Noodles and Rice

And the Luc Cagadoc saga continues…

by Stef on May 5th, 2006

More commentary about the table manners incident:

Eating like pigs? from The Mindanao Daily Mirror
The boy who ate with a spoon from PhilippineNews.com
Food fight angers Filipinos from TheStar.com

and a reporter’s view on how the whole thing should have been handled:

Bigger problems than lunch-time adventures

While I agree with George Springate (last article)’s

We have far too many, more important problems in our West Island schools than to get bogged down with dinner-time adventures — however unfortunate.

this simply highlights just how trivial the matter is to be handled this way by the principal and the school. Don’t they have other things to worry about than how a boy feeds himself? Why put so much attention on what utensils a person is using in the lunchroom, when schools have problems like

bullying, high dropout numbers, public schools rated at the tail end of provincial listings, students with poor reading, writing and language skills, gangs, racism and university students who haven’t graduated being prematurely named teachers and shoved into classrooms

as mentioned in the Springate article?

Mr. Springate suggests that the school should have handled it “immediately and professionally”. I suggest that it shouldn’t even have become “something to handle” at all. If the principal and school’s priorities lay in what’s really important — the issues mentioned above — whether Luc Cagadoc was using “the proper utensils” or not would never have become the issue that it now is. They should have left the child alone, but the fact is they didn’t.

So Mr. Springate and anyone else feeling inconvenienced by this turn of events, please don’t dismiss this as trivial. For reasons obviously unclear to you, there are a LOT of Filipinos that believe Ecole Lalande and its officials have acted unfairly. Let’s not try to sweep this under the rug, where it will remain forgotten and unresolved, where it will fester and cause bigger problems. Yes, there will always be more important issues, but let’s remember that for a considerable number of Filipinos, this is not just about a spoon, a fork and the boy who used them. It is about cultural tolerance and respect. Viewed that way, it gains a global value that cannot be considered insignificant.

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POSTED IN: In the News, Uncategorized