in gun-crazy America that such a conviction has been made, but it should be worth following for the Philippines, although we know too that rich kids would probably be acquitted. There’s more opposition we can expect from parents being held accountable, who would argue there would be no deterrent effects.

Let’s leave the guns for now and look at other problems for which we should be better prepared. We do know that the first semester of each new school year brings the monsoon and floods, and we will probably be replaying the investigations into the misuse of flood control funds and the replays of the old horror stories around violence. Yet, what I hear in urban poor areas are romanticized stories about gun violence and about how quickly engineers can become rich!

Do we prepare students to handle ethical issues around careers? Yes, indeed. But the case of swimming shows how broad ethics can be. One of the foreign students who died could not swim, I am told, and there are many more Filipino students in similar straits, so shouldn’t we have clear policies about the swimming requirement for students who can’t swim? Extend the discussion more: shouldn’t we require general first aid, rescue, and safety education at all levels of schools as basic life skills?

During the discussions at my school, we did look at general health issues that should be part of classes. The summer session offers opportunities for health and safety lessons. The rainy season has started and should be a time to bring in classes about water- and mosquito-borne diseases, notably H-fever and leptospirosis, both potentially fatal diseases that come with the rains and floods.

Paradoxically, we are being warned by health authorities (too softly, if you ask me) about an El Niño problem that will be severe this year, a combination of rains and heat that can cause malaria, dengue, and Zika (a handful of cases were reported in 2016).

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michael.tan@inquirer.net