Chocolates and school

My 10-year old kid goes to school at 7:30 a.m. and goes home at 5:30 p.m., after a 90-minute tutorial. Multiply that by five days and it's like giving your child a 50-hour work week, enough to make the union bosses to go up in arms unless there is overtime pay.

I know most of us wouldn't want to work a 50-hour week, but how come we're allowing this to happen to our kids? The schoolbags alone that they bring to class would qualify them as dockworkers, if not for the yayas who carry it for them.

The sad fact is that education in our country these days is overrated. Sadder still, pre-high school education has become a competition not between the students but between the parents of these kids. It seems that having a kindergarten or elementary honor student in the family is a badge of honor worth fighting for no matter what the cost. For how else could you explain an irate Mom over a child's failure to understand mathematical fractions?

In other countries, sports are given the same importance as academics. Kids are encouraged to play any sport they like after school. That's why in Australia, classes end up at 3:30 and sports are played until 6:00. It's not a coincidence that they can produce Olympians Ian Thorpe and Cathy Freeman, Patrick Rafter and Lleyton Hewitt while we have Olympians Eric Buhain and Lydia de Vega, Roland So and Joseph Lizardo.

When the CVIRAA was still around, a friend of mine excelled in track cycling (bike racing in the track and field oval). When his Dad, who worked overseas, found out that he had been involved in sports, he angrily demanded my friend to stop riding, the reason being that he might get injured. His Dad said that he just didn't endured cold and lonely nights in some foreign land just to see his son get bruised or get broken bones because of sports. I don't blame my friends' Dad. I blame the system.

I don't have statistics or the studies to back up what I'm saying but as a parent, I have more than a feeling that our education is heading in the wrong direction. What I'm saying is that sports should be given the same importance as academics. All work and no play makes. . . . .

I should remind parents that a kid's life is not all about classrooms and teachers 10-hours a day. It's about play, too, especially the physical kind. It's funny, because sports remind me of chocolates. In the line of work that I do, most parents complain to me that the bad teeth of their kids are caused by eating chocolates. So what's wrong with chocolates? Not everybody in this country can afford chocolates. The truth of the matter is that chocolates are not bad for the teeth if only parents would only follow up the toothbrushing and their oral hygiene like they follow up their kid's school assignments.

It would be the greatest tragedy if play and chocolates are kept out of our young ones. Can you imagine yourself life as a kid without the two?

UN and doping

The United Nations has dipped its fingers into doping in sports. Frankly, I don't know how the UN can help the UCI, WADA and the IOC fight doping when they could not stop the wars in Bosnia, Lebanon and Rwanda. If you ask me, the UN is not living up to its lofty goals and therefore should set its sights on its shortcomings instead of spoiling the broth on the war against doping.

UN, who gets most of its financial support from the US, should check the MLB, the NFL and the NBA. But then again, maybe it's the major sports that's supporting the UN?