Education and Development: A Cultural Perspective* In 1958, British sociologist by the name Michael Young wrote a satirical essay entitled, “The rise of the Meritocracy – 1870 – 2033”. The central thesis of the essay was the British society was transformed from one stratified into the wealthy, noble and highly placed in the government into one based on intelligences and effort. The only trouble was that the society that emerged was equally stratified into the very intelligent, the less so, and the least intelligent. The instrument that was used was very scientific; no less than the I.Q. test or the psychologists which was so sharply refined that it could predict the intelligence of a baby while it was still in its mother’s womb. In the new meritocracy, I.Q. tests were administered periodically and depending on the result, a person could be retained, promoted or demoted. Inevitably the new system found itself divided into the leaders who thought of and development policy, and those who implemented it in the middle and lower levels. The educational system also reflected these divisions, the best schools being exclusive enclaves for the high I.Q.’s. As the result of the scientific precision of the test , the most intelligent of the working class found themselves in the leadership stratum and the stupid among the old elite were relegated to mechanical or manual jobs. But since everything was automated by that time a large residue of low I.Q.’s found themselves unemployed. The solution to this serious problem was to create a new class of domestic servants for the high I.Q.’s whose time and brains were too precious for domestic tasks. So British society went full circle from wealthy nobility who were attended by domestic servants, the commoners, and working class, to machine operators, middle level workers and an intellectual aristocracy who also had to be attended by domestic servants out of sheer necessity. The basic irony is the assumption that those who do well in academic activities as suggested by I.Q. tests are ipso facto the best leaders in any society. This is Plato all over again. Is it possible to have a really classless society? It is possible to have a society without those who lead and those who follow? A more relevant question is: is it possible for a society to achieve development without being divided into the few rich and the numerous poor or the few rich, a comfortable majority and no poor? Many theories of development have been advanced, none of which has been adequately verified. And none of them is explicit on the issue of whether from the process of development they advocate an unstratified society or whether a less rigidly stratified society is likely to emerge. One of the problems in studying the relationships between development and education is the lack of clarity in terminology. For the economist, development is reflected in a rising GNP and an ample dollar reserve; for the 2 doctor it is indicated by reduced incidence of illness; for the architect it is in better housing for all the people, for the social worker, in less people on relief. Now the educator is in a most ambiguous position. Would having more people in school truly indicate development? The pious answer would be in the affirmative. I suggest that we suspend judgment until we have examined what development and education mean. If we are to define development clearly, I suggest that we avoid the esoteric language of the economists and other social scientists. If a country claims that it is pushing development the questions we should raise are: What has happened to poverty or to the gap between the rich and the poor? To unemployment? To health services? To housing? To schooling? If the numerous poor have decent jobs, better food, enjoy improved health, and are able to provide their children with enough basic literacy and social skills as well as functional skills to make them self-dependent, then there has been development, regardless of the GNP. The GNP is convenient to use as an indicator, but used singly it cannot reflect fully and accurately the state of development of any society. After all, the locus of development is the individual. The richest nations in the world have pockets of poverty amidst plenty, pockets inhabited by people in rebellion against their state. Developing societies like the Philippines, on the other hand, are characterized by minuscule pockets of wealth amidst widespread, grinding poverty. What about education? One of our mistakes has been in equating education with that which occurs, however inadequately, in schools. Actually education begins at birth and proceeds throughout life, as the individual learns the norms and practices of his culture. This process is what anthropologists call enculturation. By focusing on the development of skill in social interaction, the sociologists label the same process as socialization. Although most socialization research emphasizes the early childhood years, the fact is that we unde4rgo socialization anew each time we join a new group or organization. We have to learn not only our own roles, but also the other roles and statuses that make up the new entity. The stress on early childhood is partly a result of the diaper theory of personality development, which postulates that parent-child, specially motherchild relationships in the early years of life, are significant in shaping the behavioral system of the individual. Be that as it may it is important that we distinguish between education and schooling or, if you wish, formal education, which is a deliberate, organized process of teaching individuals in a specified spatial and temporal order though activities labeled as curricular. Thus it is logical for the anthropologists to regard schooling as a process of cultural transmission. By no means does this denote that what is transmitted is necessarily static, obsolete or irrelevant, for culture which is actually an intellectual construct, is different from a specific culture borne by people who are 3 living beings and subject to change. The most primitive of cultures does change, albeit more slowly, than a highly industrialized technological society. Another dimension of the anthropological perspective is the assumption that schools have a culture of their own, that there are regularities in the behavior of its constituents which reflect certain values. The analogy is carried further by the observation that, as in the life cycle, schooling has rites of passage such as admission, entrance examinations, initiation into fraternities, proceeding from the freshman to the senior year and graduation, rites of intensification such as athletic pep rallies, field day and Christmas celebrations, class reunions, etc. The classroom is itself a little society, with its own norms for governing behavior. Some acts, like cheating, talking and excessive moving around are sanctioned, whereas docility, compliance with teacher assignments are rewarded. There are two ways of regarding a school: as a formal organization in the manner of the sociologist and management specialist, or as a social institution with a cultural dimension in the manner of the anthropologist. It was the latter I attempted in a case study of a Philippine barrio school and the surrounding community. From being a somewhat ivory-towerish armchair professor I became a participant-observer to find out what school and community were really like. To use a popular phrase, I went where the action really was to be able to tell it “like it is”. To say that I was not too happy about my findings is to understate the case. Having been a teacher for the greater part of my life, it was a shattering experience to see some of my most cherished beliefs about education and pedagogy refuted by reality. What did the elementary school mean to the people most directly involved with it? Nothing more than a limited instrument of socio-economic advancement, competing on uneven terms with stronger economic forces in the local culture. If a child’s services were needed in the home because his parents were working in the fields, he dropped out of school without much ado. Survival was simply more important than schooling. This economic definition reinforced the conception of the school as primarily a credentialing institution for the next higher level of formal education. Its certificate was essential, but gave little prestige. If the child was unable to complete the elementary course, at least he had a minimum of schooling, which was less shameful than having none at all. Despite the high rate of pupil dropouts, children who reverted to illiteracy did not lose the ability to count and compute, because even the simple village economy required these skills. On the other hand, the paucity of reading materials in barrio homes and the increasing reliance on the transistor radio for news and entertainment reinforced this reversion to illiteracy. 4 The rhetoric of official objectives notwithstanding, traditional values and basic literacy skills persisted as the institutionalized purposes of the school. Whenever there was an attempt to depart from them, there was no dearth of criticism and/or resistance. Thus most parents saw little value in gardening, selling and other domestic chores required of the pupils. Nor was there much enthusiasm engendered for Boy and Girl Scouts activities or for Field Day. Again, teachers subverted the bureaucracy’s community improvement program by engaging in perfunctory surveys. Detailed action programs for changing a particular aspect of community life were eschewed for various reasons. The teachers claimed they were overburdened with work, an excuse not without basis. Moreover, such projects did not have lasting effects, as the ill-fated community school movement had shown. But community education through classrooms instruction continued as a nominal part of the curriculum. In such subjects as health, it was hoped that the teachers’ work with pupils would somehow be communicated to, and adopted by parents. This was the approach supposed to be used to change villagers’ attitudes, which was considered essential to permanent community improvement. There was no evidence that children were practicing ideas taught in the class at home, let alone that parents were adopting them too. Moreover, children as models and teachers of parents ran counter to the culturally defined notion of the old and the adult as exemplars. The concept of the community school had never really taken root in the barrio. The efforts of the school in this direction tended to focus on peripheral matters. Lamps on gate posts, flower gardens, the school lagoon-these projects were pursued with an evanescent zeal that deflected attention from urgent needs such as water supply. The school taught survival behaviors rather than innovative ideas. Traditional values and basic literacy skills facilitated survival within the local culture, but they did not induce openness to change, whatever this might be. Graduation from the barrio school was merely a first and remote way-station toward entry into the world of employment and economic security. For teacher and school heads, school was a place for teaching pupils the three R’s and the basic values of the community. This work they acknowledged as monotonous, but necessary. Despite its nominal commitment to community education, the bureaucracy also concurred with this view of the importance of the three R’s, for at the end of the school year the district supervisor came to test first grade pupils on reading skills. In any case, the three R’s and local values must be taught though rote, hortatory lectures, drill and physical punishment, if need be. Both parents and teachers agreed on the efficacy of physical punishment as a disciplinary 5 measure, and as a way of developing those behavioral patterns considered desirable in the culture. As for the skill-academic subjects, neither parents nor teachers questioned the mechanistic methods employed. On the contrary, the new math was objectionable because it was such a recondite and circuituous way of attaining results that had historically been achieved through a shorter, if less logical, method. After all, the important thing was for pupils to learn the basic arithmetical skills so that they could protect themselves in actual situation where these skills were needed. But the logic of inquiry and alternative approaches underlying the new math were for those who would continue to high school, and this was not most unlikely for many barrio pupils. It was not only time-consuming; it also tended to be taught as mechanistically as the old arithmetic. Almost instinctively teachers objected to extending tedium fro the same results. The new math illustrates the ironic of curricular innovations prescribed from above. It was supposed to rescue instruction from tedium and indifference – to stimulate intellectual curiosity and improve the quality of class activity. Yes it ended up by being learned through routinized formula, no less deadening than the old arithmetic. It seems probable that the continuing treatment of teachers as ant-like workers carrying out curricular directives with docility and indifference was related in some way to the failure of curricular change. The implicit fate of parents and teachers in traditional methods was validated by the fact that most children did learn to read, write and compute in rudimentary fashion as long as they stayed in school up to the fourth grade. Most of them turned out to be obedient, respectful of, and submissive to, age-authority. If these were largely consequences of having live models in the persons of teachers and other adults rather than of formal instruction, no one would have been distressed by the thought. Again, there was parental and teacher consensus on the proliferation of subjects in the curriculum, but little agreement on which ones ought to be discarded. Most parents thought that pedagogical efforts should concentrate on the three R’s and the development of proper conduct, but a few believed that the school should be more “realistic” in its subject matter. Practical knowledge of farming, horticulture, fishing, mechanics, industrial arts, electricity, household work and community life should be taught because they would be useful to villagers. Such opinions comprised a minority, however significant. In general, villagers saw the community and the school as separate entities, each with its particular functions. Nowhere was this separateness more clearly illustrated than in the conflicts that arose in situations where cash contributions were involved. Villagers complained in vain about the contributions and fees levied on them, and sought to have the teachers share, or even assume, such expenses. Teachers, however, have their own involuntary contributions extracted from them by the 6 bureaucracy. Both groups felt they had legitimate grievances vis-à-vis compulsory monetary contributions. In both cases the resistance was based on the same principle: expenses for certain institutional needs should be financed from sources other than one’s personal funds, even though one might conceivably profit remotely or abstractly from such expenditures, viz., those for the entertainments of important guests to keep us the image of collective hospitality. In such associations as the PTA, parents and teachers joined efforts to raise donations from external sources through the exploitation of political connections and a few, rare philanthropically inclined persons. Pride in concrete, visible, physical improvements was sustained by vigorous campaigns for donations from outside. Self-sustenance, at least as far as money for local projects was concerned, was rejected. This behavior pattern of the PTA was replicated in that of village associations such as social and religious clubs and even in the barrio council. The modus operandi was essentially the same. A proposed project, generally something observable and concrete, such as stage or a basketball court was approved and a campaign to finance it from external sources was launched. If the campaign was successful, there was a great deal of self-congratulation and usually a concluding ritual, such as the inauguration of the new barrio hall by an important official. It should be noted that parent-teacher conflicts over school contributions and other matters, viz., those for graduation ceremonies never exploded open confrontations. They took the form of gossip, innuendo and oblique remarks, the meaning of which was lost on nobody. To return to the curriculum, while they agreed on the priority of basic skills and proper behavior, teachers and school heads were largely undecided on the subjects which were unessential. All conceded that Good Manners and Right Conduct or Character Education and the three R’s were of supreme importance, but it was difficult to ascertain whether Work Education, Art, Music, Health or Physical Education could be eliminated from the curriculum without depriving pupils of some basic knowledge or skill. Although relatively new, Science was already a sacrosanct subject, if the official messages from the bureaucracy and the national leadership were to be believed. Under no circumstances combined with Health, but this was merely to prevent the elimination of the latter. The combination of two subjects, such as Art and music, was a favorite solution to the nagging problem of curriculum overflow. Part of this overflow was caused by laws passed under the pressure of vested interests. By reducing the time allocation of subjects, combining evaded the issue of priorities and pacified ardent proponents of particular courses. 