CLASSES in the old Jesuit school will begin this August. This is no big deal insofar as education management goes. Seasons and their ephemera rightfully belong to the creative. And there are many things that should be big deal for education people but are ignored, seasons and weather and climate included.
“I’ll see you in September when summer is gone.” Gary Lewis and the Playboys sang the song with those lines. Summer in that song is going away, for a while. June nights surround lovers but one always waits in another place, when summer is gone. This makes August the gateway to summer, the summer of other countries, the signifier for the hot days for our colonizers. But we sing this song even if August and part of September do not constitute the summer for us. March, April and May are our summer months. Try as we may harder, we can never feel the poignancy of those lines.
The fact is by September, summer is long gone in this country.
Summer is something tentative in terms of the more permanent events in a human group’s life. The ephemera are the permanent element, the charm of such season filled with indeterminate pains and pleasures. Edna St. Vincent Millay tells it all: “I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full seasons of the year.” The lines can take any feeling man’s breath away but in our country, as I always put it, summer is the full season of the year.
In the songs of the temperate countries, summer is about fleeting affairs. One, it seems, is allowed to be unfaithful in summer. Films abound about the beauty of the transient and this all takes place during the summer months that extend until the first few days of September. Take note of the film The Summer Knows, and remember the Michel Legrand song that goes with it: “The summer knows/The summer’s wise…. She sees the doubts/within your eyes.” The secret of childhood, the loss of innocence are there in the lines: “And if you’ve learned your lesson well/There’s little more for her to tell.”
We do not have these bittersweet recollections. Morality is an annual commitment, although we do not adhere to such a vow. We pretend to be faithful from January to December. We assure ourselves that fidelity is a contract sealed with the kiss of a region that it either dry or wet, or sometimes, dry and wet, and all the time hot. We are given reprieve when the chills come in the mornings from December to February. Then the true season of this republic asserts itself again.
What happens now that some universities are globalized (summer cannot contend with globalization) and the school calendars have shifted?
I may sound flippant but when classes extend to April and May, we technically, and in fine romantic form, really lose the summer of our childhood. Yet, when foreign universities abroad contemplate regarding their schedule, the universities that dispense of the summer of old will be fully integrated to a world calendar.
Looking back, the summer of March until May is in tune with the harvest season. The families rest their finances and summon back their children to work in the farm. This was when farms were far from the towns. Urbanization was then viewed as a force that will soon encroach upon rural lands. That is not the case now, when farms are being subdivided and farmlands are vanishing. The flood that covers most of big cities has nowhere to go. The paddies are gone and where there were rice and trees, we have pavements and roads, as well as highways that killed woodlands and marshlands.
The new calendar has not fully conquered the other schools. In some areas where August is the beginning of classes, somehow, summer is gone. The old months of vacation are gone, whether we like or not.
Where do we put those easy, laid-back summer classes?
Where will the summer of circumcision go? What occurs in the months when boys lose their boyhood? Where will those summer afternoons be? Henry James, “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
The bureaucracy of education, some say, is the slowest to move of all bureaucracies. And yet, this time, with the change they are imposing, these men and women of knowledge have just swiftly altered, to a certain degree, the clime of this nation.
I do not know if my thoughts make sense. Perhaps, these are memories of a generation that relied on the rhythm of the seasons, when typhoons were used to reckon milestones and misfortunes.
Believe me, for those who will attend classes in August or early September, they should salute this summer, for this is their last summer.
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Image credits: Jimbo Albano