FIRING LINE: Classrooms of fear

FIRING LINE: Classrooms of fear

By Robert B. Roque Jr. | June 23, 2026

I can’t stop thinking about it: two incidents, three days apart, both in Cavite.

On June 16, a 14-year-old Grade 8 student walked into a Grade 5 classroom in General Trias — teachers were away at a meeting — and stabbed seven elementary pupils with a kitchen knife. On June 19, two 18-year-old students at Cavite National High School argued, fought, and the confrontation ended with one drawing a blade and wounding the other.

Unthinkable. Unacceptable. And yet, no longer unimaginable.

School Year 2026-2027 had barely begun when violence struck twice in one week. And these incidents did not come out of nowhere. In February, authorities intercepted seven 15-year-olds in Laguna who had allegedly been plotting an attack on a school after being radicalized online. Days before the Cavite incidents, a Grade 12 student in Bacolod City fatally stabbed his teacher.

Go back to 2025, and the list becomes even more unsettling. A 14-year-old girl was stabbed to death inside her classroom in Parañaque by a classmate who had earlier been reported for bringing a knife to school. In Lanao del Sur, a Grade 11 student allegedly shot his teacher over a failing grade. In Nueva Ecija, a teenage quarrel ended in a murder-suicide inside a classroom.

The pattern is difficult to ignore. School violence, once regarded as rare and shocking, is beginning to feel alarmingly recurrent.

Beneath many of these tragedies lies a deeper wound that has long been festering: bullying.

A June 2026 study by EDCOM 2 — the Second Congressional Commission on Education, tasked with recommending reforms to Philippine education, and De La Salle University affirmed what education officials themselves have acknowledged. Among countries participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment, the Philippines has the highest incidence of bullying. Sixty-five percent of Filipino Grade 10 students report being bullied several times a month. Four out of every 10 experience it weekly.

These are not mere statistics. They are a breeding ground for resentment, humiliation, anger, and sometimes violence.

The government rightly devotes the largest share of the national budget to education. But education cannot be measured by academic performance alone. DepEd’s revised Anti-Bullying Act rules, signed this month, are a welcome start. Yet policies and circulars by themselves cannot save a child from picking up a knife.

Schools must be outstanding institutions not only of learning, but of good manners, right conduct, mutual respect, and reverence for life itself.

Coming off a Father’s Day weekend, perhaps this hits some of us parents harder. We entrust our children to schools, hoping they return home smarter, safer, and better human beings.

That responsibility, however, does not belong to teachers alone. It rests as much on mothers and fathers, school officials, and the government. For if we fail to nip the roots of bullying and violence while they are still young, we may once again find ourselves mourning tragedies that should never have happened in the first place.

Editor’s Note: This commentary was written a day before the Tacloban High School shooting that killed 3 students and wounded 5 others.

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