7 Language, which included reading, was indispensable, but it comprised an area of special difficulty because pupils had to learn formal Pilipino and English. Since the barrio was a Tagalog area, pupils presumably had less difficulty with Pilipino. Teacher and school heads claimed that pupils learned content more easily when they were taught in “Tagalog or Pilipino”. In fact, pupils were encouraged to read tagalong comics to accelerate the development of reading skills. While these materials were not exactly ideal, they served the purpose in a situation where most households had neither books, magazines nor newspaper, and where not even the school had a library. One facet of the urban-centered surge of nationalism was the demand to shift from English to Pilipino as the medium of teaching at all levels. Nationalism was a favorite posture and slogan of the bureaucracy. It was implicit in the community school idea, in the use of a vernacular to teach first and second graders, in the increasing use of Pilipino in public speeches and messages, in the number of subjects based on Philippine history and community life. This stance was also a defense against the charge of neo-colonialism. The response of the teachers, school heads and parent-informants to this demand was equivocal. On the one hand, most conceded the inevitability and appropriateness of using Pilipino as the language of instruction, especially in the elementary schools. At the same time, they specified that teaching materials be adequate before the change was made. For this, a program of translation over a considerable period of time was envisioned. Unless, this was done, they anticipated difficulties for everyone concerned, particularly the teachers. Not for them the impulsive experimentation of radical-minded university students and professors: there must be a gradual well-prepared program. On the other hand, none among the key informants would willingly give up English. In fact, those parents who had the least command of it were the most insistent on its retention. It must remain part of the curriculum, because of its international and prestige value, and its association with advanced economics. Were not applicants to such lowly positions as janitor required to fill up forms in English? There was no question about its economic value in general terms. Indubitably, some ability to speak and write this language was so requisite to employment. If this was part of the neo-colonialism so devoutly deplored by the urban nationalists, it was regrettable. Again, survival was more important than nationalism. The uncertainly of responses vis-à-vis the pruning of the curriculum to reasonable and manageable level suggested that the curriculum per se was not a major concern of teachers or school heads, despite verbal acknowledgement of its importance. The curriculum was the business of the bureaucracy: teachers and school heads were merely implementing workers and officers. The unilateral transmission of curricular directives from higher officers to the schools through 8 memoranda and official meetings was one proof of this. Since curricular policy and program were high-level decisions, perfunctory compliance with directives was the complementary teacher-response. If school activities were any gauge, then fund-raising, the maintenance and improvement of physical plant and grounds, the preparation of reports and other ritual activities were a major concern of teachers and school heads. There being no regular sources of money for physical improvements and miscellaneous expenses in the school, for the entertainment of visitors, official and otherwise, it devolved on the staff to develop ways of raising money within the framework of bureau regulation. This way accomplished ingeniously, by skirting thinly the edge of formal laws and rules, with the tacit consent of school heads and administrators, and possibly of the bureaucracy itself. Corollary to this emphasis on physical improvement was the great care exercised to protect school property. Everything was locked up during classes; and every item was carefully inventoried at the end of the school year. Teachers were spared from giving some personal contributions by the use of sales proceeds to feed, entertain and give gifts to, official visitors, but there was no total escape from them. The district office passed tickets for fund drives it received from higher quarters to the teachers, who either shared the cost among themselves, or, in some instances, persuaded pupils to contribute part of the cost. What made such contributions so distasteful was that there were no concrete returns from them: they were collected as part of public charity campaigns, whose benefits were seldom felt in the school barrio. For the mimeographing and duplication of test papers, the rental of the amplifier and related equipment during Field Day, graduation band other school celebrations, the repair of a classroom damaged by a typhoon, pupils and/or their parents could always be persuaded or coerced into contributing small sums, albeit with much grumbling. Final grades and graduation certificates could be withheld, the small number of free textbooks would not be distributed, if these requests were ejected. However, there seemed to be no relentless efforts exerted to collect in the vent that genuine inability top pay was pleaded. This unstated emphasis on money-raising within the system served as a model for the teachers, reinforcing a fundamentally economic view of life learned in the village culture. As already mentioned, the bulk of expenses was for the maintenance and improvement of physical plant and grounds, for this was the first thing noted on official visits. Beauty, cleanliness, neatness of grounds and buildings were a credit to the school administration, as were pupil and teacher performance in official and readily graded tests, participation of the staff in in-service seminars and training programs, in fund-raising projects such as beauty contests, 9 involvement of the school in extra-curricular activities such as Boy and Girl Scout ventures by reports on attendance. Therefore reports on almost every aspect of the school, from enrollment to the rating performance of teachers, occupied a great deal of the time and energies of the staff. Not the least of these reports were those on sales and collections. Some of these were required on short notice, others periodically, and many mere at the end of the school year. In any event when reports were due, all other activity was subordinated to their preparations in accordance with formats prescribed by higher offices. Documents reporting adequate enrollment, substantial collections, good attendance at extra-curricular activities and inservice training projects, good or acceptable grades in district, division or national tests, or even those merely proposing action or academic programs were symbols of accomplishments and highly valued. Statistics on community surveys were proudly displayed on a bulletin board as evidence of the school’s community improvement program. Reports in neatly arrange files constituted proof that something was being done, that projects and activities assigned by higher echelons in the bureaucracy were nor being neglected. In this manner the bureaucracy itself was amply equipped with statistical information which it could use to prove its worth to national goals and plans, and to defend itself from its critics. Conceivably, documents and reports sometimes became substitute for achievement, instead of merely symbolizing it. After all, statistics, which most reports contained, were a part of the scientific or empirical, no-nonsense approach publicly favored by government offices. They carried the approval of scholars, academicians and national leaders. Statistics as a form of evidence were therefore prestigious in a national government that was increasingly oriented, at least verbally, to rational modes of operation. The barrio council also showed this partiality for reports. Towards the end of his term, the barrio captain took all the records of minutes of meetings so that they could be polished into proper shape and left as a respectable legacy to succeeding councils. Another area of importance in the school was that of ritual activities, which were related to fund-raising and the preparation of reports. Very often accounts of them constituted the content of reports. They were financed largely from money raised by the staff. Visit of school officials, teachers’ district meetings, school staff meetings, school opening exercises, graduation ceremonies, demonstration lessons, Field Day celebrations, were among the regular activities in which virtually the entire staff was involved. School staff meetings were held to prepare for these occasions with various tasks being assigned to the teachers by the school head. As in the district meetings. these were primarily the occasions for the transmission of instructions of directives. Great care went into the planning of these activities, the staff taking minute details into account. Even the 10 menu for the occasion was sometimes an item on the agenda, although usually this was left to the discretion of the Home Economics Teacher. Such activities tended to strengthen the sense of the school as part of t e larger education system. They gave the staff and perhaps the pupils a feeling of importance. At the same time, they were also under scrutiny on such occasions, so that the feeling of being evaluated by officials who were present was palpable. It was important that such activities be carried out smoothly and successfully, if the school, meaning primarily the staff, was to maintain a respectable standing among the schools in the district, the district office being its closest link to the bureaucracy and its immediate supervisory agency. As for conceptions of good leadership, is was clear that teachers preferred the quietly authoritarian approach and forcefulness of the first principal to the timid, if warm, style of her successor. Decisiveness without the appearance of being aggressive, a soft, polite approach without loss of authority were the qualities of the approved style of leadership. The teachers wanted clear-cut directives given to them in a non-dictatorial manner. That the school administrator generally succeeded in doing this suggested that this might be a culturally defined style of leadership. Nor were the teacher alone in this choice. Villagers, confronted with the official leadership of the barrio captain and the informal one of a wealthy residents’ forceful, it somewhat dictatorial, ways, often chose the latter. Male leaders were allowed more latitude vis-à-vis being dictatorial. An important factor in effective leadership, whether in the school or community, was that of the ability to get things done, to meet requests and/or demands, either through political shrewdness, adeptness at interpersonal relations, or professional ability or all of these. Thus the successful leadership of a new school administrator or barrio official was not confirmed until it had been tested in this particular area. Did she or he have entry to the power structure and the resources for obtaining concessions and/ or favors from it? The question of whether such concessions or favors were a matter of right or law was irrelevant; effectiveness in getting them was the crux of leadership. IT was right (underscoring mine) to reciprocate what was conceived to be a favor received or a debt incurred. Was this success in getting things done likely to extend over an appreciable period of time or was it essentially ephemeral? What was the quid pro quo for obtaining favors? What form of service, favors or concessions would be required implicitly of the leader and/or his followers? If funds had been released for the construction of a school building or execution of some projects, the school leader might commit his vote in an election as well as those of his subordinates whom he could persuade or pressure. IN addition to the acknowledged purposes of the school, pupils also learned that it must be financed by activities such as selling bread and candy, and holding beauty contests and benefit dances, if it was to survive as an 11 institution. The notion of direct participation in fund-raising as an essential part of school activity was instilled at an early stage of schooling. If the activities of the school seemed to be focused less on instruction than on matters pertaining to money-raising, physical improvements and ritual activities, it was because the staff, the pupils and even the parents were responding to a system that emphasized and rewarded such activities. This system was the bureaucracy of which the school was an extension of the grass roots level. There was a logic in the thematic selectiveness of school activity: it was essential to the continuance of the bureaucracy. No less than the individual school, money-raising for physical improvements, report and other paper work, and other ritual activities gave the larger bureaucracy a reason for existing and a justification for continuing its essentially self-maintaining functions. This bureaucratic socialization of staff, and to a lesser degree, of pupils and parents, proceeded apace once the individual was coopted into these activities. That the schools continued to be perceived by some sectors as institutional agencies for social change and community improvement, and more recently, as organizations for manpower development was as much due to the glib repetition of this aphorism over a long period of time as to blindness in school people deriving from close identification with a system. The important thing was that the school was successful in teaching survival behaviors rather than innovative ideas. It is also proposed that even as the school taught survival behaviors to pupils, it insured its own survival as an institution and, to some degree, that of higher bureaucracy beyond it. It is therefore important to note that the staff of the school in particular were responding to the demands imposed on them by a bureaucratic system which was not necessarily opposed to the culture of the community. While there were variations in the behavior of teachers and school heads, there was sufficient similarity to justify the assumption that patterns of responding to these demands had been developed. Equally important is that it was in the school that two goals that do not tally with that the people of a community want may be accepted verbally and implemented in a perfunctory fashion, as in the experience of the community school. On the other hand, what a community wants is not necessarily what it needs from the point of view of national planners. At this point it is important to intrude a dissenting note from the popular notion that the Filipino resists change specially that which involves manual work because he is by nature indolent, devoid of achievement orientation, etc. It would be closer to the truth to say that our people eschew vocational training and manual work because they have not found them adequately rewarding. Who 12 wants to do back-breaking work in fields and factories when a clerical white-collar job pays better and more regularly? But if such training and such work culminates in ample rewards, we would probably witness the evolution of a frenetically achieving society with all its concomitant ills. These findings suggest some of the problems in regionalizing or localizing educational response. There must be an effort to ascertain the prospective clientele’s needs about the urgency of which they may need to be convinced before starting innovative programs. Unilateral planning runs the risk of not being effectively implemented. Research on the cultural adaptability of innovations should logically precede action. But we are in a hurry to develop, and it is this haste which accounts, in the long run, for unsatisfactory results. What should be the objectives of elementary and secondary education? The rhetorical answers are found in our legal documents and bureaucratic directives. The real answers can be ascertained only at the classroom and in what happens to students after they have leave school. Should we concentrate on fundamental social literacy and employable skills? Should we teach values separately, as in character education? Whose values shall we teach? If we cannot be sure that they are the right values, why teach them at all? Who should go to college? The NCEE is a further refinement of the sorting and classificatory function of the schools, separating those who are likely to do well in college and those who are not. Please note that I don not refer to intelligence, because I.Q. test are misleading, atomistic instruments that cannot indicate, let alone measure certain types of intelligence and other human capabilities. Should higher education emphasize preparation for professional practice so that graduates do not join our growing pool of educated unemployed? What of general or liberal education? Because the technological and scientific professions are in demand at present, practitioners of the liberal arts feel beleaguered, uncertain and unimportant in a world of rapid change. Yet never before has the purpose of liberal or general education been as valid, as necessary and as urgent than at the present time. Liberal or general education is necessary for all members of a society intent on striking a balance between specialization as an instrument of development and the intelligent participation of its citizens in social and political decisions. It is designed to enable the individual to understand the forces and conflicts of the contemporary world, the ideas underlying such forces, the ideological and economic assumptions of various types of social and political organization. For such understanding, it is necessary to have a sense of the past history, an ability to criticize and judge (philosophy, logic and mathematics) and a 13 comprehension of human relationships, values and problems which endure through time in a context of accelerated change (metaphysics, axiology, literature and the arts). The aim of liberal education is to free the mind from conventional and narrow preconceptions so that an issue can be examined from every conceivable perspective in order to render a judgment based on acceptable evidence. In this sense the liberal arts are eminently practical, for they prevent us from making rash judgments and decisions. This is not the case in other disciplines and professions where knowledge expands at a geometric rate and becomes obsolescent almost as rapidly. A university can only stimulate or begin liberal education for it should be a lifetime pursuit. Therefore we should reinterpret its purpose in contemporary terms: to teach students how to learn so that they can continue to educate themselves as adults in a rapidly changing world. This requires instructional skill of the highest order; teaching that is challenging, dialect, imaginative. It is suggested that liberal arts teachers take on this task of enduring value and leave the other disciplines to empirical research. May I remind you that all the great theories have been derived from hypothetico deductive reasoning, rather than applied research, viz., relativity. With the increasing impersonalism of a technological managementoriented society, we must see to it that our students remain human. For merely to survive as a species is not enough. Even surviving in comfort is not enough. What is important is to survive as the human species. 