long overdue rant: NSTP

Is it any wonder that it took me the whole of five minutes today to conceptualize and write an entire reflection paper for NSTP? Insincerity flows out of me like blood would from a stake to the fucking heart. Frankly I don’t see how much reflection could possibly be done out of FORCED LABOR, which is essentially what NSTP is. Hello government! How about we free you of your dirty work and pass the non-trivial burden of educating the youth onto our bumbling college students, equipped only with two sessions worth of “skills training” that in reality involved nothing more than group-roleplaying a bunch of exaggerated what-to-do situations. Bah.

If you think I’m just whining about another school requirement, well screw you mister. It’s not the work I’m so bothered about (successfully teaching little kids to read does bring its own brand of joy, I’m sure), but all this candy-coated horseshit about finding Jesus and personal growth and whatever. We even renamed it NSTP+ (plus!) to emphasize that added spiritual side! Great job assholes, that just gets me so excited. How about just letting us accomplish our given duties, and stop squeezing meaning out of everything? It’s bad enough that this thing is required by law, but to compel us to be spiritual about it is just pushing it.

Even less recently we had the unfortunate opportunity to attend (compulsively of course) a spiritual recollection to conclude the semester’s NSTP activities. You know something is wrong when the facilitator says “it’s only through the wisdom of God that you can find meaning in your NSTP experience.” I mean, holy shit, it can’t even be justified in human terms. How convenient that we always have vague abstract concepts to resort to! Never mind that the opportunity to be of service to humanity is a good enough reward in itself, our constructed understanding of God just has to come along and ruin everything.

All I’m saying is you can force cooperation, but never sympathy. You could of course argue that the whole point of all these insertion activities is to develop social concern (in which case I say screw you anyway), but my point is exactly that all these imposed religious jabberwock gets in the way of true sympathy, which should come straight from within, uninfluenced by anyone else’s worldview. Not to mention all these cavemen at the community you’re serving always make sure you’re thoroughly annoyed, treating you as if you’re some power-pushing overlord just because you’re from Ateneo. Big deal. All we have are high tuition fees and required Theology courses. Most of the time there isn’t even any air-conditioning. We’re the ones losing money to go out of our way to give FREE SERVICE, so shut up.

Anyway, I look forward to next sem’s activities. (There’s sarcasm here somewhere.)