EDUCATION AND TEACHING FORUM

Let’s resume our discussions on education and teaching in earnest

Even as the country starts to recover from the ravages of the disastrous September and October floods, it would be a good idea to resume our exchange of ideas on the major reforms that the Philippine educational system needs. Why don’t we now all look back to the thread of our lively discussions that were rudely interrupted by the disastrous floods? We can pick up from there and further refine our ideas for the consideration of our education officials before the atmosphere gets beclouded again and the landscape gets deluged again—this time by the unpredictable torrents of the 2010 national election campaign. Who knows, we might even be able to convince the more knowledgeable and sensible national candidates to incorporate our ideas into their political platforms. That would be such a delightful payback for our efforts!

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Setting the tone for our post-flood discussions on education

Allow me to attempt to set the tone for our post-flood discussions in this forum on education and teaching by posting an essay I wrote six years ago for my column in The Manila Times.

Teaching Ourselves to Think Logically

I recently came across a very compelling statement of one of the critical tasks of education. In a commencement day address in 2001, Neil Rudenstein, 26th president of Harvard University, described this task as “the development and the calibration of finely tuned judgment, leading finally to action.” I have since been pondering how the education of Filipinos as individuals and as a people measures up to this task. Given that our literacy rate is as high as 92 percent, and given that we are among the few peoples in the world that speak English as second language, we should by rights be able to claim having attained that “finely tuned judgment” by now. Sadly, however, most of the evidence around us points to the opposite.

The signs of our illogic and bad thinking as a people are simply too plentiful to be ignored. Let me just cite a few concrete examples:

(1) We endlessly rant and carp against the poor quality of our governance, but we recklessly and even gleefully elect people who know next to nothing about governance and about organization, management, and public accountability. Worse yet, we have accepted the false notion that popularity is competence, that garrulousness is intelligence and wisdom, that media-created appearance is reality, and that the grossly uninformed opinion of the misguided many should dictate our choices, our decisions, and our actions. It is therefore our fate to be governed in great part not by men and women with vision and a sense of mission, but by actors, entertainers, and third-rate broadcasters who have seen better days, by recycled politicians and military men with fractured mindsets and vested interests to protect, by misfits both from the psychological and moral sense, even by outright recidivists and buffoons. We allow all these to happen, and yet we rage that our nation is in perpetual political drift, that it just goes into a maelstrom of what passes for political activity only to return to where it begins. We actually have nobody but ourselves to blame that our politics has become an essentially ridiculous media show that amounts to nothing.

(2) We rely too little on science and too much on the supernatural to guide us in both our small and big decisions, preferring wishful thinking and blind leaps of faith to the rigor of dispassionate, objective analysis. We accept without question the religious admonition that to get things done, we must pray ceaselessly and leave everything to God, often forgetting that we still need logic, reason, and action to get things done right, and that even God needs us as His earthly instruments to get things done at all in this planet. Thus, very much like the ancient Romans who would not as little as lift a finger before their augurs (soothsayers) had interpreted the day’s omens, we wait for signs in the sky and in our dreams to decide whether to cross our own Rubicons, like making a play on a beleaguered but strangely rising stock in the stock market, hiring an applicant who is every inch fit for the job except for a mole on the left check that our favorite soothsayer says is a jinx, or deciding whether to run a beleaguered but necessary candidacy in a crucial national election. The fanatics among us actually nail themselves to crosses or perform sadomasochistic acts of flagellation, blow up infidels and themselves with bombs believing it would get them to paradise, or open and upturn umbrellas and flail handkerchiefs in unison in parks to goad the heavens to grant them their desires. We may smirk at these irrational acts, but the supposedly more intelligent among us see nothing wrong with irrationally using cellular technology to divine the public pulse by making those endless texting surveys that, if we only gave it some thought, actually amount to nothing but a big con and a big joke. As a people, we have yet to learn to achieve a healthy marriage between reason, our superstitions, and our religious beliefs.

(3) We lament the deterioration of our English and the unhealthy predominance of Taglish in our lives, but we do practically nothing to counteract this. We actually revel at the broadcast media’s incessant and insidious assaults on both English and Filipino. We do not raise a howl but actually cheer when national primetime TV newscasts and talkshows ruthlessly use Taglish and swardspeak to exploit our propensity for mayhem, scandal, and gossip, when they use ludicrously emotive and incendiary language far beyond the demands of the occasion or subject, when they routinely trivialize the important and hype the inconsequential, and when they bloat tawdry relationships of tawdry characters into tawdry melodramas of national proportions. Through our own monumental apathy and garrulousness, the broadcast media have us shameful voyeurs and Pidgin speakers at our own expense.

(4) We complain that overpopulation is choking our cities and our countrysides, yet we allow religious doctrine to override the wisdom of pursuing systematic family planning to arrest our galloping population growth. By the year 2035, if we don’t take strong measures now to significantly curb our 2.07 percent annual population growth, our population of 81 million today would have doubled to 162 million—making us among the most densely populated countries in the world. We prefer to look the other way despite the empirical evidence presented by our experts and scientists that our unabated population growth seriously impedes our economic growth, makes our poverty reduction programs meaningless, and perilously degrades our living standards. Until now, after many years of indecision, we have not yet summoned the political will to meet this problem head on by pursuing an effective national policy to bring our population growth to manageable levels.