14 The Role of Education in Social Transformation Concepts, Issues and Prospects By Josefina Cortes, Ph.D. This paper discuss education as all kinds of learning covering knowledge, attitudes and skills acquired from school and non-school sources leading to desirable changes in the learner’s cognitive, affective and manipulative behavior. There are certain kinds of learning that can be learned more expeditiously and economically outside schools. In other words, schools are just one of society’s educative agents. I(n fact, schools are social inventions which came much later than the other agents of education in society, such as the family, church and guild. The story of education began with “a woman instructing a daughter or son walking talking and working together. In the Stone Age, there were no elementary classes in flint chipping; a boy learned to chip flints by watching adults. When there was a little lore or skill to transmit, and the life of society was lived out before the child’s eyes, education was blended with other activities” (Calrk, 1916:22). However, as societies grew, education became more complex, more dependent on highly abstract, scientific and technical knowledge, and as a society’s function became more differentiated and highly specialized, the need for more normal and systematic teaching-learning activities gave to the creation of schools or a formal educational system. Schooling or formal education ensures that learning deemed desirable and useful to both the individual and society is not left to chance. In addition to the school system, every society has other organized learning systems intended for specific clienteles and for very specific learning objectives. Learning obtained from these non-school organized learning activities is referred to as nonformal education. Learning gained from one’s-day-to-day transactions with others and the environment is informal education. The most important sources of informal education are such social institutions as the family, the church, the mass media, and the workplace. All education whether formal, non0formal and informal involves learning. However, it is not education when learning is not consistent with the shared values, aspirations and needs of people in a society. Filipinos tend to equate education with schooling and this acquisition of knowledge, attitudes and skills necessary for a person to succeed in life. Although they agree that education can be obtained inside school and elsewhere, schools are seen as the primary source of education. Filipinos also believe that the higher a person goes up the formal education ladder, the more knowledge he/she acquire and expectedly, the more wealth he or she produces. This view is captured in a popular Tagalog proverb which says, “Ang sa taong karunungan ay kayamanang di mananakaw”. It is therefore no wonder that the supreme ambition of every Filipino family is to have every child earn a college 15 diploma regardless of the sacrifice it might require of the family (Cortes, 1981). These views about education are reflected in the Constitutions adopted by the Filipino people. In these Constitutions the importance of education to the development of the individual and nation-building is explicitly recognized. The 1935, 1973 and 1987 Constitutions are quite definite about the ideas and values that education must promote and sustain. Common to the Preamble of each of these Constitutions is a vision of a society that aspires for the values of independence, justice, democracy, belief in God, conservation and development of the patrimony of the nation. The 1973 and 1987 Constitutions expanded these values to include peace, equality, truth, and love with the view of attaining a just and humane society”. All three Constitutions require that educational institutions shall aim to teach the duties of citizenship, to develop moral character, personal discipline, and vocational efficiency. The 1973 Constitution mandates that schools shall inculcate love to country, while the 1987 Constitution stipulates that schools must inculcate patriotism and nationalism, foster love of country, respect for human rights, appreciation of the role of national heroes in the development of the country, strengthen ethics and spiritual values and encourage critical thinking and broaden scientific knowledge. Implied in these Constitutions provisions is the idea that schools are instruments for the attainment of social, economic and political goals of the polity and individual. For this purpose, all three constitutions ordain that all educational institutions shall be under the supervision and subject to the regulation of the State; the Government shall establish and maintain a complete and adequate system of free public education at the elementary and secondary levels. Moreover, the 1987 Constitution mandates that “the Sate shall assign the highest budgetary priority to education and ensure that teaching will attract and retain its rightful share of the best available talents through adequate remuneration and other means of job satisfaction and fulfillment” (Art. XV, Sec 5, par.5) Underlying the foregoing Constitutional provisions is the assumption explicitly stated in the 1987 Constitution, Article 11, and Section 17, that education, along with science, technology, arts, culture and sports, is a means “to foster patriotism and nationalism, accelerate social progress, and promote total human liberation and development. It is obvious that the Filipinos concept of education is consistent with the functional and human capital theories of education’s role in social transformation. These theories contend that: 1. Education is a great social and economic equalizer. 2. Education is the key to upward economic and social nobility 3. Education increases labor productivity 4. Education makes people more enlightened and less intolerant. 16 These assumptions and contentions are shown in more precise terms in Figure 1. The general assumptions underlying Figure 1 are that education develops in the individual the capacity to acquire cognitions, attitudes and skills that influence his/her behavior as a social, economic and political being and that the aggregate behavior of properly educated individuals in society, would consequently contribute to their individual and collective well-being. These assumptions are premised on the firm belief that schools, by bringing about change in the people’ cognitions, attitudes, values and skills can effect social transformation. What are the roots of these assumptions and to what extent have these assumptions influence the orientation development and structure of the present school system? Historical Roots and Colonial Legacy The Philippine school system today is largely the product of the country’s colonial experience. Undoubtedly, the school system introduced by the Spaniards and later by the Americans was functional in its assumptions and orientations. Schools were established by these colonial powers to socialize the people into their colonial statuses and roles and to develop the knowledge, attitudes and skills required of subservient and loyal subjects. Under Spain the natives were taught literacy in order for them to read and learn the Christian doctrines. There was no serious effort to educate the Filipinos beyond the 1863 which respectively ordered the establishment in the country of a public elementary school system and a secondary school system. Political pressures against the use of Spanish in the elementary and secondary schools by the Spanish rulers themselves worked against the full implementation of both these education decrees. Thus, education in the higher levels was available only to children of the well-off and of Spanish descent. This led to the high social, economic, and political value that Filipinos attach the college education. The college degree became highly prestigious and covered. A public school system patterned after that of the USA was established in 1901 by the Second US Commission in the Philippines along with the creation of a Department of Instruction whose mandate was to “insure a system of free primary instruction for the Filipinos People” (ACT No. 74). The school during the American regime were used to implement the policy of “benevolent assimilation”. The Department of Public Instruction was given the instruction that So far as the state is concerned, the primary aim of education is to prepare the individual to exercise the right of suffrage intelligently and to perform the duties and citizenship fully and honestly. Public education is primarily an instrument of self-preservation. The individual is educated at public expense not for his own sake primarily but for the security of the State (Isidro, 1949:3) 17 Philippine Education under American rule provided a systematic and thorough process of Americanizing the Filipino, English became the language of instruction. American-authored textbooks found a flourishing market in a rapidly expanding school system, Curricular patterns and educational innovations in Philippine schools were faithful copies of those introduced in American schools. In the words of O.D. Corpuz” Filipino children learned to read from English-language primers, published in America, about well-dressed and clean faced Billy and Sally and Dick and Mary Ann, illustrated in color with American homes with smoke swirling out of chimneys in winter. Their elder brothers and sisters were familiar with the farmers of Lexington and Concord…they read the bibliographies of George Washington, Thomas Alva Edison and Henry Ford. ..little of this had any genuine relevance to the Filipinos’ tropical way of life, but the educational process conditioned the Filipinos …whose classroom experience was reinforced by direct and daily contact with American culture… This conditioning was important because it rooted deep in the Filipino mind a predisposition, in the resolution of political issues to appreciate and understand the American point of view (Corpuz, 1965:70) With English as a medium of instruction and one of two official languages up to present, the cultural conditioning mentioned by Corpuz continues to shape and control the Filipino mind and behavior. Structure and Main Features of the Present Philippine School System The Philippine school system today is a huge network of schools and a gigantic enterprise. Its phenomenal growth and expansion over the years is shown on the Table 1 and Table 2.The rate of increase in the number of public and private schools on the elementary level was 111.8 percent from 1959-1960to 1984-1985. During the same period, the increase in the number of secondary schools was 443.4 percent and on the tertiary level, college and universities increase by 27502 percent. The growth in school enrolment has been equally rapid. Elementary school enro9lment rose from 4.1 million in 1960 to 8.2 million in 1980. During the same period, secondary schools registered an increase in enrolment from 611,544 to a staggering 2.76 million. Tertiary enrolment grew from 300,572 in 1,127,968 in 1985. Elementary education generally covers the age group 7 to 12 years. Public schools take care of a little over 95 percent of the total enrolment in elementary education. Secondary education corresponds to the age group 13 to 16 years old. Of the total enrolment of 3.323 million enrolled in secondary schools in 1984-85, 59 percent were in the public sector. 18 Tertiary level education covers the age bracket 17 to 20 years old or over. Approximately, 85 percent of the annual enrolments on this level are in private schools. Current Concerns About Philippine Education The rapid and unsystematic expansion of the system of education in the Philippines has created interlocking problems. The general indictment is that the formal school system has over-expanded at the expense of quality education; the school system has been wasteful, elitist, reactive, neo-colonial, irrelevant and unable to anticipate future developments and needs of the country and people. 1. Overexpansion and dwindling resources for education: The Philippine formal educational system appears to be one of the most expand in the world. Participation rates among the relevant school age group are relatively higher than the other countries in the ASEAN region. At the tertiary level, the participation rate surpasses that of the United Kingdom and the USSR. (Table 3). The growth in enrolment and increases in participation rates, however have not been matched by a corresponding increase in the budget for education as a percentage of the total national budget. On the contrary, the share of education in the national budget consistently dropped from 30.8 percent in 1955 to 7.6 in 1981. There has been a slight increase in the national budget allocation for education after 1981 but it has remained below 20percent of the total annual national budget in spite of the 1987 Constitutions provisions to assign highest priority to education (Table 4). Prior to the current school year, 1988, 1989, approximately 67 percent of the total annual national budget for education went to elementary education, leaving less than 30 percent for secondary and tertiary education. Thus public secondary schools had to depend on the local government for funding. Being largely in the hands of the private sector, education at the tertiary level depends on private funds for financial support, mainly tuition fee collections. As a result, secondary and tertiary schools vary greatly in quality and resources. Moreover, the high social and economic values that Filipinos attach to a college degree have resulted in the proliferation of tertiary institutions offering four-year degree programs that require the least cost to operate, e.g. teacher, education, business, and commerce. 2. A Wasteful and Ineffective School System The Philippine school system has been criticized for being wasteful and ineffective. From the first national survey of education 1925 (Monroe 19 Survey) to the present, the academic achievement of pupils have always fallen below set standards. The Survey of Outcomes of Elementary Education (SOUTELE) found that “on average, the graduates of elementary schools across the nation can only answer 50 items of the items correctly. If one is to use the standard passing mark for the test of 75 percent, then the average elementary school graduate has learned only 2/3 of what he should have learned” (DEC-EDPITAF,1976:88). The same study noted that the difference in scores between elementary school graduates and fifth graders is too small to be of any educational significance. This suggests that the sixth grade could be a tremendous waste of time and resources. The low level academic achievement of pupils is further aggravated by the high incidence of dropouts among elementary school pupils, Available statistics on the cohort survival rate of every 100pupils that entered Grade 1 in 1963-64, and show that only 57.56 percent reached Grade VI. In other words, 42.44 percent had dropped out before reaching the sixth grade. The average cohort survival rate has gone up to 64.1 percent after five years of elementary schooling according to the official reports in 1986. But in some regions of Mindanao and the Visayas, the average cohort survival rate by Grade VI is as low as 45.8 percent meaning that 54.2 percent of every 100 student’s entering first grade drops out before reaching the sixth grade (DECS Statistical Bulletin., SY 1985-86:24) High School graduates are observed to be ill-prepared for any gainful occupation and for college education. This observation finds support in the poor performance of high school graduates who take the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) and by the rate of unemployment among the labor force with secondary schooling. Likewise, the wasteful and ineffectiveness of the school system is manifested by the high percentage of failures reaching as high as 80-90 percent of examinees in Professional Board Examinations. For example, among the examinees that took the Board examination for Chemists in 1987, only 44 or 11 percent of the 399 examinees passed (Manila Bulletin., Nov. 21, 1987:1). 3. Imbalances in the Quantity and Quality of College Graduates and Brain Drain Colleges and universities in the Philippines continue to register an extremely disproportionate distribution of enrolment in the different disciplines. In 1968-69, teacher training, business and commerce, law, arts and humanities accounted for about 80 percent of the total collegiate enrolment. In 1980-81, three degree programs namely, business and commerce, engineering and technology, medicine and the related fields absorbed 66.7 percent of the total enrolment in this educational level. The physical sciences and life sciences continue to be the least attractive 20 disciplines notwithstanding the availability of government: scholarships in these areas (Table 5): Since private colleges and universities depend mainly on tuition fee collections for their operations, most of them concentrate on low-cost courses or academic degree programs that do not require heavy capital investments in terms of laboratories, scientific apparatus and equipment and the payment of competitive salaries for qualified faculty that are in short supply. It is no wonder that the most commonly offered four-year academic programs by these institutions are in these fields: teacher education, business and commerce, and “others” or programs not classified under the well-known disciplines. Furthermore, a large percentage of the collegiate faculty in 70 percent of the private colleges and universities had not studied beyond the bachelor’s degree (FAPE, 1975). This situation has resulted in surpluses of graduates in some fields and shortages of graduates in other fields of specialization which in turn have led to the problem of educated unemployed and “brain drain”. The term “brain drain” refers to the gross outflow or emigration of those who belong to the categories of professional, technical and skilled manpower such as engineer, natural scientist, physicians and professional nurse from their home country to other countries. Official reports from the US Office of Immigration and Naturalization revealed that Filipino professional and technical workers immigrating to the USA increased from .95 percent in 19.69 percent in 1970. While it may be said that the Philippines is producing college graduates who cannot be absorbed by the economy, a close examination of those who migrate are in the professions that account for the smallest proportion of graduates in the country, such as graduates in the natural sciences, medicine and allied fields and engineering. These are also the graduates badly needed by the country for development. 4. Irrelevance and Neo-colonial Orientation of Philippine Education The Monroe Survey of Philippine Education of 1925 recommended a radical change in the school curriculum because courses were found to reflect American culture rather than that of the Philippine culture (The Board of Educational Survey, 1925). Today, forty-two years after gaining independence from the USA, Philippine education continues to be a clone of the American school system. English remains as the dominant medium of instruction. As the sole medium of instruction in the Philippines schools until the adoption of the Bilingual Policy in 1976, Filipinos learned to be literate in the English 21 language rather than in their mother tongue or in the national language. This greatly influence their thinking, preference, lifestyle and world view. The irrelevance and alienation of the products of the educational system from the needs and realities of Philippine society reached the peak of national consciousness during the 1960s. This period also witnessed throngs of young adults, marching out into the streets demanding the reorientation of Philippine education. In response, to the clamor for educational relevance, the Presidential Commission to Survey Philippine Education (PCSPE) was created in 1969 to 1) analyze the performance of the educational system with reference to national development goals, 2) recommend specific ways of improving the system, and 3) identify critiscal areas for more detailed research. PCSPE found that “Philippine education was plagued imbalances between popular expectations and educational standards, facilities and enrollment; the supply of graduates and demands for specific manpower skills; location of educational facilities and actual regional development needs; and national investments in economic enterprise” (1970s:8-9). Based on the recommendations of PCSPE, Presidential decree 6-A or the educational development Decree of 1972 was issued stipulating that “it is the policy of the government to ensure, within the context of a free democratic system, maximum contribution of the educational system to the attainment of national development goals”. The decree provided the basis for reforms intended to evolve a more relevant educational system. However, it also served as a justification for the negotiations of an educational loans from the IMF-World Bank. Consistent with the functionalist approach to education, the reforms identified by the PCSPE were addressed to flaws in the educational system itself such as it goals, structure, resources and management rather than to constraints that originate from the larger society. The closest that the PCSPE touched on thid aspect was its observation that …the present objective of the Philippines education are goals of the entire system, and are unachievable aims for the educational system alone (PCSPE, 1970:7-9). The PCSPE Survey Report hardly discussed the possible root causes of the problems of education such as in the lack of role models for the values and ideas taught in schools, unjust social structures, and the heavy dependence on Western education, many others. Like the Educational Development Decree of 1972, Batas Pambansa Bilang 232, also called Education Act of 1982, is premised on the assumption that the problems of education in the Philippines are basically educational and technical, therefore these problems can be solved by working toward the attainment 22 of, according to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports at that time, the “four Es in Education”, namely, effectiveness, efficiency, excellence and equity. Issues and Policy Implications This section examines the extent to which the Philippine school system has fulfilled the educational aspirations and expectations of Filipinos. It also points out the relevant educational issues and policy implications indicated by the observed gaps in school system performance. 