Education and Social Change: Where have all the flowers gone?

March, the start of graduation season, has marched on...

...Those who are privileged enough to pass through the halls of the academe are now asking the proverbial question: where do we go from here?

Worried and hopeful, some of them ask me for advice and what I usually give is an optimistic and yet tempered look at what life is after graduation. I try not to dampen their hopes, in spite of the current financial state of, not just the country, but the rest of the world.

But for those who enjoyed scholarship grants, I usually discuss with them the role that education plays in society. I feel I have to make them realize that as scholars, they are in fact a privileged but probably over-hyped bunch who can do a lot, but not so much. Much is expected of them but then, historically, their being beacons of hope has been wanting, at the very least. These scholars see education as promoting national development. How this works, however, is something they cannot fully explain.

Education as a social process is all about acquiring or transferring meaningful knowledge, attitudes, values and skills among social actors: the teachers and students. Education could be informal, formal or non-formal. Informal education involves learning in the course of day-to-day activities in order for a community to reproduce itself in succeeding generations. It is unstructured and learner-led.

Non-formal education is relatively structured, undertaken through, for instance, training-workshops in firms or even in community organizations. It is often mainly concerned with addressing the immediate educational needs of particular learners. It is not sequenced or structured compared to formal education.

For the more familiar formal set-up, the process takes on a certain form distinguished by the organization of learners into classes. Formal learners sequentially go through levels of education and follow a pre-determined schedule. Knowledge here is transmitted primarily through pre-determined curricula and is systematized into discipline areas. What is also evident is the professionalization of the lead knowledge-transmitters, the teachers, according to these areas of specialization.

When people therefore talk of education, what they often refer to is the formal type, which in the Philippines is mainly realized through the public schools. Tragically, the public school system has been described as perennially in a state of crisis even as education continues to be popularly seen as a key factor in national development.

Education could partially contribute to societal development in two ways. First is by producing a labor force with particular skills, competencies and distribution. Second and perhaps more importantly is that it produces the people’s general ways of perceiving, thinking about and acting upon the world.

Beyond the issue of Filipino children’s low achievement scores in international tests is how the public school system has actually produced people with a “neo-colonial identity and consciousness,” carrying values supportive of personalistic and authoritarian political structures and a “non-critical, fatalistic, non-analytic outlook manifested in a curious readiness to attribute felicitous political events due to miraculous causes.” It no longer wonders why Philippine politics remains to be as it is today, uninspiring at best.

Education is an agency with but a supportive role in social transformation. Indeed, formal education itself “cannot effect thoroughgoing social structural changes,” as the late Dr. Maria Luisa Canieso-Doronilla of the University of the Philippine exquisitely pointed out. “Well meaning individuals who place total fate in the transforming power of education” need to be “reminded that issues of distributive justice when premised only on a more equitable distribution of educational opportunities are immediately translated by the logic of educational processes (such as teaching, learning and grading) into simple matters of individual ability, effort, values, attitudes and grading) without significantly weakening the structure of inequitable relations in society at large.” In other words, Dr. Doronilla succinctly argues that “a program of scholarships to ‘poor but deserving students’ such as is at present provided in the 1986 Constitution will merely co-opt these students if successful, into the elite.”

So, still care to sing and ask “where have all the flowers gone?” One simply needs to look up to the social apex and see. Still students of mine continue to inspire and hope. Hope indeed springs eternal.