“You’ve been served!” said the young-looking lawyer in barong after handing me what I thought was a subpoena. It turned out to be a notification from his boss who happened to be the father of an incoming intern from Ateneo. “Attention: Von Katindoy,” the notification read. The body was replete with legalese informing me of his daughter’s decision to withdraw from the internship. It then advised me and my then-employer to desist from any attempt to contact the intern or risk legal ramifications. I did not know whether I should be annoyed or amused. Didn’t she know she could have easily sent an email like the UP student who realized that selling was not for him?
When I shared this with my classmates in a SALT course, one of them remembered a question that another Ateneo parent once posed during a general assembly. To wit: “Can you guarantee that my son would earn a six-figure income after graduating from Ateneo?” A concerned faculty member tactfully advised the parent that there was only one guarantee that they could provide him. His son will never land a job with such an expectation.
If you’re flinching as you’re reading this, you would agree that neither dovetail with our ideal image of Ateneans. Then again, both stories are more about parents of Ateneans rather than Ateneans themselves. In my six years at a local conglomerate and 19 years at a multinational, I’ve had the privilege of working with grounded and hard working alumni and alumnae of the Ateneo.
As a parent, I have always been impressed with the lengths that our Jesuit-trained teachers have gone to in the pursuit of the Ignatian mission. From Grade 1 onward, there was no school year that my three boys were not enjoined to support Bigay Puso, a year-long fund drive for select public school students. When my eldest reached Grade 9, he rode a service jeepney with his classmates to teach in a public school once a week. In Grade 10 he stayed for three days and two nights with a foster family in a Sapang Palay community. In Grade 11 he signed up for teaching pairs to tutor public school students in English and Math. In Grade 12 he immersed in a community in Rizal to hammer out a creative project with his classmates.
Not surprisingly, the Ateneo Loyola Schools have the InTACT for freshies, NSTP PLUS for sophomores, JEEP for juniors, and Praxis for seniors. Together, these programs that are managed by the Office for Social Concern and Involvement (OSCI) “seek to deepen social awareness and intensify the passion for social involvement among Loyola School students in order to create positive impact among marginalized communities.”
Thankfully, teaching empathy is not a monopoly of the Ignatian tradition. According to the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, empathy, which she describes as “the capacity to really think what it might be to be in the shoes of someone else who’s different from yourself,” is one of the three things that the humanities can teach our students to prepare them for the 21st century. The other two are the capacity for critical thinking and the capacity for respecting human dignity.
Now that the State has once again trained its sights on universities as alleged hotbeds of the CPP-NPA, teachers everywhere might just have been presented with an opportunity to develop all three. Discussions and webinars can be organized around questions that promote empathy, critical thinking and respect for human dignity; If communism were a cancer, how is red-tagging the cure? Why does the poverty that drove Carlos Bulosan to migrate in the 1930s still persist in the 2020s? What is McCarthyism? Whose interests are served by red-tagging? Whose interests are threatened? Even better, let’s hold streamed Socratic discussions with Sec. Lorenzana and Lt. Gen. Parlade.
Who knows? As we try to understand the red-tagging campaign of the military using the “unforced force of the better argument,” they too might understand that students who discuss and take action are not necessarily communist recruits.
Von Katindoy is an instructor at the Ateneo Philosophy Department and an incoming student at the University of the Philippines Diliman.