1. Mass education and literacy Has the expansion of the Philippine school system improved the literacy level and education of the masses? The data shown in Table 6 reveal the illiteracy has dramatically declined from 79 percent in 1903 to 19.6 percent in 1980. However, a closer examination of the data indicates some disturbing facts, namely: 1) Although the percentage decrease of illiteracy has been very substantial since 1903, the absolute value of illiterates has not decreased. In fact, in 1980, illiteracy among the age group 10 years old and over exceeded the total number of 5.5 million in 1903 by 2.5 million in 1980, 2) the rate of increase in literacy over the previous census year has been declining and 3) a large percentage of these illiterates are in the depressed regions, i.e., Regions II, VII, IX, and XII (Table 6&7). Participation rates or enrolment ratios among the relevant school age population in the country have been increasing during the years 1961-1981 (Table 8). The 1981 figures show that participation rates have reached 111.06 percent, 69 percent and 24 percent in the elementary, secondary and tertiary level, respectively. Ironically the Philippines is still a nation of on the average, 5th graders (Figure 2). This can be explained by the high dropout rates, particularly in the depressed regions. It may be concluded from the discussion that while the Philippine school system had been quite successful in providing access to first grade elementary education, it has failed to foster literacy and basic education (initially defined as six years of schooling, now ten years of schooling with the provision of free secondary education) among large percentage of the population especially in the less developed communities of Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. 2. Literacy, Education and Economic Growth: Development scholars have noted a positive link between levels of literacy and economic growth in most countries. Anderson and Bowman (1965: found that countries with less than 40 percent literacy 23 were among the least economically developed (less than $300 per capita) while those with over 90 percent literacy were the richest (over $500 per capita). In the Philippines, this relationships seems to be negative as shown in Table 9. Harbison and Myers in their study of 75 nations concluded that educational development and economic development are positively correlated. Thus they underscored the importance of education in these words: Not capital, nor income, nor material resources constitute the ultimate bases for the wealth of nations. Capital and natural resources are passive factors of production; human beings are the active agents, who accumulate capital, exploit natural resources, build social, economic and political organizations and carry forward national development. Cleary, a country which is unable to develop the skills and knowledge of its people and to utilize them effectively will be unable to develop anything else (Harbison & Myers, 1964:3). Using the Harbison & Myers’ indicators of human resource development, the data in Table 10 shows that the Philippines appears to deviate from the general observation that countries that have attained high levels of human resource development are also likely to have reached high levels of economic growth. It will be noted that on the measures of human resource development, the Philippines falls between Level III – Semi – Advanced Countries and Level IV – Advanced Countries. But on the measures of economic development such as GNP per capita, the Philippines lies between Level I – Undeveloped Countries and Level II – Partially Developed Countries. In 1975, the Development Academy of the Philippines noted that the ‘‘rate of investment in human capital has been faster than the rate of investment in physical capital’’ (DAP, 1975:9). Based on the notion of human capital, it would be reasonable to expect that the economic conditions of the Filipinos would improve, yet the same study found that Poverty clearly worsened. In Greater Manila, the proportion of families below the food threshold grew from 17 percent in 1965 to 25 percent in 1971, in rural areas, it grew from 39 to 48 percent. The number of persons below the food threshold grew from about 11.6 million in 1965 to 16.6 million in 1971 (DAP, 1975: 11). Increased investment in educational programs without improvement in the quality of teachers, curricular content, use of resources, and 24 students’ attitudes does not always result in education. In the words of R.P.; Dore: Not all schooling is education. Much of it is mere qualifications – earning…ritualistic, tedious, suffused with anxiety and boredom, destructive; in short, anti-educational (Dore, 16976: 1x) 3. Educational, Employment and Productivity Education, especially formal schooling, is expected to make a person more employable and productive. To what extent is it true in the Philippines? The empirical evidence produced by research studies on this matter in the Philippines indicate that the effects of education on employment and productivity do not fully support the aforesaid expectation. For example, Table 114 shows that the relationship between rates of employment and years of schooling does not follow a strictly linear and positive relationship. The highest rates of unemployment occur among those with high school and some college education. Those without schooling and with 4 years or more of college education exhibit the lowest rates of unemployment. Similarly, the effect of schooling on productivity seems to produce mixed results. In a study of workers in the shoe industry in Metro Manila, Alicias (1981) found that ten years of schooling tend to contribute P 0.51 per hour to a worker’s productivity. On the other hand, one to three years of college schooling or more than ten years of schooling or more than ten years of schooling was noted to reduce the typical male worker’s productivity by P 1.02 per hour but contribute P 0.52 per hour to a typical female worker’s productivity. Encarnacion (1977) studied income distribution in Manila, Luzon, the Visayas, and the Mindanao focusing on such factor as schooling, age, occupation, sex, and hours worked during the week as possible explanation for income inequality. He found that years of schooling is the strongest factor determining income distribution in each region, except Visayas. In the Visayas, schooling is a close second to the amount of time spent at work. Encarnacion (1977:10) concluded that ‘‘over the long stretch, raising the general level of education would reduce income differentials…thus the best single variable to work with seems to be the amount of time spent at work’’. Miñoza, however, found that among Filipino farmers, education and productivity and education is arguable. It appears that education may be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for employment and productivity. 4. Education, Social Mobility and Equity 25 Does the Philippine school system foster social mobility and equity? Research studies on the academic performance of students in the elementary grades in the NCEE including other college entrance examinations such as UP College Admission Test (UPCAT) have consistently shown that academic achievement is positively correlated with the socio-economic background of students (SOUTELE, 1976; Tan, 1975; Manlapaz, 1976; Ibe, 1985, Cortes & Soegiarto, 1986). All these studies points out that student who belong to well-off families, who reside in relatively affluent and urban communities, and who attend high quality schools tend to score high in academic achievement tests. A parallel situation is observed on the tertiary level of formal education where 85 percent of the enrolments are in private colleges and universities which offer widely varied resources and quality instruction. Sectarian private institutions are generally of better quality, and are charging higher tuition fees. On the other hand, proprietary and non-sectarian or profit-oriented colleges/ universities charge lower tuition fees but are relatively poorer quality. Accordingly, students of the lower socioeconomic classes go to the latter schools. In effect, quality tertiary education becomes accessible only on the rich. Even the University of the Philippines is accessible mainly to the middle and upper classes because of its college admission policy which is based on the student’s performance in the UPCAT. Tan noted that “schooling more than age determines the incidence of poverty…the incidence declines almost monotomically from 82 percent for those with Grade I-III years of schooling to 40 percent for those with 4 years of high school, to 20 percent for those with four years of college. The incidence further drops to 14 percent ad the heads of the families achieve more than 4 years of college “(Tan in J. Encarnacion Jr.,et al.,1976:232). However, it is important to stress in this regard that those who remain in school succeed in reaching the higher grade levels are the children of the upper classes in the society. A study of school dropouts in the country revealed that pupils who drop out of school are generally those whose parents have little schooling, on the average 5.7 years of schooling for fathers and 5.2 years for mothers, who belong to large families, earning very low-paying occupations (Dery, 1977). The poor who succeed in finishing high school are likely to be channeled to vocational and crafts training for entry to semi-skilled, lower level, low-paying occupations. The studies cited here show that in spite of the tremendous growth and expansion of the Philippine school system, it has not made much difference in the economic and social advancement of the poor. The dynamics of educational processing involving retention, promotion and sorting for higher levels of schooling is obviously biased in favor of students belonging to the upper socioeconomic classes and from urban 26 and affluent communities. The strong attraction of these communities to better qualified teachers and school administrators tend to concentrate the opportunities for quality education in these areas, leaving the rural and economically-depressed communities with low quality schools. Thus our school system is actually fostering quality education for the well-to-do and mediocre education for the poor. 5. Education, Political Opportunity National Integration and National Identity. Education through the formal school system is expected to develop in students a set of values, aspirations, personality characteristics and motivations that are in harmony with the nation’s political system, and which in turn should instill in the students a sense of national identity and as certain degree or political competence. To what extend had Philippine schooling met these expectations? In her study of political opportunities and political welfare in the Philippines, Jurado (1976) found that regardless of educational attainment, the subjects of her study scored low on political mobility, political information and political awareness. However, on a participation scale of 1 to 8, the subjects obtained overall average score of 4.46 which indicates a general willingness to participate, moderate schools of 3.2 on political dissent and 3.15 on political efficacy. In another study, the general voting participation was found to have increased over time, with 2.3 percent in 1909, 14.4 percent in 1946, 21.48 percent in 1957 and 25.44 percent in 1971. This consistent increase in voting participation was attributed partly to the rise in literacy rates (Jurado & Lava, 1976). A survey of Filipino perceptions of schooling (Cortes, 1981), revealed that schools have been quite successful as instruments of political socialization. Students, teachers, parents, white-collar and blue-collar workers from central and non-central communities generally agreed that among the ten most important things that they learned from school are “appreciation of Philippine culture” and “loyalty and love of country”. Doronilla (1983) also found that among the elementary students in a school in Quezon City, the highest ranking orientation is “valuing special qualities of the people.” However, the same study reported that among the lowest ranking finding is corroborated by another study conducted in Mindanao, which noted that pupils prefer to live in a foreign country (Batara, 1983). A study of the “brain drain” in the Philippines found that emigrants are likely to exhibit a relatively weak “anchorage” in the country, meaning that their psychological, social and economic ties in the homeland are few and rather loose. Furthermore, the same study observed that the propensity to 27 emigrate is positively associated with the person’s negative valuations of the social, economic and political conditions in the Philippines. As interesting insight provided by this study is that those educated in public schools tend to have a slightly stronger anchorage in the Philippines than those who attended private schools (Cortes, 1970). Is private education more alienating? This question needs further study. 6. Language and Learning Some members of the 1986 Constitutional Convention averred that the use of English as medium of instruction in Philippine schools has stifled creative, analytical and abstract thinking, and encouraged rote learning among Filipinos. The few research studies done by graduate students on this subject provide some empirical support for this contention. Specifically, studies on the effect of the language of instruction on pupil learning show that Pilipino, compared to English, as a medium of instruction, appears to produce more gains in pupil learning (Russel, 1967; Villanueva-Logan, 1977; Esclabanan, Mogol, Santos, and Tuy, 1977). Furthermore, pupils exhibit more enthusiasm and find learning easier when Filipino is used as the language of instruction (PCSPE, Special area Group for Curriculum, 1970; Cortes & Soegiarto, 1986). A study of the UP Institute of science and Mathematics education (1987) revealed that the level of comprehension in the English language of a sample of elementary school teachers was equivalent to only grade VII by UP norms. The present Bilingual policy of DECS requires that science and math be taught in English. In this connection, the same study pointed out that …most of these science teachers do not have a science degree. If the science teachers have not mastered the very medium of instruction, English language, and they are unfamiliar with the science content, how can science education be improved? (p.14). These research studies do indicate that the continued use of English as medium of instruction is partly the explanation for the pervasively low levels of academic achievement among our students and the inability of our schools to develop a strong sense of nationhood. Furthermore, the use of English as medium of instruction in our schools may also be the explanation for the following problems. 1. The lapse to illiteracy among dropouts since they do not have much use of English in their-day-to-day activities. 28 2. Rote memory learning among those who have a poor command of the English language. 3. Slow development of the national language, and 4. A process of schooling which is biased in favor of the upper and the modern sectors of the Philippine society for whom opportunities in the use of English abound both at home and in the community. A national language is admittedly a key factor in attaining national unity and identity. Unfortunately the Republic of the Philippines has wavered and remains irresolute its language policy. The national language has always been pitted against the English language as official language and language of instruction. This paper is not arguing against the English language for there is no doubt that English is the key to world understanding modern science and technology. But, does learning the English language require that it be used as an official language of instruction ion Philippine schools? Perspective and prospect for educational Reforms It is clear from the foregoing discussion that education is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for social transformation. Certainly, the problems of education are manifestations and reflections of the conditions that obtain in Philippine society. This paper is not meant to erode our people’s faith in education as a means of attaining socioeconomic progress and transforming our country into a “just and humane society” rather it is intended to heighten our awareness of the limits to what our schools can do considering the social economic as well as political structures and value systems within which our schools operate. What then are the prospects for enhancing the contribution that schools can make to bring about genuine social transformation in a democratic capitalist Philippines? First, our people are very much afflicted y the “diploma disease” or the inordinate drive for educational qualifications earning against obtaining an education. One way of curing ourselves of this disease is to demand of our schools quality education and educated individuals with demonstrated capabilities for self-development and creative participation in our economic, political and cultural life. We must give importance to the substance or to added value that a person can demonstrate as a result of schooling, rather than the shibboleths of schooling such as the certificates or diploma. 