Random Thoughts

On being asked about my take on Philippine education and educational philosophy in general

As a teacher especially involved in the education of minors I see a great gap in the country’s approach to education in general and to basic education in particular. While it is true that little by little change is slowly creeping in, in the country’s educational system, I believe that this problem is more than about reforming curricula and changing structures, this is a problem deeply rooted in our view of education.

This crisis in our educational system is brought about by a highly bourgeois attitude typical of the 60’s, where education is primarily viewed in its functional mode. There is a neo-utilitarianistic attitude among our educators and people in general where they think one ought to study only what are needed for their careers in the future. A child is brought to grade school left with clear instruction that he studies elementary to be able to get to high school and college. He moves on to high school with the same thought. Ultimately he reaches college, chooses a degree which would be most lucrative come graduation. After four or five years he “finishes” school, looks for work, gets dismayed by the competitive jobs market and lands underemployed if not unemployed at all. The young careerist easily gets dismayed because by this time he would have spent 14 to 15 years of his student life wasted away by being not able to find that “job” he studied for. After all, his sole raison d’être for having spent that much time in school was to “work”. Isn’t this the sad reality among the Filipino youth of today? Because of this neo-utilitarianistic attitude towards education, our people tend to be rather job-takers not job-makers, worst of all this view by and large dehumanizes schooling and working by considering “earning” as their ultimate goals, and, income as the be-all-and-end-all of education and employment.

Plato in his Timeon encounters a non-Greek affirming that the Greeks were αει παιλεσ, eternal children. To which the Philosopher saw no reproach but rather a tribute to the Greek character. At this a Greek Metropolitan, one Stylianos Harkianakis adds, ‘It remains firmly accepted that the Greeks want to be a people of philosophers not technocrats, that is, eternal children, apt to wonder in amazement at the higher states of human existence. Only in this light can we view the important fact that the Greeks have made no practical use of their innumerable inventions’. To which Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, that brilliant thinker and presently pope, furthers that, “wonder should not be lost – the capacity, that is, to marvel and to listen, to ask not only about what is functional but equally to perceive the harmony of the spheres and to rejoice precisely that it is of no use to us.”

A functional view of education must be tempered with a deep regard to the more fundamental principle of learning and that is learning for learning’s sake, for the apprehension of truths, and the attainment of “greater” states of human existence. In this way education becomes a humanizing agent in this ever dehumanizing environment we live in today.