HEADLINES OPINION NEWS REGIONS WORLD

Opinion Columns

The urgent concern that

education is
By Fr. Ranhilio Callangan Aquino
February 7, 2024

THIS is not the first time that education in the

country has been red-flagged. There is a
problem with education — and unless it is
addressed resolutely, freedom from the
political tangle that often prevents
meaningful reform, we will be imperiling an
entire generation, the products of a
dysfunctional system.

It has been repeatedly observed — and

remarked — by college instructors and
professors that freshmen university-level
students lack reading and comprehension
skills. So, what is the course of remediation?
Why do we not have the good sense to
realize that when the curriculum was simpler
and teachers were required to comply with
less bureaucratic rigmarole, pupils could read
and understand? But before all the blame is
heaped on basic education, it should not be
forgotten that those who teach
schoolchildren are products of colleges and
schools of teacher education. And when
higher education woefully adopted and
mangled the much ballyhooed outcomes-
based education, things turned from bad to
disastrously worse. Then, colleges busied
themselves with drawing curriculum maps,
spelling out desired outcomes and preparing
tables of specification — among the many
other demands of an increasingly
domineering regulatory mechanism.

ADVERTISEMENT

Pupils should be led to comprehend. And

while the Canadian Jesuit philosopher
Bernard Lonergan thought of insight as
something that someone either caught or did
not catch at all, insight also comes about as a
result of useful clues, helpful analogies,
suggestive metaphors and leading questions.
But of course, when schoolchildren are glued
to cellphones and tabs and are furiously
engaged in online game competitions, the
intellectual space for cogitation considerably
narrows. It is the habit of reading that is
gradually falling from favor — and there is a
direct proportion between the desire to read
and the capacity to understand. In fact,
reading should be easier now, for while, in
the past, one had to ask one's parents (if
they knew!) or one's teachers (if one was
bold enough!) the meanings of words, Mr.
Google is extremely helpful — provided again
that one clicks on reliable sites like Merriam-
Webster or the Cambridge dictionary. There
should be a nationwide campaign to get
youngsters to read. Too much TV, cellphone
and tab time has been the undoing of the
habit of reading and the capacity for thought
that reading engenders.

ADVERTISEMENT

Ad

Then there is the matter of logic. Public

discourse is replete with examples of fallacy
and sophistry — and what is worse is that
nonsense gets peddled as supreme wisdom.
"Depends sa tingin mo. Kung feel mo na OK
'yung ginagawa mo, di OK!" That is not an
unpopular line at all — and how often has it
been peddled as sound advice by charlatans
who flood the airwaves with their nonsense?
Then, of course, adultery and rape and theft
and brigandage are OK because they can
feel to be OK! Why was logic expunged from
the curriculum? From the earliest of times,
logic and rhetoric figured prominently in the
curricula of those who wanted sound
education. The Greeks insisted on it, and
many disputations in the Scholastic period
centered on logic and reasoning and
argument. Alas, all this has given way to
histrionics and dramatics.

ADVERTISEMENT

Ad

Time was when sonnets from Shakespeare

were commonplace when the lyrical lines of
Longfellow could be recited by
schoolchildren, when high schoolers could
quote Frost and Dickinson. We have shooed
them out of our reading lists because we did
not like our students subjugated literally by
Westerners. But what have we placed in
substitution? Who are the poets and men
and women of letters who have taken their
place? We pride ourselves in being global
citizens, but our jingoism is atrocious and
most certainly deleterious — and the literary
poverty, even intellectual misery of our
present generation of students, should be
proof enough of our folly!