29 Second, we must recognize and develop the potential of nonformal education for developing certain talents and abilities more expeditiously, effectively and economically than the formal school system. Third, the traditional response to accommodating the increasing social demand for education by “linear expansion” should be replaced by a strategy of innovation in the modes of delivering education, management of educational resources and in the content of education. A proactive or anticipatory orientation is needed if schools are to serve as effective partners of national progress. Fourth, tolerating unequal access to educational opportunities by condoning mediocre education for the poor in the face of quality education for the well-off must be stopped. The root causes of these inequalities, among which are the uneven access to quality education is due to geography, natural resource endowments and educational practices must be addressed by policy. A concrete step in this direction is the identification and development of Centers of Excellence in strategic places throughout the country particularly in the pre-service and in-service training of teachers and in other fields of specialization and professions. A national Accrediting Agency may also be considered to maintain standards, quality and prevent proliferation of tertiary level programs. Similarly, elementary and secondary schools demonstrated leadership qualities should be designated and sustained to serve as laboratory schools and demonstration centers from which other schools in the area can draw assistance for upgrading their capabilities. Fifth, the formal education system must be restructured in recognition of the existence and distinctive strengths of the formal and nonformal education sub-systems. It may be worthwhile to consider en educational structure where the formal school sub-system, serving as the core of the country’s educational system, will leave the function of specific gainful skills training to non-school agencies. The school system can then concentrate on basic education for citizenship and functional literacy to enable the individual to continue learning on his own. This means that the formal school system must nurture and develop the questioning mind, the scientific and/ or creative approach to problem solving and generating knowledge. Moreover, the formal school system must be responsible for education in professions and highly specialized skills derived form a body of complex and abstract knowledge that need the mediating role of specialist. Sixth, with the implementation this year of a free secondary education, a thorough revamp of the curriculum of secondary education is needed to make it both terminal and college preparatory so as to provide secondary school graduates the option to either proceed to college of join the labor force. Seventh, consistent with the Filipino’s believe that college education is an economic and social investment only those who are likely to benefit the most from a college education should be admitted to college, 30 with the government providing financial assistance to deserving but poor students. Eight, the hearth of education reform in the Philippines calls for a bold policy that will minimize the dependence of the Philippine school system on American and Western education. The first important step in this direction is to shorten the transition from bilingualism, i.e., using English and Pilipino as language of instruction to the use of Filipino as the sole medium of instruction in our elementary and secondary schools with the vernacular or regional language as auxiliary language of instruction. This does not rule out the learning of English and other foreign languages in Philippine schools. The need for instructional materials in the national language must be met without further delay. Unless the first step in using the school system as the instrument for the development and use of the national language is taken now, Philippine education will continue to be plagued with the same problems of poor quality, incompetent teachers, inequality in educational opportunities, elitism, educational alienation and failure to foster national unity and national identity. The Challenge to the University of the Philippines The University of the Philippines has the reputation of being the premier university in the country. As such, Filipinos expect the U.P. to provide leadership in educational reforms addressed to problems and issues germane to the role expected of higher education in transforming the Philippines into a “just and humane society.” It would be presumptuous for this writer to chart and define the specific areas in which the University of the Philippines may take the lead. However, these general questions may be raised to trigger discussion on this subject: 1. How can the University of the Philippines operating within her legitimate concerns of teaching, research and community extension service and without necessarily endangering the University’s right to academic freedom and autonomy. a. design educational programs that will encourage and help students to be more thoughtful and discerning of social problems; b. discover ways of stimulating and nurturing creativity in the sciences, arts and professions; c. create and3 provide opportunities to students and faculty to make available their services to the community, especially to the depressed areas; d. minimize the dependence of our colleges and universities on foreign-authored textbooks; 31 e. help raise the quality of teaching in all levels of the educational system, particularly on the undergraduate and graduate levels; f. prepare individuals to perform more ably and integrity in public life; g. develop in students and faculty members the desire and appreciation for authentic education in lieu of working for grades and earning qualifications or diplomas; and h. improve our moral fiber? 2. What immediate steps may the University of the Philippines take to implement the educational mandate of the 1987 Constitution that all schools “shall inculcate patriotism and nationalism, foster love of humanity, respect for human rights, appreciation of the role of national heroes in the historical development of the country, teach the right s and duties of citizenship, strengthen ethical and spiritual values, develop moral character and personal discipline, encourage critical thinking, broaden scientific and technological knowledge, and promote vocational efficiency?” THE MISEDUCATION OF THE FILIPINO Education is a vital weapon of a people striving fro economic emancipation, political independence, and cultural renascence. We are such a people, Philippine education; therefore, must produce Filipinos who are aware of their country’s problems, who understand the basic solution to these problems, and who have courage enough to work and sacrifice for their country’s salvation. Nationalism in Education In recent years, in various sectors of our society, there have been nationalist stinings which are crystallized and articulated by the late Claro M. Recto. There were jealous demands for the recognition of Philippine sovereignty on the bases question. There were appeals for the correction of the iniquitous economic relations between the Philippines and the united Sates. For a time, Filipino businessmen and industrialists rallied around the banner of the Filipino First policy, and various scholars and economists proposed economic emancipation as an immediate goal for our nation. In the filed of art, there have been signs of a new appreciation for our own culture. Indeed, there has been much nationalist activity in many areas of endeavor, but we have yet to hear of a well organized campaign on the part of our educational leaders for nationalism in education. 32 Although most of our educators are engaged in a lively debate on techniques and tools for improved instruction, not one major educational leader has come out for a truly nationalist education. Of course, some pedagogical experts have written on some aspects of nationalism in education. However, no comprehensive educational program has been advanced as a corollary to the programs for political and economic emancipation. This is a tragic situation because of our basic ills and is apathetic to our national welfare. Some of our economic and political leaders have gained a new perception of our relations with the United States as a result of their second look at Philippine American relations since the turn of the century. The reaction which has emerged as economic and political nationalism is an attempt on their part to revise the iniquities of the past and to complete the movement stated by our revolutionary leaders in 1896. The majority of our educational leaders, however, still continue to trace then direct lineal descend to the first soldier teachers of the American invasion army. They seem oblivious of the fact that the educational system and the philosophy of which they are the proud inheritors were valid only within the framework of American colonialism. The educational system introduced by the Americans had to correspond and was designed to correspond to the economic and political of American conquest. Capturing Minds The most effective means of subjugating a people is to capture their minds. Military victory does not necessarily signify conquest. As long as feelings of resistance remain in the hearts of the vanquished, no conqueror is secure. This is best illustrated by the occupation of the Philippines by the Japanese militarists during the second Word War. Despite the terroristic regime imposed by the Japanese warlords, the Filipinos were never conquered. Hatred for the Japanese was endangered by the oppressive techniques which in turn were intensified by the stubborn resistance of the Filipino people. Japanese propagandists and psychological warfare experts, however, saw the necessity of winning the minds of the people. Had the Japanese stayed a little longer, Filipino children who were being schooled under the auspices of the new dispensation would have grown into strong pillars of the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Their minds would have been conditioned to suit the policies of the Japanese imperialists. The molding of men’s minds is the best means of conquest. Education, therefore, serves as a weapon in wars of colonial conquest. This singular fact well appreciated by the American military commander in the Philippines during the Filipino-American War. According to the census of 1903: General Otis urged and furthered reopening of schools, himself selecting and ordering the text books. Many officers, among them chaplains, were detailed as superintendents of schools, and many enlisted men, as teachers The American military authorities had a job to do. They had to employ all means of pacify a people whose hopes for independence were being frustrated by the presence of another conqueror. The primary reason for the rapid introduction, on 33 a large scale, of the American public school system in the Philippines was the conviction of the military leaders that no measure could so quickly promote the pacification of the islands as education. General, Arthur Mc Arthur, in recommending a large appropriation fro school purposes, said: This appropriation is recommended primarily and exclusively as an adjunct to military operations calculated to pacify the people and to procure and expedite the restoration of tranquility throughout the archipelago. Beginnings of Colonial Education Thus, from its inception, the educational system of the Philippines was a means of pacifying a people who were depending their newly-won freedom from an invader who had posed as an ally. The education of the Filipino under American sovereignty was an instrument of colonial policy. The Filipino had to be educated as a good colonial. Young minds had to be shaped to conform to American ideas. Indigenous Filipino ideas were slowly eroded in order to remove the last vestiges of resistance. Education served to attract the people tyo the new masters and at the same time to dilute their nationalism which had just succeeded in overthrowing a foreign power. The introduction of the American educational system was a subtle means of defeating a triumphant nationalism. As Charles Burke Eliott said in his book, the Philippines: To most Americans it seemed absurd to propose that any other language than English should be used in schools over which their flag floated. But in the schools of India and other British dependencies and colonies and, generally, in all colonies. It was and still is customary to use the vernacular in th elementary schools, and the immediate adoption of English in the Philippine schools subjected America to the charge of forcing the language of the conquerors upon a defenseless people. Of course such a system of education as the Americans contemplated could be successful only under the direction of American teachers, as the Filipino teachers who had been trained in Spanish methods were ignorant of the English language… Arrangements were promptly made for enlisting a small army of teachers in the United States. At first they came in companies, but soon in battalions. The transport Thomas was fitted for their accommodation and in July, 1901, it sailed from San Francisco with six hundred teachers – a second army of occupation - surely the most remarkable cargo ever carried to an Oriental colony. The American Vice Governor The importance of Education as a colonial tool was never under estimated by the Americans. This may be clearly seen in the provision of the Jones Act which granted the Filipinos more autonomy. Although the government services were Filipinized, although the Filipinos were being prepared for self-government, the department of education was never entrusted to any Filipino. Americans always headed this department. This was ass2ured by Article 23 of the Jones Act which provided: That there shall be appointed by the President, by and which the advice and consent of the State of the United States, a vice-governor of the Philippine 34 Islands, who shall have all the powers of the governor-general in the case of a vacancy or temporary removal, resignation or disability of the Governor-General, or in case of his temporary absence; and the said vice governor shall be the head of the executive department known as the department of Public Instruction, which shall include the bureau of education and the bureau of health, and may be assigned such other executive duties as the governor-General may designate. Up to 1935, therefore, the head of this department was an American. An when a Filipino took over under the Commonwealth, a new generation of “FilipinoAmericans” had already been produced. There was no longer any need for American overseers in this field because a captive generation had already come of age, thinking and acting like little Americans. This does not mean, however, that nothing that was taught was of any value. We become literate in English to a certain extent. We were able to produce more men and women who could read and write. We became more conversant with the outside world, especially the American world. A more widespread education such as the Americans desisted would have been a real blessing had their educational program not been the handmaiden of their colonial policy. Unfortunately for us, the success of education as a colonial weapon was complete and permanent. In exchange for a smattering of English, we yielded our souls. The stories of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln made us forget our own nationalism. The American view of our history turned our heroes into brigands in our own eyes, distorted our vision of our future. The surrender of the Katipuneros was nothing. compared to the final surrender , this leveling down of our last defenses ,Dr. Chester Hunt characterizes this surrender well in these words: The Programme of cultural assimilation combined with a fairly rapid yielding of control resulted in the fairly general acceptance of American Culture as the goal of Filipino society with the corollary that individual Americans were given a status of respect. This, is a nutshell, was (and to a great extend still is) the happy result of early educational policy because, within the framework of American colonialism, whenever there was a conflict between American and Filipino goals and interests, the schools guided us toward action and thought which could forward American interests. Goals of American Education The educational system was not established by the Americans for the sole purpose of saving the Filipinos from illiteracy and ignorance. Given the economic and political objectives of American occupation, education had to be consistent with these broad purposes of American colonial policy. The Filipinos had to be trained as citizens of an American colony. The Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation of President McKinley on December 21, 1898, betrays the intention of the colonizers. Judge Blount in his book, The American Occupation of the Philippines, properly comments: 35 Clearly from the Filipino point of view, the United States was now determined: to spare them from the dangers of premature independence,” using such force as might be necessary for the accomplishment of their pious purpose. Despite the noble aims announced by the American authorities that the Philippines was theirs to protect and to guide, the fact still remained that the Filipino people were a conquered nation whose national life had to be woven into the pattern of American dominace. Philippine education was shaped by the overriding objective of preserving and expanding American control. To achieve this, all separatist tendencies as the pervasive factor in the grand design of conquering a people, the pattern of education, consciously or unconsciously, fostered and established certain attitudes ion the part of the governed. These attitudes conformed to the purpose of American occupation. An Uprooted Race The first and perhaps the master stroke in the plan to use education as an instrument of colonial policy was the decision to use English as the medium of instruction. English became the wedge that separated the Filipinos from their past and later was to separate educated Filipinos from the masses of their countrymen. English introduced the Filipinos to a strange, new world. With American textbooks, Filipinos started learning not only a new language but also a new way of life, alien to their traditions and yet a caricature of their model. This was the beginning of their education. AT the same time, it was the beginning of their education. At the same time, it was the beginning of their miseducation, for they learned no longer as Filipinos but as colonials. They had to be disoriented from their nationalist goals because they had to become good colonials. The ideal colonial was the carbon copy of his conqueror, the conformist follower of the new dispensation. He had to forget his past and unlearn the nationalist virtues in order to live peacefully, if not comfortably, under the colonial order. The new Filipino generation learned of the lives of American heroes, sang American songs, and dreamt of snow and Santa Claus. Nationalist resistance leaders like Macario Sakay were regarded as brigands and outlaws. The lives of Philippines heroes were taught but their nationalist teachings were glossed over. Spain was the villain, America was the savior. To this day, our histories still glossed over the atrocities committed by American occupation troops such as the water cure and the reconcentration camps. Truly, a genuinely Filipino education could have been devised within the new framework, for to draw from the well springs of all Filipino ethos would only have led to a distinct Philippine identity with interest at variance with that of the ruling power. Thus, the Filipino past which had already been quite obliterated by these centuries of Spanish tyranny did not enjoy a revival under American colonialism. On the contrary, the history of your ancestors was taken up as if they were strange and foreign peoples who had settled on these shores, with whom we had the most tentious of lies. We read about them as if we were tourists in a foreign land. 36 Economic Attitudes Control of the economic life of colony is basic to colonial control. Some imperial nations do it harsh, but the United States could be cited for the subltery and uniqueness of its approach. Foe example, free trade was offered as generous gifts of American altruism. Concomitantly, the educational policy had to support this view and to soften the effects of the slowly tightening noose around the necks of the Filipinos. The economic motivations of the Americans in coming to the Philippines were not at all admitted to the Filipinos. As a matter of fact, from the first school days under the soldier teachers to the present, Philippine history books have portrayed America as a benevolent nation who came here only to save us from Spain and to spread amongst us the boons of liberty and