As kids see it, much of the problems of the world would be solved if at least two things about it could be made more fun, school and religion.
As for the first, it might make a big difference if it were explained to them precisely why school is at all necessary. After all, one might understand why the whole question is quite a big mystery for children. Imagine them looking at all the sacrifices they and their parents obviously have to make, to send them to school on a daily basis bar weekends and holidays. A young child can figure out the nature and extent of these sacrifices and wonder if it is all worth it. And how could the young child ever really appreciate what he or she is learning and how it might be useful in the run of time?
As for the latter, how can a child ever really figure out this business of faith, loving God and saving one’s soul? Put in there the issues of sin and repentance, the whole concept of collective salvation and loving the poor and then you end up with a heady cocktail that is obviously quite difficult to digest for minors even when one presumes adult guidance and supervision.
And so for most kids, all these are simply drilled into them in a ritual as inevitable as life itself. And yet they must count themselves fortunate. For there are others not as fortunate as them who cannot go to school at all for some reason or another. And as for church on Sunday, do kids really understand its importance beyond the fear of sin or the ire of their parents? Unless they understood this, a church must seem a desolate place. And yet a child must figure all these out. Otherwise, they will have to do what they have to do merely out of obedience and respect.
By an ancient value system, obedience and respect translate into fear. One must fear God as a way of respecting Him. And by an odd twist of logic, this fear translated into love. One loves God by fearing Him and vice versa. One has to wonder if the ancient formula still works. One has to wonder as well if this formula only results into a chronic spiritual depression among children, which eventually alienates them from all things having true spiritual value. One has to wonder in due course how all these can ever truly translate into fun. One might finally wonder if by the ancient value system, all things fun always translates into sin and wrongdoing. In the case of learning and school, all these translate to the idea that anything that is fun is of no educational value and should therefore be discouraged.
It is not surprising then that most children grow up with a latent rebellion. This rebellion translates into the social hierarchy that children eventually apply into the classroom. This hierarchy have words to describe them. Take for instance the word, “naning”.
“Naning” is the Bisayan word shortened from the complete word “naningkamot”. In English, this translates to “trying”. To stress its negative connotation, the English synonym for “naning” is “trying hard”. By usage it goes: Trying hard to get good grades. Trying hard to achieve anything at all. Ironically also: Trying hard to belong.
“Naning” is not a simple word. To identify its antonym as “loser” is not quite accurate. Its true antonym is really just “normal”. This means that “naning” is not really normal and thus the people who are “naning” are not really fully integrated into the mainstream society of the classroom. They are as oddball as losers, the people who are predicted as failures for the rest of the their lives because they fail in school.
One might argue that in the real world only the “naning” and the “losers” truly have the potential to become really important in the run of life. The mainstream students of the class are by the same token doomed to become merely ordinary or even mediocre, but for a few “secret” exceptions. “Secret” because not all young people really reveal who they truly are inside a classroom setting. It would be interesting to derive the necessary statistics to either prove or disprove this assertion. It does seem true from personal observation.
One might resolve all these by citing that school and church are there so that children eventually learn the lesson that life itself is not all fun. All things of value come from sacrifice and suffering. But this sounds almost cliche and over-simplistic. Perhaps the better resolution is described by the bell curve applied to all manner of learning. It only seems difficult requiring sacrifice and suffering at the beginning until one reaches a level of modest mastery. And then everything becomes absolutely fun. As fun as life should be. The problem is only to get there.