Originally broadcast on CHED radio - Date unknown

As I fetched him out of the bath last night, and stood him up to dry his small hard little body with a Turkish towel, he looked up at me and said, "do I have to go to school again tomorrow?". I smiled a little and said, "yes, son, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow - for twelve long years you have to go to school”. Then he asked me why people had to go to school, and I must confess my eyes watered a bit, because my first little baby was bewildered… so bewildered, having entered a whole new world in one brief day. I felt sad because I knew that during that one day, my son had grown just a little way away from me. The thin edge of the wedge had been forced between us, and though tonight he needed me very much, there would come a time, perhaps much sooner than I expected, when he would need me less and less, when he would become a part of the new world about him, and instead of watching somewhat apprehensive from the sidelines, he would get in step with the world, would conform with his fellow man, would become a statistic in an enrollment book instead of just my small little, lost boy, who that day had entered his new frustrating, bewildering world… a world of realist… a world that had a little time for dreamers… a hectic, frantic world that moved at a pace almost too frightening to think about. Why do you have to go to school? Beneath my breath, I asked the same question, though the emphasis was different - “oh, why, why do you have to go to school?” Why do you have to learn that there is hate as well as love… that there is filth as well as cleanliness… that there is evil as well as good, that you will not always need your mothers comfort and caress, and your father's protecting arms. You have to go to school to learn, son, so when you grow up you can get a job and earn money and get married, and I thought to myself and have babies of your own… and someday, when you are bathing your own little boy on the first day of school, you'll understand how I feel, and perhaps you'll cry a little, too. "Off to bed, little man. Tomorrow is another day.”