(5) We are aghast at the steady deterioration of the quality of life in our cities, yet we also lack the political will to stop the growth of squatter populations on both public and private property as well as on our waterways, and to compel our government to pursue countryside development programs that can effectively check the exodus of the provincial and rural poor to our urban areas. Instead, we enact laws that make it almost next to impossible to get squatters out of public or private property once squatted upon, and turn a blind eye to our politicians who not only coddle squatters but espouse their causes in exchange for votes.

(6) We are prone to excess in both our religious and secular celebrations, dissipating our time, resources, and energy in needlessly overextended rituals and expensive revelries. To us, it is not enough to have a feast day practically every day of the year in honor of a saint or to mark the founding day of a province, town, or barangay. We also obsessively celebrate the longest Christmas season in the world, now easily the longest festivity of its kind in the planet—all of five months every year, from as early as September to as long as mid-January of the following year. We are keenly aware that big business and the mass media are ruthlessly exploiting our Christian piety for profit, yet—like flies attracted to flypaper—we allow ourselves to merrily play along with their premeditated and premature calls for revelry. Even more unfortunate, our religious leaders have largely abdicated their moral responsibility to enjoin the faithful to exercise restraint, and to warn us that our veneration—if we can still call it that—has gone to irrational extremes.

A basic yardstick of logical and rational thinking is that what we do and how we do it must make sense. I don’t think how we are dealing with the six problematic life situations I have discussed meets such a yardstick. We continue to live our lives in ways that defy logic and reason, and which are oftentimes colored by political expediency or by an unhealthy desire for personal gain. These lines of belief, thought, and action inordinately waste our energies and ultimately work against our interest as individuals and as a people. Only if we work harder at thinking logically and rationally could we possibly change this picture. Only then shall we achieve that finely tuned judgment we need so badly to achieve real progress. (September 29-30, 2003)

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Education Reform Discussions on Hiatus Amid Flood Calamity

The special forum on “The State of Education and Teaching in the Philippines” is on hiatus as many regions of the country continue to suffer from the onslaught of Typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng. Many Forum members have been adversely affected, with their communication links to the Forum disrupted either by damage to telecommunication facilities or by power outages in the respective areas. Understandably, educational and teaching reforms will take the backseat during the next several months. Education officials would be too preoccupied with rebuilding or repairing typhoon- or flood-ravaged classrooms and replacing water-logged school facilities and books. It must also be kept in mind that although classes have officially resumed after being suspended for almost two weeks, many classrooms in Metro Manila and various parts of Luzon continue to be occupied by tens of thousands of flood evacuees. And as of this writing, the situation is further being compounded by severe flooding and a spate and deadly landslides in Northern Luzon wrought by Typhoon Pepeng. It definitely would be quite a while before the educational situation in the country could get back to normal.

Under the circumstances, we obviously couldn’t expect immediate official action on any of the educational and teaching reforms already suggested in this Forum, but this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continue to come up with even more and even better ideas on how to improve the Philippine educational system. Let’s keep our discussions on a high gear even as we await a much better time than this for our beleaguered country. It could be sooner or longer than we think, but it will come.

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Below are the postings previously being discussed in the Forum. You are most welcome to respond to any of the postings made so far or to post an entirely new topic of your own. Do share with us your thoughts on how honest-to-goodness education and teaching reforms might be achieved in our country.

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—Tonybau, a medical doctor and former PTA president, paints a bleak scenario of overcrowding, teacher overload and lack of qualified teachers, lack of basic facilities like clean water and libraries, and malnutrition among pupils in his city’s public high school. He then advocates a total overhaul of the educational system that “continues to churn out students, majority of [whom] are products of an environment where teachers are there only to earn their keep.”

—Florlaca, a retired university professor and department head with a master’s in zoology and a doctorate in comparative endocrinology, vigorously proposes that improving research performance is essential to real academic reform. He says that publications that meet internationally accepted criteria are the best indicator of research performance and of competence to do other academic work as well. We still have to hear a response to this from academe or from education officials.

—Arvin Ortiz, a student-writer, points out that while some professors consider Wikipedia as an unreliable source for students’ research papers and theses, some PhDs in the Philippines have actually cited Wikipedia as a source for the textbooks they have written. What gives?

—Penmanila, creative writing institute director and English professor at the University of the Philippines, notes that teachers of English in the Philippines have such a weak command of the English language themselves, and wonders how their English can be improved. He asks: Do seminars and things of that sort really help?

—Madgirl109, who describes herself as “just another struggling Filipino worker in Japan,” gives a first-hand view of the problems and opportunities of Filipinos working in Japan. For them to improve their job and income prospects in Japan, she says, they need to become more proficient not only in English but in Nihongo as well.

—Meikah, who used to be a university instructor but now works as a web education professional, believes that education and teaching in the country have gotten from bad to worse. She says college students lack comprehension skills because their teachers in grade school and high school had made no effort at all to help them understand or teach them how to understand their lessons.

—Maudionisio says that to foist the myth of “one nation, one language,” the Philippine government massively brainwashed elementary pupils in the 1960s to think that the national language was Pilipino, and that the other languages spoken by Filipinos in the other regions were simply dialects. He contends that this brainwashing has not been undone, so some of those pupils—now grown up—still erroneously refer to the various Philippine languages as “dialects.”

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