Enrollment for college/university level of education starts
in just few weeks. High school graduates must have been having this anxiety
already thinking about which course best suits them in the next level of the
never-ending pursuit for wisdom.
Today, the Philippine education is undergoing overhaul. The
implementation of K12 education envisions students, among others, to be skilled
and employable in the Senior High School level thus the name Career Academy.
This program is just one of the many “tuning up” mechanisms of the present
government to ensure that what employers call “job mismatch” will be lessened
or even better, to be eradicated. Thus, after the Senior High School years,
graduates become employable and can start earning for their family or for their
own needs or, hopefully, to finance themselves to the University life.
I personally like this program. Being a college instructor
for 9 years now, I have come to know that some students could really excel in
the “college” life at least the way I understand it to be. For me, University
or Higher Education life must be more of professional trainings: theories,
concept developing, advanced learning, etc. Thus, graduates of this level must
be able to carry out researches, push their disciplines further, offer new ways
of understanding concepts and the likes. Some students, on the other, could
have excelled in technical courses. They have all the skills, the energy and
the patience to go through the details of their interest and reading books and
advance theories in the University may just bore them.
And do not get me wrong: I am not judging which is better in the technical or the professional courses. For me, we must be able to
assess very well the students’ aptitude so that they can better plan their
careers.
Meanwhile, what bothers me is that our government only
envisions students to be workers and only in a very little degree to be
critical thinkers. The recent curricula give more premiums in training the
students to be skilled workers in the soonest possible time. Logically, if the
goal is to make them employable, then they are on the right track. Soon, we
will have a good number of highly skilled workers that will soon dominate both
the national and global market. And that is something worth anticipating for!
However, there is something essentially lacking in this
planning for our future. We cannot just produce workers without making them
thinking workers. Surely, they are intelligent too in their own fields, but
equipping them with the necessary critical eye that makes them aware of their
dignity as human and that of others is an overly important matter for our
education system.
In the current design of the K12 education, Edukasyon sa
Pagpapakatao occupies a central theme. The basic education years are truly the
crucial years in building and shaping one’s ethos or character. However,
Philosophy as a discipline in itself still hardly echoes in the whole design;
it only has a 3-unit weight in the Senior High School years; and another 3-unit
weight in the Higher Education under the title Ethics.
Are the six units enough? If I ask some college students, I
would probably have the usual answer, “yes” or even “more than enough.”
Usually, they will ask me about the direct relevance of this course to their
“major subject” and they would opt to focus more of their time on the latter.
Given this mentality, Philosophy subjects are taken as that which just delay
their professional growth.
More so, a student who takes AB Philosophy is confronted
with at least two reactions whenever they say what in the world are they doing. First, people ask them, “what will you get from that? What jobs await
you?” Surely, these are real questions. One cannot just master Plato or Aquinas
or Marx without thinking what food to eat and feed their family when they get home. Second, “What is that?” This surely is more painful
to our ears. Given the Filipino context that to be a “pilosopo” is to be the
street-wise person who indulges in the plaza debates, to take philosophy is
really weird. “You don’t have to be in the University to be a philosopher; just
argue and that’s it.” Of course, with these negative comments they receive,
Philosophy majors are disheartened and would always ask whether they are really
doing a good path in planning their future. So, why Philosophy therefore?
More than anything, our country needs critical thinkers who
are immersed in the ideals of humanity, justice and truth. Big words, for sure,
and everyone can have a say on it. But as I have already said, we cannot just
have workers; we need thinking workers. I am not saying that Philosophy has the
monopoly of thinking; I am saying Philosophy prepares the way. Philosophy is
that which still reminds us of our inviolable humanity; that we are more than
the machines that govern our everyday factory life. Philosophy is still the
fire that burns our minds so that the ideals of a just society will be the bar
that we have to meet. Philosophy is still the waters that make us look for
truth and even to thirst more for it.
The present political quagmire that has been besetting us
only proves all the more that we need Philosophy as a central thrust of our
education reforms. The collapse of moral ascendancy of our leaders, the
whirlwind of corruptions scandals that we faced, and weaker social systems that are supposed to protect us,
these all point us towards something which the technicalities might not give
us: spiritual discernment. By spiritual discernment, I do not mean to be
religious about it; I mean that today is the most proper time for us to think
about what comprises us an individual and as a society and what do we aspire for
from there. This discernment goes beyond our tally sheets, computer programs,
legal norms, and the likes. This is the role of Philosophy in our lives.
The problem of our government is that it only reduces
poverty as an economic term. Poverty includes moral, spiritual, intellectual
and existential entropy. We might have a wave of skilled workers in the near
future, but without teaching them the ideals that Philosophy may give, still
our leaders will continue corrupting us. If this government truly aspires for
social emancipation, then let it promote Philosophy.
No comments:
Post a Comment