Education for democracy

SOME 500,000 Filipinos (most of them women, incidentally), graduated from college between March and April this year. They will compete for the limited number of jobs available in a stagnant economy with the  estimated half a million other college graduates from past years who’re still unemployed, says IBON Databank and Research Center Executive Director Sonny Africa.

As hundreds of thousands of Filipinos graduate in the third and fourth months of the year at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels, the same issues that have bedeviled Philippine education for decades are still unresolved. The most immediate is whether these graduates will find employment. But apart from the question of whether they will find the job they expect their education to have qualified them for, or just to find any job, period, only those totally out of touch with Philippine reality will contest the poor state of Philippine education.

Numeracy and literacy levels are low among primary and high school students, many of whom are unprepared for college work, of which among the indicators  were the low scores in the now abolished National College Entrance Examinations. (The K+12 program has been put in place, but its impact is still too early to call.)

But at the tertiary level, the results of the board examinations in many disciplines have also been disappointing, with high rates of failure among the graduates of many schools that for some reason continue to be licensed and allowed to operate.

Those of a perverse turn of mind might well argue that Filipinos are actually getting dumber, thanks to Philippine education. Much of the criticism of Philippine education has been on the mismatch between what Filipinos are trained for and what the economy needs, for which the high levels of unemployment among college graduates are blamed. But the reality is that quality remains a major issue at all levels, and will still have to be addressed even if, somehow, the number and kinds of courses Filipinos take in college are matched with what the economy needs. The system, for one, has too many bad teachers and poor school facilities like substandard or even non-existent laboratories and libraries (in which, thanks to the text book scam, some of the available books are so full of errors they actually detract from the sum of human knowledge, and students would do better not to read them).

The Philippines allocates one of the lowest budgets for education among the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries, a fact that’s certainly among the reasons for the persistent quality issues that plague the educational system as far as public education is concerned. But equally to blame is the vast number of  profit-oriented schools in which an “academic proletariat” of college instructors toils for a pittance despite the annual increases in tuition and other fees (this year some 120 colleges have been allowed to boost their fees come June), and who have little time and energy to update themselves in their disciplines, much less do research to advance knowledge and enhance teaching.

It’s not only the mean possibilities of employment bad training affects.  Congressional education committees don’t even mention it, but bad education doesn’t only make it difficult for the “masscom” graduate, for example, to land that job as a reporter in one of the more respected broadsheets, and to instead  end up operating a copying machine in a shop specializing on fake diplomas on Manila’s Claro M. Recto avenue. It also dumbs down a populace that in the rumored democracy known as the Philippines is supposed to make the decisions on public issues sovereign decision-making requires.

But just like dumb media and a dumb press, a dumb population may suit the bureaucrats and politicians fine. It makes it less difficult to make bad policies seem good, among other reasons because it perpetuates hoary, backward, and even colonial concepts of governance and foreign relations, as well as such approaches to social issues as the idea that nothing can be done about poverty and the skewed distribution of wealth because that’s just the way it is—it’s God’s or some other supernumerary’s will, just like corruption in officialdom.

Which leads us to the basic question of whether, indeed, there’s the political will in the first place to truly reform Philippine education. At about this time, some politico or the other is bound to make the usual noises about “making Filipinos globally competitive,” meaning enabling those armed with a degree in education to work as nannies in Singapore or Hongkong. Educational reform, however, should  not be about developing that kind of competitiveness, but about truly arming Filipinos with the skills and knowledge the development  of their country needs, and which will also help them realize their potentials as human beings even as the knowledge they have acquired provides them some understanding of the way their society works  in addition to an overview of what the present world is like, how it has come to be, and how it may be changed.

General education—in the arts and humanities as well as the social sciences for those specializing in the professions and the sciences, and in the sciences for those specializing in the arts—can help provide the understanding of the basics of scientific discipline and the nature of society while educating men and women in the varieties of human motives and experience. But the bad news is that while CHED (Commission on Higher Education) still mandates the arts and the humanities as well as the sciences as part of its various curricula, the need for general education has been under challenge in the context of the mantra to “make Filipinos globally competitive”. While the GE part of tertiary curricula is still there, it is there without the support and with only the minimum tolerance of most schools.

Professors of engineering and similar disciplines question why engineering students have to take art studies, history and literature courses, because, after all  “they don’t need them.” And yet human beings aren’t solely engineers or doctors or lawyers, they’re also citizens, parents, lovers, husbands, wives, neighbors who need to understand themselves, each other, and the world. Their understanding of that world also has a bearing on how well or how badly they do their jobs as engineers or lawyers or doctors. Certainly a lawyer who’s aware of the vast complexity of human motives, knowledge the arts can provide, would merit one’s trust better because he or she can do a better job of defending human rights, for example, than one whose understanding of human beings is so limited he has absolutely no idea about why one of his late clients left her entire estate to her cats.

But one suspects that an ignorant population, including professionals who fit the category of Jose Ortega y Gasset’s “learned ignoramus” (meaning one who knows only his discipline and nothing about anything else, including why his country’s poor), are the best assets of a corrupt political class focused on staying in power, despite the lessons of history, which in the Philippines says  the time’s ripe—some would say overripe—for this class to give way to real democratic governance of, by, and for the people.

Philippine education needs a clear policy commitment to the making of a competent and knowledgeable corps of people who will find the jobs they need to survive, and even create those jobs by devoting their skills to their country’s authentic development. But they’ll also have to be armed with enough understanding of history and of their society, as well as the humanization the arts have embedded in their minds and hearts, to have some vision of what they want themselves and Philippine society to be—and to devote their energies, talents, and skills (or at least a reasonable percentage of it) to the making of that alternative future.

If  even the personal is political, education is even more about learning how power is used, who uses it, and for what purpose. Awareness and understanding of power,  and how it can change things for the better,  is crucial to the education of a citizenry in a democracy—which means that, for lack of the kind of education that will enable free men and women to actively change society, what obtains in the Philippines is not a democracy,  but something else.