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Sunday, November 14, 2004
Tabada: Snake charming 101
By Mayette Q. Tabada
Matamata
Two things distinguish college students: their hurry to get out of college, and their fear of the world outside. When a student exhibits the first symptom, I believe his education is doing him some good. But when he is showing signs of the second malady, I think education is poisoning his system and he should quickly catch the first contagion and save his soul.
A class of mass communication students of St. Theresa’s College was recently asked why they were taking up a subject in ethics.
Their answers were anything but the it’s-a-requirement-for-graduation variety.
All 40 undergraduates have yet to start their media internship, but it’s a fate the majority approach with trepidation.
Two of the students were blunt; they wanted the course on ethics to equip them with tips for surviving the “snake pit.”
The rest of the class preferred to be coached on “dos and don’ts.” The euphemism may imply that they don’t view yet the media as a heart of darkness where serpents cavort. The press is just a twilight zone bathed perpetually in the yellow glow of caution: no snakes will rush out of the pit but tread carefully lest you step on one of the residues of malice that could take out legs or lives.
As their teacher, I sagged beneath their expectations. What do I know about snake charming and survival games?
During my brief stint in media, I only remember working. But cynicism like mine has no place in a room full of 40 individuals who want to know the proper way of “doing things” so as not to “repeat the mess” (which present members are presumably engrossed in carrying out), “get into fights” (where present members land in, presumably due to lack of ethics) and prematurely curtail the already foreshortened life span of one swigging snake venom six days a week, 360 days a year (lent, Christmas and new year being the only inviolate newsroom holidays).
One student wants to check if the government is indeed keeping its promise to protect the press from its enemies. (I miss that: not the promising but believing at all that the government keeps its promises.)
Interspersed with the cool calculators of risk are those who intend to “be responsible for their actions.” They view ethics as the “most important” in their four-year course work.
Some of the undergraduates express that they want to be “media professionals” as early as their third or fourth year in college. One avers that distinguishing between right and wrong begins at home, but all of life is a quest and she wanted directions in taking the right paths.
If ethics were a set of directions they had yet to fathom, the goal at the end of these paths seemed to be already discerned by this batch of 17-, 18- and 19-year-olds. Many did not want media to “crush people’s dignity and reputation.” Many tied up their professionalism with not propagating “false ideologies;” not “politicizing” the media; and not carrying out any “disservice like injustice” to the masses.
A few expressed the classic conundrum facing generations of students: ethics is not so much learned as practiced.
You can perhaps understand now why I changed my mind and now think the snake-charming part is kid’s stuff. I’m not sure I can plan anything this semester that will come close to answering this tyro’s retort: “The question here maybe is not why study ethics … but why is it that, despite the existence of this subject, some just don’t apply it in real life?”
(gguu@lycos.com/ 0917-3226131)
(November 14, 2004 issue)
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