Teaching by example October 11, 2006

I REMEMBER again something I had read about parenting ages ago. A parent who keeps saying no to a child will not necessarily teach the child to be disciplined and righteous. He or she will probably just end up teaching the kid to say no to everything. That is, to become stubborn and contrary.

The principle is as simple as it is profound: Example is the best teacher there is. How we teach is what we teach. A child hearing his parent telling him constantly not to do things will not learn not to do things. He will learn to constantly tell other people not to do things. Or put another way, he will learn how to act like his parent.

In various interviews, particularly by college kids doing their paper in English, I’ve always been asked how I’ve raised my kids, whether I’m strict or not, what values I’ve tried to drum into them. I’ve always replied that I’m no better or worse than any other parent in the lecturing department, but that if there’s a value I’ve harped on, it is honesty or fairness. Worse than deluding others is deluding yourself. But I’ve never been big on ramming that down their throats. For one reason: I figure that whatever lessons I want to impart to them I’d teach best by what I am and do. If I do not live a life that’s honest and decent, or at least that aspires toward it, nothing I say is going to make them so.

I remembered these things after reading that the clamor for investigating the cheating in the nursing exams has gotten louder and wider. I’m glad it has; there’s hope for this country yet. At least Filipinos can still be roused up by major-league acts of dishonesty.

But I don’t know why the “thorough investigation” that more and more public and academic officials are clamoring for should be limited to the cheating in the nursing exams. I don’t know why that “thorough investigation,” if it means to be thorough at all, shouldn’t be directed to all instances of monstrous acts of cheating in this country. Indeed, I don’t know why that “thorough investigation,” if it means to be investigative at all, shouldn’t aim to determine the participation, direct or indirect, active or passive, of the highest authorities of the land themselves in cheating in this country.

The point is simple: The highest officials of this country, public or private, secular or religious, are the parents or guardians of this country. What they are and do is what they say and preach. How they act is what they teach. If they lie, cheat and steal, there is no warning against lying, cheating and stealing they can sound to the public that will be heeded. If they aid, abet and find ways to justify lying, cheating and killing, there is no threat they can issue to the public that will deter them from lying, cheating and stealing as well.

I’ve said my piece about the example Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has set by stealing the elections. Why should the nurses balk at trying to become bona fide nurses by answering leaked questions when the person claiming to be their bona fide President became so by counting votes from ballot boxes that were more leaky than the oil tanker that sank at the bottom of the sea near Guimaras? Why should the nurses agree to have the results of the exams rendered null and void because some of them cheated when the person claiming to be their President refuses to have the last elections declared null and void because she herself, with no small help from Garci, cheated the hell out of the voters?

But it isn’t just Arroyo who is setting a horrendous example there. I remember again Archbishop Ramon Arguelles’ breathtaking statement justifying the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines’ refusal to back the impeachment bid against Arroyo: “Talaga naman nandaya (si Arroyo).... Pero lahat naman nandaya e. Natalo lang ’yung iba sa dayaan.” [“Of course, Arroyo cheated. But everyone cheated anyway. It’s just that the others lost in the cheating.”]

Coming from one of the “istambay” who hang out in our neighborhood off-track betting station, that would have been dismaying. Coming from no less than an archbishop, that is reprehensible. One would imagine, as I said in a column in response to that, that the sheer prevalence of cheating would make us say in the face of the mother of all cheating that it was time we did something to make the cheating stop. Not say, “sige na lang” [just let it be], let is fester till kingdom come.

Indeed, it wasn’t just Arguelles who said so, it was Jose de Venecia and the other representatives who refused to impeach Arroyo who said so. Their official line was that there was no evidence of cheating in the elections -- by itself a blatant lie -- their unofficial one was that everyone cheats anyway. They went on to say that the country had more important things than cheating to think about, there was the future of the country to think about. As though any country that was built on a lie could possibly have any future.

If I recall right, many Filipinos were already asking last year what kind of world we were leaving the children with the open, brutish and widespread razing of moral values our own leaders had embarked on. Susan Roces asked that expressly when she delivered her “I see no contrition in your eyes” speech at Club Filipino. What lessons, she asked Arroyo and Mike Defensor, are we teaching the children?

Whatever they are, it’s not just the children who are learning them. Everybody is. The nurses are. By all means let us have a thorough investigation of the cheating in the nursing exam, as deep and as wide as is necessary to ferret out the authors of this heinous crime. As we are bound to find out however, the true culprits go beyond a few nursing officials and/or a review center and go way, way up to the very people who run this country.

What they are and what they do are what they teach. Example is the best teacher there is.

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