What lessons we are teaching our students nowadays

One, never admit to a crime unless you are forced to. For weeks, Malacañang tried to deceive the public by saying variously that the tape was doctored, that Ms Arroyo was the person on the tape but she was talking not to an official of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) but to a local-government official, that we don't really know who was in the tape at all. Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye would later retract his admission that it was Ms Arroyo on the tape, saying he wasn't really sure, his copy was not the original. From experience, he said, he couldn't recognize his own voice from a copy of a copy. He forgot that he wasn't dealing with a cassette tape but with a CD and that, as every high school kid knows, burning does not degrade an audio file but produces an exact clone. Which is a good lesson about knowing what you are talking about before you open your mouth.

The bigger lesson, of course, is that if you are a student and you doctored your transcripts to get a scholarship, never admit to it even after being found out. Unless you can no longer hold out.

Two, after you admit a crime, make sure that you yourself prescribe your own punishment. What did Ms Arroyo propose after she admitted to committing the worst possible crime of a president, which was to call up a Comelec official while he was busy counting votes? "I want to close this chapter and move on with the business of governing." The President has confessed to a crime, notwithstanding that she calls it "a lapse in judgment," but it is not up to the people she wronged to prescribe her punishment, it is up to her.

So now, if you are found to have doctored your transcripts to get a scholarship, all you have to do is apologize to school officials, demand that they stop their "kakulitan" [insistence] in questioning your right to be in their school, and say, "I want to close this chapter and move on with the business of studying."

Three, if you have committed a heinous crime, propose a punishment that is not only disproportionate to the crime but voids the crime completely. By way of penance, Abad says, Ms Arroyo promises to be a better leader. But what is the crime? The crime is that she has no right to be the leader of this country in the first place. The crime is that she stole this country's leadership by cheating in the elections. The correct penance for that is not resigning for being a usurper? The correct penance for that is not doing time -- with or without the company of her spouse -- in the National Penitentiary? The correct penance for that is upholding the lie with the promise to change?

So now, if you've admitted to cheating your way to a scholarship, you don't need to give it up, least of all to the "labandera's" [laundrywoman's] kid whose place you took by claiming to be indigent. You don't need to be expelled from school for being the living embodiment of all that the school abhors. All you have to do is promise to study harder. All you have to do is promise to do things to restore the school's trust and confidence in your being a scholar as well as a student. And you'll be put up as a paragon of virtue, an ideal for values formation.

Ah, but Mr. Abad, sir, don't you think that is such a bad lesson?

I can't help linking to and quoting Conrado de Quiros' articles. He's that good talaga. Read the whole thing.