There's the Rub: What's education for?

12/12/20, 7:34 PM

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THERE'S THE RUB

S U N D AY, J A N U A R Y 3 0 , 2 0 0 5 ABOUT ME

What's education for? DANTE

C E B U C I T Y,
What's education for? PHILIPPINES

I'm a nurse by
profession here in the Philippines.
Posted 11:01pm (Mla time) Jan 30, 2005
VIEW MY COMPLETE PROFILE
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
PREVIOUS POSTS

Postscript
No satisfaction
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the January 31, 2005 issue of
Unthinking
the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Dangerous
Respite
GILL Westaway, British Council executive director, had an interesting What new dawn?
thing to say last week. The Philippines, he said, could be suffering from Impeachable
too many colleges and universities. "There could be an oversupply in Not so fast
some areas. In a country like the Philippines, where resources are Words
scarce, it's better to have fewer universities with quality rather than
Disaster
allowing hundreds of universities that are diluting the overall quality."
Westaway based his remarks on a one-year study made by the British
Council with funding from the Asian Development Bank.

Well, if the point of education is merely to enable students to find jobs,

then I agree with this wholeheartedly. A college or university education
in this country is superfluous, even counterproductive. It is four or five
years' waste of time and effort. A couple of months from now,
thousands of college graduates will line up before their school officials
to get their diplomas, and we will hear again, in editorials and various
commentaries, about how so few of those hopeful faces will turn
radiant in the next few years. Most of them will end up glum from
unemployment. There are simply no jobs available for most of those
commerce, accounting and communication graduates.

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There's the Rub: What's education for? 12/12/20, 7:34 PM

If the point is landing a job abroad, then the four or five years spent in
colleges and universities are just as well a waste of time and effort. You
won't be working as a doctor, lawyer, or media person in other
countries anyway. They won't take you in those capacities simply
because you have a degree in medicine, law, or communication from a
Philippine university. Your employers are not entirely to blame, to go
by the Newsweek ranking of colleges and universities some years ago,
where Ateneo, UP and La Salle landed among the lower rungs of the
ladder, a far cry from 30 years before when they were among the top 20
in Asia. You have a degree in medicine, law and communication from a
Philippine university, you will work as a caregiver, a bank teller, or a
fast-food attendant anyway.

If the point of education is to merely give students employment, here or

abroad, we would be better off scrapping colleges and universities and
putting up nursing and trade schools and schools that teach survival
English across the country. Many colleges and universities are already
doing it, opening up nursing departments in response to the demand
for caregivers in the United States, Canada and elsewhere. And
teaching functional English so the nurses and maids can communicate
with their employers. I am not being entirely facetious when I say
maybe we should also put up pop music schools. That's our main
export to Asia-musicians and bands.

But if the point of education is more than just employing people, then
the problem becomes a lot more complex, one that isn't solved simply
by lessening the number of colleges or universities. The problem
precisely lies in the fact that our whole educational system is now
predicated on enabling students to find work. That is as narrow and
unenlightened a view of education as you can get. The point of
education is not just to enable students to work, it is to enable students
to think. The point of education is not just to impart skills, it is to
impart vision. The point of education is not just to prepare the youth to
face the "outside world." The point of education is to educate.

I grant giving students the skills to find jobs is important as well,

particularly for a country like ours. I found nothing short of heroic the
efforts of my mechanic some years ago to see his son through dentistry
and his daughter through nursing school. At the end of the day, he
would pull himself up from underneath the car he had been fixing,
grimy and sweaty, to greet his kids when they came home from school

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There's the Rub: What's education for? 12/12/20, 7:34 PM

in their smart all-white uniforms. People like him have every right to
expect his children's schools to give them a crack at a more secure
future.

But that isn't all that schools can, or should, do. Certainly, that isn't all
that colleges and universities can, or should, do. The business of
colleges and universities is to bequeath to the world a generation that
can think, that can aspire to know the what and the why and not just
the how and the how-how-the-carabao. I remember again the irate
letter-writer who demanded to know what I had against caregivers and
maids-I had asked what we were doing turning ourselves into the
toilet-bowl cleaners of the world-when both did completely respectable
work. My answer then, and now, is that I have nothing against them,
just as I have nothing against janitors and forklift operators. What I
have against is the attitude that we can only exist in survival mode and
that we can't be better. What I have against is an educational system
that imagines its role in life to be to cater to the export labor market by
producing standard entrants to it.

I remember again too the non-joke about Pinoy and Chinoy college
graduates. When Pinoy graduates meet, they ask each other, "What job
have you landed?" When Chinoy graduates meet, they ask each other,
"What business have you opened?" We can say the same thing about
the graduates of our colleges and universities and those of other Asian
countries. When they meet, our graduates ask each other, "Which
country do you want to go to?" When the graduates of other Asian
colleges and universities meet, they ask each other, "Where do we want
our country to go?" The first is called resignation, the second is called
ambition. The first is called desperation, the second is called direction.
The first is called getting by, the second is called getting ahead.

We just want the first, let's not bother reducing our colleges and
universities. Let's scrap them altogether.
P O S T E D B Y D A N T E AT 1 2 : 0 0 A M

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