democracy. The almost complete lack of understanding at present of those economic motivations and of the presence of American interests in the Philippines are the most eloquent testimony of the success of the education for colonials which we have undergone,. What economic attitudes were fostered by Americans education? It is interesting to note that during the times that the school attempts t indicate an appreciation for things Philippine, the picture that is presented for the child’s admiration is an idealized picture of a rural Philippines, as pretty and as unreal was an Amorsolo painting with its carabao, its smiling, healthy farmer, the winsome barrio has in the bright clean patadyong, and the sweet little nipa hut. That is the portrait of the Filipino that our education leaves in the minds of the young and it hurts the country in two ways. First, it strengthens the belief (and we see this is adults) that the Philippines is essentially meant to be an agricultural country and we cannot and should not change that. The result is an apathy toward industrialization. It is an idea they have not met in school. There is further, a fear, born out of that early stereotype of this country as an agricultural heaven, that industrialization is not good for us, that our national environment is not suited for an industrial economy, and that it will only brings social evils which will destroy the idyllic farm life. Second, this idealized picture of farm life overlooks the poverty, the disease the cultural vacuum, the sheer boredom, the superstition and ignorance of backward farm communities. Those who pursue higher education think of the farms as quaint places, good for an occasional vacation. Their life is rooted in the big towns and cities and there is no interest in revamping ritual life because there is no understanding of its economic problems. Interest is limited to artesian wells and handicraft projects. Present efforts to uplift conditions of the rural masses merely attack the peripheral problems without admitting the urgent need for basic agrarian reform. With American education, the Filipinos were not only learning a new language, they were not only forgetting their own language; they were starting to become a new type of American. American ways were slowly being adopted. Our consumption habits were molded by the influx of cheap American goods hat came in duty free. The agricultural economy was extolled because this 37 conformed with the colonial economy that was being fostered. Our book pictured the western nations as peopled by superior beings because they were capable of manufacturing things that we never thought we were capable of producing. We were pleased that our raw material exports could pay for the American consumption goods that we had to import. Now we are used to these types of goods, and it is a habit we find hard to break, to the detriment of our own economy. We never thought that we, too, could industrialize because in school we were taught that we were primarily an agricultural country by geographical location and by the inmate potentiality of our people. We were one with our fellow. Asians in believing that we were not cut out for an industrialized economy. That is why before the war, we looked down upon goods made in Japan despite the fact that Japan was already producing commodities on par with the West. We could never believe that Japan, an Asian country, could attain the industrial development of the United States, Germany or England. And yet, it was “made in Japan” airplanes, battleships, and armaments that dislodged the Americans and the British from their positions of dominance during the Second World War. This is the same attitude that has put us out of step with our Asian neighbors who already realize that colonialism has to be extirpated from their lives if they are to be free, prosperous, and happy. Transplantation of Political Institutions American education in effect transplanted American political institutions and ideas into the Philippines. Senator Recto, in his last major address at the University of the Philippines, explained the treason for this. Speaking of political parties, Recto said: It is to be deplored that our major political parties were born and nurtured before we have attained the status of free democracy. The result was that they have come to be caricatures of their foreign model with its known characteristics – patronage, division of spoils, political bossism, partisan treatment of vital national issues. I say caricatures because of their chronic shortsightedness respecting those ultimate objectives the attainment of which was essential to a true and lasting national independence. All throughout the period of American colonization, they allowed themselves to become more and more the tools of colonial rule and less and less the interpreters of the people’s will and ideas. Through their complacency, the new colonizer was able to fashion, in exchange for sufferance of oratorical plaints for independence, and for patronage, rank, and sinecure, a regime of his own choosing, for his own aims, and in his own self interest. The American were confronted with the dilemma of transplanting heir political institutions and yet luring the Filipinos into a state of captivity. It was understandable for American authorities to think that democracy can only mean the American type for democracy, and thus they foisted on the Filipinos the institutions that were valid for their own people. Indigenous institutions which could have led to the evolution of native democratic ideas and structures were disregard. No wonder we, too, look with hostility upon countries who try to develop their own political institutions according to the needs of their people without being bound by Western political procedures. We have been made to 38 believe in certain political doctrines as absolute and the same for all peoples. An example of this is the belief in freedom of the press. Here, the consensus is that we cannot Filipinize the press because it would be depriving foreigners of the exercise of freedom of the press. This may be valid for strong countries like the United States where there is no threat of foreign domination, but certainly, this is dangerous for an emergent nation like the Philippines where foreign control has yet to be weakened. Re-examination demanded The new demands for economic emancipation and the assertions of our political sovereignty leave out educators no other choice but to re-examine their philosophy, their values and their general approach to the making of the Filipino who will institute, support, and preserve nationalist aims, to persist in maintaining a system which was born under the exigencies of colonial rule, ti be timid in the face of traditional opposition, would only result in the perpetuation of an educational system which lags behind the urgent economic and political changes that the nation is experiencing. What then are the nationalist tasks for Philippine education? Education must be seen not as an acquisition of information but as the making of man so that he may function most effectively and usefully within his own society. Therefore, education can not divorced from the society of a definite country at a definite time. It is a fallacy to think that education goals should be the same everywhere and that therefore what goes into the making of a welleducated American is the same as what should go into the making of the welleducated Filipino. This would be true only if the two societies were at the same political, cultural and economic level and had the same political, cultural, and economic goals. But what has happened in this country? Not only do we imitate Western Education, we have patterned our education after the most technologically advanced Western nation. He gap between the two societies is very large. In fact, they are two entirely different societies with different goals. Adoption of Western Values Economically, the U.S. is an industrial nation. It is a fully developed nation, economically speaking. Our country has a colonial economy with a tiny industrial base in other words, we are backward and underdeveloped. Politically, the U.S. is not only master of its own house; its control and influence extend to many other countries all over the world. The Philippine has only lately emerged from formal colonial status and it still must complete its political economic independence. Culturally, the U.S. has a vigorous and distinctively American culture. It is a nation whose cultural institutions have developed freely, indigenously, without control on direction from foreign sources, whose ties to its cultural past are clean 39 and proudly celebrated because no foreign power has imposed upon its people a wholesale inferiority complex, because no foreign culture had been superimposed upon it destroying, distorting its own past and alienating the people from their own cultural heritage. What are the characteristics of American education today which spring form its economic, political, and cultural status? What should be the characteristics of our own education as dictated by our own economic, political and cultural conditions? To contrast both is to realize how inimical to our best interest and progress is out adoption of some of the basic characteristics and values of American education. By virtue of its world leadership and its economic interest in many parts of the worlds, the United States has an internationalist orientation based securely on a well-grounded, long held nationalistic viewpoint. U.S education has no urgent need to stress the development of American nationalism in its young people. Economically, politically and culturally, the U.S. is master of its own house. American, education, therefore, understandably lays little emphasis on the kind of nationalism we Filipinos need. Instead, it stresses internationalism and underplays nationalism. This sentiment is noble and good but when it is inculcate in the people who have either forgotten nationalism or never imbibed it, it can cause untold harm. The emphasis on world brotherhood, on friendship for other nations, without the firm foundation of nationalism which would give our people the feeling of pride in our own products and vigilance over our natural resources, has had very harmful results. Chief among these is the transformation of our national virtue of hospitality into a stupid vice which hurts us and makes us willing to dupes of predatory foreigners. Un Filipino Filipinos Thus, we complacently allow aliens to gain control of our economy. WE are even proud of those who a mass wealth in our country, publishing laudatory articles about their financial success. We have to hear foreigners call our country a paradise on earth, and we never stop to think that it is paradise only for them but not for millions of our countrymen. When some of our more intellectually emancipated countrymen spearhead moves for nationalism, for nationalism of this or that endeavor, do the majority of Filipinos support such moves? No, there is apathy because there is no nationalism in our hearts which will spur us to protect and help our own countrymen first. Worse, some Filipinos will even worry about the sensibilities of foreigners lest they think ill of us fir supposedly discriminating against them. And worst of all, many Filipinos will even opposed nationalistic legislation either because they have become the willing servants of foreign interests or because, in their distorted view, we Filipinos cannot progress without the help of foreign entrepreneurs. In this part of the world, we are well high unique in our generally nonnationalistic outlook. What is the source of this shameful characteristic of ours? One important source is surely the schools. There is little emphasis on 40 nationalism. Patriotism has been taught us, yes, but in general terms of love of country, respect for the flag, appreciation of the beauty of our countryside, and other similarly innocuous manifestations of our nationality. The pathetic result of this failure of Philippine education is a citizenry amazingly naïve and trusting I its relations with foreigners, devoid of the capacity to feel indignation even in the face of insults to the nation, ready to acquiesce and even to help aliens in the despoliation of our natural wealth. Why re the great majority of our people so complaisant about alien economic control? Much of the blame must be laid at the door of colonial education. Colonial education has not provided us with a realistic attitude toward other nations, especially Spain and the United States. The emphasis In our study of history has been on the great gfits that our conquerors have bestowed upon us . A mark of benevolence was used to hide the cruelties and deceit of early American occupation. The noble sentiments expressed by McKinley were emphasized rather than the ulterior motives of conquest. The myth of friendship and special relations is even now continually invoked to camouflage the continuing iniquities in our relationship. Nurtured with this kind of education, the Filipino mind has come to regard centuries of colonial status as a grace from above rather than as a scourge. Is it any wonder then that having regained our independence we have forgotten how to defend it? Is it any wonder that when leaders like Claro M. Recto try to teach us how to be free, the great majority of the people find it difficult to grasp those nationalistic principles that are the staple food of other Asian minds? The American architect of our colonial education really labored shrewdly and well. The Language Problem The most vital problem that has plagued Philippine education has been the question of language. Today, experiments are still going on to find out whether it would be more effective to use the native language. This is indeed ridiculous since an individual cannot be more at home in any other language than his own. In every sovereign country, the use of its own language in education is so natural no one thinks it could be otherwise. But here, so great has been our disorientation caused by our colonial education that the use of our own language is a controversial issue, with more Filipinos against than in favor! Again, as in the economic field Filipinos believe they cannot survive without America, so in education we believe no education can be true education unless it is based on proficiency in English. Rizal already foresaw the tragic effects of a colonial education when, speaking through Simoun, he said: You ask for equal rights, the hIspanizations of your customs, and you don’t see that what you are begging for is suicide, the destruction of your nationality, and annihilation of your fatherlands, the consecration of tyranny,! What will you be in the future? A people without character, a nation without liberty - everything you have will be borrowed, even your very defects!...What are you going to do with Castilian, the few of you who will speak it? Kill off your own originality, subordinate your thoughts to other brains, and instead of freeing yourselves, make yourselves slave indeed! Nine tenths of those of you who pretend to be enlightened are renegades to your country! He among you who talks that language neglects his own in such a 41 way that he neither writes it nor understand it, and how many have I seen who pretended not to know a single word of it! It is indeed unfortunate the teaching in the native language is given up to second grade only, and the question of whether beyond this it would be English of Filipino is still unsettled. Many of our educational experts have written on the language problem, but there is an apparent timidity o n the part of these experts to come out openly for the urgent need of discarding the foreign language as the medium of instruction in spite of remarkable results shown by the use of native language. Yet, the deleterious effects of using English as the medium of instruction are many and serious. What Rizal said about Spanish has been proven to be equally true for English. Barrier to Democracy Under the system maintained by the Spain in the Philippines, educational opportunities were so limited that learning became the possession of a chosen few. This enlightened groups was called ilustrados. They constituted the elite. Most of them came from the wealthy class because this was the only class that could afford to send its sons abroad to pursue higher learning. Learning, therefore, became a badge of privilege. There was a wide gap between the ilustrados and the masses. Of course many ilustrados led the propaganda movement, but they were mostly reformers who wanted reforms within the framework of Spanish colonialism. In their way, they were also captives of Spanish. Many of them were the first to capitulate to the Americans, and the first leaders of . Later there were supplanted by the products of American education. the Filipinos during the early years of the American regime came from this class. Later they were supplanted by the products of American education. One of the ostensible reasons for imposing English as a medium of instruction was the fact that English was the language of democracy that through this tongue the Filipinos would imbibe the American way of life which makes no distinction between rich and poor and which gives everyone equal opportunities. Under this thesis, the existence of an ilustrado class would not long endure because all Filipinos would be enlightened and educated. There would be no privileged class. In the long run, however, English perpetuated the existence of the ilustrados – Americanized ilustrados who, like their hispanized counterparts, were strong supporters of the way of life of the new motherland. Now we have a small group of men who can articulate their thoughts in English, a wider group who can read and speak in fairly comprehensible English and a great mass that hardly express itself in this language. All of these groups are hardly articulate in their native tongues because of the neglect of our native dialects, if not the deliberate attempts to prevent their growth. The result is a leadership that fails to understand the needs of the masses because it is leadership that can communicate with the masses only in the general and vague terms. This is one reason why political leadership remains in a vacuum. This is the reason why issues are never fully discussed. This is the reason why orators with the best inflections, demagogues who rant and rave, are 42 th eons that flourish in the political arena. English has created a barrier between the monopolists of power and the people; English has become a status symbo9l, while the native tongues are looked down upon. English has given rise to a bifurcated society of fairly educated men and the masses who are easily swayed by them. A clear evidence of the failure of English education is the fact that politicians address the masses in their dialects. Lacking mystery of the dialect, the politicians merely deal in generalities. Because of their lack of command of English, the masses have gotten used to only half understanding what is said to them in English. They appreciate the sounds without knowing the sense. This is a barrier to democracy. People don’t even think it is their duty to know, or that they are capable of understanding national problems. Because of the language barrier, therefore, they are content to leave everything to their leaders. This is one of the root causes of their apathy, then regionalism or parochialism. Thus, English which was supposedly envisioned as the language of democracy is in our country a barrier to the full flowering of democracy. In 1924 the eminent