GOLDEN JUBILEE

Unbearable pressure, Boys and only Boys

Posted Friday, 16-Sep-2005 7:49 AM

      This was the situation in the month of March 1956, barely three months before opening day, and these were the rumors going around the gossip-mills in Chinatown when Father Desautels received a barrage of letters, suggestions, and unsolicited opinions predicting that, unless girls were accepted, the new school’s classrooms would be empty.

      The pressure to accept girls for the sole purpose of presenting a respectable initial enrollment became almost unbearable. Father John Ho, who had been named prefect for Chinese studies and who was marking time at Cebu’s Sacred Heart School, wrote several letters. Based on his experience at the Cebu school, he insisted that girls be admitted. He reminded Father Desautels that the custom in Chinese families was to send all their children to the same school. He was adamant. And he was scared. To make things worse, Father José Oñate, the Provincial of the Jesuit Chinese missions now formally organized into a standard Jesuit province, yielding to pressure from his Chinese brothers within the province, wrote a powerful letter asking Father Desautels to consider accepting girls. That, too, was quite shocking, for Father Oñate was a canon lawyer, a staunch conservative, thoroughly familiar with Jesuit history, and therefore, in a position to know that his suggestion clashed with the traditional approach to Jesuit education.

      Everyone seemed to have an opinion different from his. Father Desautels writes in his Journal on March 5,

      Should we accept girls at Kuang Chi? Bishop Velasco, the nuncio, the archbishop, are weighing the odds. Rev. Oñate is in favor. Father Ho, from Cebu , has written a long white paper concluding that, unless we take in the girls, we will have no students come June. Mr. Khe Thai and Basilio are strongly for the idea.

      Indeed, Fathers Desautels and Pineau were perfectly aware that, if girls were accepted, the school would certainly start with a big bang. And so the temptation to yield must have been almost irresistible. Father Desautels writing to the Secretary of the Provincial and reporting the modest initial enrollment of 170 boys, acknowledges that “had we accepted girls, that is, the sisters of our boys, our initial enrollment would have reached one thousand.” To stick to the boys-only policy, therefore, meant a test for the determination of the founding team. But Fathers Desautels and Pineau had it always clear in their minds, and were thinking of no initial big bang but of the long future that awaited the school. For them quantity was not of the essence, much less in a school that was starting, while quality was non-negotiable. If the initial product had quality, satisfied customers would do the rest. Father Pineau, in a letter to benefactors in Canada writes,

      We do not believe in having great numbers to the detriment of standard. We believe that only with a high standard and students who can measure up to it can we hope to form an elite that will deeply influence the important Chinese community of the Philippines, for which little has ever been done.

      In a situation like this, the two Jesuits gave proof of a superior courage and a typically independent mind. They refused to be bullied, and against pressures coming from all directions, they decided to go ahead with boys only, no matter how few showed up, even if only 50 enrolled. They were willing to take the risk. Sorry for all their friends at all levels: it was their school and it was to be their way or there would be no school at all. The school would be exclusively for boys.

Go back to the top ^