Farewell To A Great Scholastican

...But the young are resilient and Cory came to her own during the Japanese occupation. She determined to do better in school. “Suddenly it hit me that, yes, this might be the end of something,” she says. “I decided I’d really put my heart and soul into [my studies]. So you might say I react well in a crisis.” Saint Scholastica’s College, the Roman Catholic private school the four Cojuangco girls attended, was bombed in the dying days of the war so Cory transferred to Assumption College for her first year of high school. The German nuns at Saint Scholastica stressed religion and reading. The more relaxed French nuns at Assumption focused on raising the social consciousness of their charges and teaching them how to think and act like ladies. “St. Scholastica’s was a very strict school,” Cory recounts. “But we, who were studying there, felt that we were really learning more than other girls in other schools.”...

---An excerpt from "Essential Cory Aquino"

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