scholar, Najib Saleeby, wrote on the language of education in the Philippines. He deplored the attempt to impose English as the medium of instruction. Salleby, who was an expert on the Malayo-Polynesian languages , pointed out that Tagalog, VIsayan, Ilokano, and other Philippine dialects belong to the same linguistic tree. He said: The relation the Tagalog helds to the Bisaya or to the Sulu is very much like or closer than that of the Spanish to the Italian. An educated Tagalog from the Batangas, and an educated Bisayan from Cebu can learn to understand each other in a short space of time and without much effort. A Cebu student living in Manila can acquire practical use and good understanding of Tagalog in less than three months. The relation between Tagalog nd Malay is very much the same as that of Spanish and French. This was said 42 years ago when Tagalog movies, periodicals, radio programs had not yet attained the popularity that they today all over the country. Saleby further states: Empirically neither the Spanish nor the English could be a suitable medium for public instruction in the Philippine Islands. T does not seem possible that either of them can become the common or national language of the Archipelago. Three histories of Spanish rules and education failed to check use of the vernacular. A very small minority of Filipinos could speak Spanish in 1898, but the great mass of the people could neither use nor understand it. Twenty five years of intensive English education has produced no radical change. More people at present speak English than Spanish, but the great majority hold on to the local dialect. The Spanish policy might be partially justified on colonial and financial grounds, but the American policy cannot be so defended. It should receive popular free choice, or give proof of its practicability but showing actual and satisfactory results. The people have as yet had no occasion to declare their free will, and the present policy must be judged on its own merits and on conclusive evidence…But teaching English broadcast and enforcing its official use is one thing, and its adoption as the basis of education and as the sole medium of public instruction is a completely different matter. This point cannot be 43 fully grasped or comprehended without special attention and experience in colonial education and administration. Such policy is exalted and ambitious to an extreme degree. It aims at something unknown before in human affairs. It is attempting to do what ancient Persia, Rome, Alexander the Great and Napoleon failed to accomplish. It aims at nothing less than the obliteration of the tribal differences of the Filipinos, the substitution of English for the vernacular dialects as a home tongue, and making English the national, common language of the Archipelago. This is more true today. Very few college students can speak except in mixed English and the dialect. Our Congress has compounded their confusion by a completely unwarranted imposition of 24 units of Spanish. Impediments to Thought A foreign language is an impediment to instruction. Instead of learning directly through the native tongue, a child has first to master a foreign tongue, memorize its vocabulary, get accustomed to its sounds, intonations, accents, just to discard the language later when he is out of school. This does not mean that foreign languages should not be taught. Foreign languages should be taught and can be taught more easily after one has mastered his own tongue. Even if the Americans were motivated by the sineeje desire of unifying the country through the means of a common tongue; the abject results of instruction in English through the six decades of American education should have awakened our educators to the fact that the learning process has been disrupted by the imposition of a foreign language. From 1935, when the Institute of National Language was organized, very feeble attempts have been made to abandon the use of English as a medium of instruction. Our educators seem constantly to avoid the subject of language, in spite of the clear evidence of rampant ignorance among the products of the present educational system. This has resulted in the denial of education to a vast number of children who after the primary grades no longer continue schooling. In spite of the fact that the national language today is understood all over the country, no one is brave enough to advocate its use as the medium of instruction. There is the constant argument that new expenditures, new efforts in the publication of new textbooks will be required. There are arguments about the dearth of materials in the national language, but these are feeble arguments that merely disguise the basic opposition of our educational leaders to the use of what is native. Thus the products of the Philippine educational system, barring very few exceptions, are Filipinos who do not have a mastery of English because it is foreign, and who do not have a mastery of their native tongue because of the deliberate neglect of those responsible for the education of the citizens of the nation. A foreign tongue as a medium of instruction constitutes an impediment to learning and to thinking because a student first has to master new sounds, new inflections, and new sentence constructions. His innermost thoughts find difficulty of expression, and lack of expression in turn prevents the further development of thought. Thus we find in our society a deplorable lack of serious thinking among great sections of the population. We half understand books and periodicals 44 written in English. We find it an ordeal to communicate with each other through a foreign-medium, and yet we have so neglected our native language that we find ourselves at a loss in expressing ourselves in this language. Language is a tool of the thinking process. Through language, thought develops, and the development of thought leads to the further development `of language. But when a language becomes a barrier to thought, the thinking process is impeded or retarded and we have the resultant cultural stagnation. Creative thinking, analytical thinking, abstract thinking are not fostered because the foreign language makes the student prone to memorization. Because of the mechanical process of learning, he is able to get only a general idea but not a deeper understanding. So, the tendency of students is to study in order to be able to answer correctly and to pass the examinations and thereby earn the required credits. Independent thinking is smothered because the language of learning ceases to be the language of communication outside the classroom. A student is mainly concerned with the acquisition of information. He is seldom able to utilize this information for deepening his understanding of his society’s problem. Our Institute of National language is practically neglected. It should be one of the main pillars of An independent country. Our educators are wary about proposing the immediate adoption of the national language as the medium of instruction because of what they consider as opposition of other language groups. This is indicative of our colonial mentality. Our educators do not see any opposition to the use of foreign language but fear opposition to the use of national language just because it is based on one of the main dialects. The fact that one can be understood in any part of the Philippines through the national language, the fact that periodicals in the national language and local movies have a mass following all over the islands, shows that, given the right support, the national language would take its proper place. Language is the main problem, therefore. Experience has shown that children who are taught in their native tongue learn more easily and better than those taught in English. Records of the bureau of Public Schools will support this. But mere teaching in the national language is not enough. There are other areas that demand immediate attention. Philippine history must be rewritten from the point of view of the Filipino. Our economic problems must be presented in the light of nationalism and independence. These are only some of the problems that confront a nationalist approach to education. Government leadership and supervision are essential. Our educators need the support of legislators in this regard. In this connection, private schools must also be strictly supervised. The Private Sector Before the Second World War, product of the Philippine public school system looked down on their counterparts in the private schools. It is generally accepted that graduates of the public schools at that time were superior to the products of the private institutions in point of learning. There were exclusive 45 private institutions but these were reserved for the well-to-do. Theses schools did not necessarily reflect superiority of instruction. But they reflected superiority of social status. Among students of the public schools, there was still some manifestation of concern for national problems. Vestiges of the nationalistic tradition of our revolution remained in the consciousness of those parents who had been caught in the mainstream of the rebellion, and these were passed on to the young. On the other hand, apathy to national problems was marked among the more affluent private school students whose families had already accepted American rule. Today, public schools are looked down upon. Only the poor send their children to these schools. Those who can afford it, or those who have social pretensions, send their children to private institutions. The result has been a boom in private education, a boom that unfortunately has seen the proliferation of diploma mills. Two concomitant tendencies went with this trend. First was the commercialization of education. A lowering of standards resulted because of the inadequate facilities of the public schools and the commercialization in the private sector. It is a well known fact that classes in many private schools are packed and teachers are overloaded in order to maximize profits. Second, some private schools which are owned and operated by foreigners whose social science courses are handled by aliens flourished. While foreigners may not be anti-Filipino, they definitely cannot be nationalistic in orientation. They think as foreigners and as private interests. Thus the proliferation of private schools and the simultaneous deterioration of public schools have resulted not only in lower standards but also in a definitely un-Filipino education. Some years ago, there was a move to grant curricular freedom to certain qualified private institutions as well as wider leeway of self-regulation. This was a retrograde step. It is true that this move was in answer to charges that state supervision would enhance regimentation. But in a country that is just awakening to nationalist endeavors, it is the duty of a nationalist administration to see to it that the molding of minds is safely channeled along nationalist lines. The autonomy of private institutions may be used to subvert nationalist sentiments are not yet Filipinized. Autonomy of private institutions would only dilute sentiments either by foreign subversion or by commercialization. Other Educational Media While basic defects in the educational system have been responsible for the lack of nationalist ideals, mass media and cultural facilities negate whatever gains are made in some sectors of the educational fields. The almost unilateral source of news, films, and other cultural materials tends to distort our perspective. American films and comics, American press services, fellowships in America, have all contributed to the almost total Americanization of our attitudes. A distinct Filipino culture cannot prevail if an avalanche of western cultural materials suffocates our relatively puny efforts in this direction. 46 Needed: Filipinos The education of the Filipino must be a Filipino education. It must be based on the needs of the nation and the goals of the nation. The object is not merely to produce men and women who can read and write or who can add and subtract. The primary object is to produce citizenry that appreciates and is conscious of its nationhood and has national goals for the betterment of the community and not an anarchic mass of people who know how to take care of themselves only. Our students heart of Rizal and Bonifacio but are their teaching related to our present problems or do they merely learn of anecdotes and incidents that prove interesting o the child’s imagination? We have learn to use American criteria for our problems and we look at our prehistory and our past with the eyes of a visitor. Much information us learned but attitudes are not developed. A proper regard for things Philippine, a patriotic concern over the national fate—theses are not all imbedded in the consciousness of students. Children and adolescents go to school to get a certificate or diploma. They try to learn facts but the patriotic attitude is not acquired because of too much emphasis on forms. What should be the basic objective of education in the Philippines? It is merely to produce men and women who can read and write? If this is the only purpose, then education is directionless. Education should first of all assure national survival. No amount of economic and political policy can be successful if the education program does not imbue prospective citizens with the proper attitudes that will ensure the implementation of these goals and policies. Philippine educational policies should be geared to the making of Filipinos. These policies should se to it that schools produce man and women with minds and attitudes that are attuned to the needs of the country. Under previous colonial regimes, education saw to it that the Filipino mind was subservient to that of the master. The foreign overlords were esteemed. We were not taught to view them objectively, seeing their virtues as well as their faults. This led to our citizens to form a distorted opinion of the foreign masters and also of themselves. The function of education now is to correct this distortion. We must now think of ourselves, of our salvation, of our future. And unless we prepare the minds of the young for this endeavor, we will always be a pathetic people with mo definite goals and no assurance of preservation. 47 PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED PAULO FRAIRE 48 TRANSLATED BY MYRA BERGMAN RAMOS CONTINUUM: New York Chapter 2 A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character the relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness. The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else, he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to “fill” the students with the contents of his narration – contents which are detached from reality, disconnected form the totality that endangered then and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity. The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education then is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. “Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem.” The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of “capital” in the affirmation “the capital of Para is Belem,” that is, what Belem means for Para, and what Para means for Brazil. Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into “containers,” into “receptacles,” to be “tilled” by the teacher. The more completely he fill the receptacles, the better a teacher he is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to9 be filled, the better students they are. 49 Education thus becomes an act of depositing in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which are students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, the opportunity to become the collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is men themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, men cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with the other. In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as process of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering the ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher’s existence – but, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher. The raison d’ etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students. This solution is not (or can it be) found in the banking concept. on the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole: (a) the teacher teaches and the students taught; (b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; (c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about; (d) the teacher talks and the students listen – meekly; (e) the teacher disciplines and the students disciplined; (f) the teacher chooses end enforces his choice, and the students comply; (g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher; (h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were consulted) adapt to it; (i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with this own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students; (j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects. 50 It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as a adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role they imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. The capacity of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their “humanitarianism” to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical facilities and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another. Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”, for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this end, the oppressors use the banking concept of education in conjunction with a paternalistic social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of “welfare recipients”. They are treated as individual cases, as marginal men who deviate from the general configuration of a “good, organized, and just” society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy, society, which must therefore adjust these “incompetent and lazy” folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be “integrated” “incorporated” into the healthy society that they have “forsaken”. The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not “marginals,” are not men living “outside” society. They have always been “inside” – inside the structure which made them “beings for others”. The solution is not to “integrate” them, into the structure so that they can become “beings of themselves”. Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressor’s purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of students conscientizagao. The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never propose to students that they critically consider reality. It will deal instead with such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat, and insist upon the importance of learning that, on the contrary, Roger gave green grass to the rabbit. The “humanistic” of the banking approach masks the effort to turn men to automatons – the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human. Those who use he banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly (for there are innumerable well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are serving only dehumanize), fail to perceive that the deposits themselves contain contradictions about reality. But, sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the 51 attempt to domesticate reality. They may discover through existential experience that their present way of life is irreconcilable with they vocation to become fully human. They may perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation. If men are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation. But the humanist, revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibility to materialize. From the outset, his efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in men and their creative power. To achieve this, he must be a partner of the students in his relations with them. The banking concept does not admit to such partnership- and a necessary so. To resolve the teacher-student contradiction, to exchange the role of depositor, prescriber, domesticator, for the role of student among students would be to undermine the power of oppression and serve the cause of liberation. Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between man and the world: man is merely in the world, not with the world or with the others; man is spectator, not re-creator. In this view, man is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty “mind” passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside. For example, my desk, my books, my coffee cup, all the objects before me – as bits of the world which surrounds me – would be “inside” me, exactly as I am inside my study right now. This view makes no distinction between being accessible to consciousness and entering consciousness. The distinction, however, is essential: the objects which surround me are simply accessible to me consciousness, not located within it. I am aware of them, but them are not inside me. It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educator’s role is to regulate the way the world “enters into” the students. His task is o organize a process which already occurs spontaneously, to “fill” students by making deposits of information which he considers to constitute true knowledge. And since men “receive” the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still, and adapt them to the world. The educated man is the adapted man, because he is better “fit” for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well men fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it. The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant minority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to their own purposes), the more easily the minority can continue to prescribe. The theory and practice of banking education serve this end quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading requirements, the methods for evaluating “knowledge,” the distance between the teacher and the taught, the criteria for promotion: everything in this ready-to-wear approach serves to obviate thinking. 52 The bank-clerk educator does not realize that there is not true security in his hypertropical role that one must seek to live with others in solidarity. One cannot impose oneself, not even merely co-exist with one’s students. Solidarity requires true communication, and the concept by which such as educator is guided fears and proscribes communication. Yet through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher’s thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students thinking. The teacher cannot think for his students, nor can he impose his thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible. Because banking education begins with a false understanding of men as objects, it cannot promote the development of what Fromma calls “biophily,” but instead produces its opposite: necrophily. While life is characterized byu growth in a structured functional manner, the necrophilous loves all that does not grow, all that is mecyanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things… Memory, rather than experience, having, rather than being, is what counts. The necrophilous person can relate to an object – a flower or a person – only if he possesses it; hence to his possession is a threat to himself; if he loses possession he loses contact with the world… He loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life. Oppression – overwhelming control – is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necroliphic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power. When their efforts to act are frustrated, when they finds themselves unable to use their faculties, men suffer. “This suffering due to impotence is rooted in the very fact that the human equilibrium has been disturbed. But the inability to act which causes men’s anguish also causes to reject their impotence, by attempting …to restore [their] capacity to act. But can [they], and how? One way is to submit to and identify with a person or group having power. By this symbolic participation in another person’s life, [men have] the illusion of acting, which in reality [they] only submit to and become a part of those who act. Populist manifestations perhaps best exemplify this type of behavior by the oppressed, who, by identifying with characteristic leaders, come to feel that they themselves are active and effective. The rebellion they express as they emerge in the historical process is motivated by that desire to act effectively. The dominant elites consider the remedy to be more domination and repression, carried out in the name of freedom, order, and social peace (that is, the peace of the elites). Thus they can condemn – logically, from their point of view – “the 53 violence of a strike by workers and [can] call upon the state in the same breath to use violence in putting down the strike.” Education is the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by the educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression. This accusation is not made in the naïve hope that the dominant elites will thereby simply abandon the practice. Their objective is to call the attention of true humanists to the fact they cannot use banking education methods in the pursuit of liberation for they would only negate that very pursuit. Nor may a revolutionary society inherit these methods from an oppressor society. The revolutionary society which practices banking education is either misguided by the specter of reaction. Unfortunately, those who are espouse the cause of liberation are themselves surrounded and influenced by the climate which generates the banking concept, and often do not perceive its true significance or its dehumanizing power. Paradoxically, then, they utilize this same instrument of alienation of what they considers an effort to liberate. Indeed, some “revolutionaries” brand as “innocents,” “dreamers,” or even “reactionaries” those who would challenge this educational practice. But one does not liberate men by alienating them. Authentic liberation – the process of humanization – is not another deposit to be made in men. Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men upon their world in order to transform it. Those truly committed to the cause of liberation can accept neither the mechanistic concept of consciousness as an empty vessel to be filled, nor the use of banking methods of domination (propaganda, slogans – deposits) in the name of liberation. Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirely, adopting instead a concept of men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of men in their relations to the essence of consciousness – intentionality – rejects communiqués and embodies communication. It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian “split” – consciousness as consciousness of consciousness. Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information. it is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far from being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actors – teacher on the one hand and students on the other. Accordingly, the practice of problemposing education entails at the outset that the teacher-student contradiction be resolved. Dialogical relations – indispensable to the capacity of cognitive actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object – are otherwise impossible. Indeed, problem-posing education, which breaks with vertical patterns characteristics of banking education, can fulfill its function as the practice of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction. Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new team emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer 54 merely the one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process, arguments based on “authority” are no longer valid; in order to function, authority must be on the slide of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. Men teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are “owned” by the teacher. The banking concept (with its tendency to dichotomize everything) distinguishes two stages in the action of the educator. During the first, he cognizes a cognizable object while he prepares his lessons in his study or his laboratory; during the second, he expounds to his students About that object. The students are not called upon to know, but to memorize the contents narrated by the teacher. Nor do the students practice any act of cognition, since the object towards which that act should be directed is the property of the teacher rather than a medium evolving the critical reflection of both teacher and students. Hence in the name of the “preservation of culture and knowledge” we have a system which achieves neither true knowledge nor true culture. The problem-causing method does not dichotomize the activity of the teacher-student: he is not “cognitive” at one point and “narrative” at another. He is always “cognitive,” whether preparing a project or engaging in dialogue with the students. He does not regard cognizable objects as his private property, but as the object of reflection by himself and the students. In this way, the problempausing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students – no longer docile listeners – are now critical coinvestigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers his earlier considerations as the students express their own. The role of the problem-pausing educator is to create, together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos. Whereas a banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-pausing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the later strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality. Students as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context, not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated. Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed. Education is a practice of freedom – as opposed to education as the practice of domination – denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart form men. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without men, in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it. 55 La conscience et le monac sont dormes d’un coup: exterieue par essence a la conscience, le monde est, par essence relative a elle. In one of our culture circles in Chile, the group was discussing (based on a codification) the anthropological concept of culture. in the midst of the discussion, a peasant who by banking standards was completely ignorant said: “Now I see that without man there is no world.” When the educator responded: “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that all the men earth were to die, but that the earth itself remained, together with trees, birds, animals, rivers, seas, the stars… wouldn’t all this be world?” “Oh no.” the peasant replied emphatically. “There would be no one to say: ‘This is a world.” The peasant wished to express the idea that there would be lacking the consciousness of the world which necessarily implies the world of consciousness. I cannot exist without a not – I. in turn, the not – I depends on that existence. The world which brings consciousness into existence becomes the world of that consciousness. Hence, the previously cited affirmation of Satre” “ La conscience at le monde sont dorme’s d’un meme coup.” As men, simultaneously reflecting on themselves and on the world, increase the scope of their perception, they begin to direct their observations towards previously inconspicuous phenomena: In perception properly called, as an explicit awareness [Gewahren], I an turned towards the object, to the paper, for instance. I apprehend it as being this here and now. The apprehension is a singling out, every object having a background in experience. Around and about the paper lie book books, pencils, ink-well, and so forth, and these in a certain sense are also “perceived”, perceptually there, in the “field of intuition”; but whilst I was turned towards the paper there was no turning in their direction, nor any apprehending of the, not even in secondary sense. They appeared and yet well not singled out, were not posited in their own account. Every perception of a thing has such a zone of backgrounds intuitions or background awareness, if “intuiting” already includes the state of being turned towards,, and this also is “conscious experience”, or more briefly a “consciousness of” all indeed that in point of fact lies in the coperceived objective background.10 That which has existed objectively but had not been perceived in its deeper implications (if needed it was perceived at all) begins to “standout,” assuming the character of a problem and therefore of challenge. Thus, men begin to single out elements from their “background awareness” and to reflect upon them. These elements are now objects of men’s consideration, and, as such, object their action and cognition. In problem posing education, men develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves.; they come to see the world not as static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation. Although the dialectical relations of men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it also true that the form of action men adopt is to large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves 56 and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action. Once again, the two educational concepts and practices under analysis come into conflict. Banking education (for obvious reasons) attempts, by mythicising reality, to conceal certain facts while explain the way men exist in the world; problem posing education sets itself the task of demythologizing. Banking education resists dialogue; problem posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality, banking education inhibits creativity and domesticates (although it cannot completely destroy) the intentionality of consciousness by isolating consciousness from the world, thereby denying men their ontological and historical vocation of men as beings who are authentic only when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation. In sum: banking theory and practice, as immobilizing and fixating forces, fail to acknowledge men as historical beings; problem-posing theory and practice take man’s historicity as their starting point. Problem-posing education affirms men as being in the process of becoming—as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality. Indeed, in contrast to other animals who are unfinished, but not historical, men know themselves to be unfinished; they are aware of their incompletion. In this incompletion and this awareness lie the every roots of education as an exclusively human manifestation. The unfinished character of men and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity. Education is thus constantly remade in the praxis. In order to be, it must become. Its “duration” (in the Bergsonian meaning of the word) is found in the interplay of the opposite’s permanence and change. The banking method emphasizes permanence and becomes reactionary; problem-posing education— which accepts neither a “well-behaved” present nor a predetermined future— roots itself in the dynamic present and becomes revolutionary. Problem-posing education is revolutionary futurity. Hence it is prophetic (and, as such, hopeful). Hence, it corresponds to the historical nature of man. Hence, it affirms men as beings who transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead, for whom immobility represents a fatal threat, for whom looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can move wisely build the future. Hence, it identifies with the movement which engages men as begins aware of their incompletion—an historical movement which has its point of departure, its subjects and its objective. The point of departure of the movement lies in men themselves. But since men do not exist apart from the world, apart from reality, the movement must begin with the men-world relationships. Accordingly, the point of departure must always be with men in the “:here and now,” which constitutes the situation within which they are submerged, from which they emerge, and in which they intervene. Only by starting from this situation—which determines their perception of it—can they begin to move. To do this authentically they must perceive their state not as fated and unalterable, but merely as limiting—and therefore challenging. 57 Whereas the banking method directly or indirectly reinforces men’s fatalistic perception of their situation, the problem-posing method presents his very situation to them as a problem. As the situation becomes the object of their cognition, the naïve or magical perception which produced their fatalism gives way to perception which is able to perceive itself even as it perceives reality, and can thus be ethically objective about the reality. A deepened consciousness of their situation leads men to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation. Resignation gives way to the drive for transformation and inquiry, over which men feel themselves to be in control. If men, as historical beings necessarily engaged with other men in a movement of inquiry, did not control that movement, it would be (and is) a violation of men’s humanity. Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate men from their own decision-making is to change them into objects. This movement of inquiry must be directed towards humanization— man’s historical vocation. The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity; therefore it cannot unfold in the antagonistic relations between oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so. Attempting to be more human, individualistically, leads to having more, egotistically: a form of dehumanization. That not it is not fundamental to have in order to be human. Precisely because it is necessary, some men’s having must not consolidate the power of the former to crush the latter. Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as fundamental that men subjected to domination must tight for their emancipation. To that end, it enables teachers and students to become Subjects of the educational process by overcoming authorization and an alienating intellectualism; it also enables men to overcome their false perception of reality. The world—no longer something to be described with deceptive words— becomes the object of the transforming action by men which results in their humanization. Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the oppressor. No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why? While only a revolutionary society can carry out this education in systematic terms, the revolutionary leaders need not take full power before they can employ the method. In the revolutionary process, the leaders cannot utilize the banking method as an interim measure, justified on grounds of expediency, which the intention of later behaving in a genuinely revolutionary fashion. They must be revolutionary—that is to say, dialogical—from the outset. 58 59