The Instructive Issue of Education

Thursday, 03 March 2011 23:30

Written by Aaron Benedict De Leon

Civil society entities have harped on the many ills of the education sector, mostly focusing on the lack of books, classrooms and other logistical concerns that provide a conducive atmosphere for learning among students. In fact, for the past few months, we have seen several youth organizations take to the streets in protest of even lesser funds for State Universities and Colleges for the upcoming Budget Year and the impending implementation of the K-12 program, extending the Basic Education cycle from 12 years to 14 years.

These are legitimate concerns, and these are key points that comprise the huge education problem we have in this country. But these problems only echo half of the entire situational malaria, perhaps because empirical data can sufficiently back up these observations.

I stress this because the educational situation should not only be concerned with the structural deficits, but more over, equally or much more focused on the instructive aspect.

What’s the legitimate proof of this? You can ask Human Resource Officers and even Recruitment Specialists around the country, and they would tell you how our educational system has failed to train sufficiently some graduates. In fact, you don’t need to look that far, and see for yourself how many graduates are bum and unemployed for many years now.

Although the demarcation line between number of graduates and available jobs for them in the market is still far, it is a fact that company employment is not the end all of earning a livelihood in this country. Opportunities for employment do not only come from companies, but from individual initiatives and self-determined mechanisms as well.

And you have the Basic and Tertiary Educational system to point to, which is based on the Prussian System of Education which has served as a model for many countries in the world, including the Philippines.

Prussian System of Education

If you look at this history of this system, it was during the 18th century in the Kingdom of Prussia where the whole program was intended to provide adequate skills needed in an industrialized world (reading, writing and arithmetic).

The motive behind this system is to instill social obedience in the citizens through indoctrination. Every individual had to become convinced, in the core of his being, that the Leader was just, his decisions always right, and the need for obedience paramount.

But in the 21st century, some of its better known features, like national testing mechanisms and the banking system of instruction can somehow be termed as outdated and have already served its purpose for a time, in fact a lengthy amount of time already.

In fact, many of its educational outcomes have been rather disappointing more than encouraging. If there was a statistical indicator for the level of critical analysis a graduate has garnered from schooling, I’m sure it will tell how this system has regressed in creating an atmosphere of critical engagement in the educational system.

Perhaps we are still mired in the mindset of “going to school, get educated, and get a good job.” In today’s world, it’s not just a philosophy but a must amongst many companies. We seem to have been laggard in the way we think of ourselves as contributors to our personal and national economic situation. Yes, this system may produce good employees, or some self-employed products, yet it does not make possible the emergence of investors or even great business tycoons.

Moreover, the system has bred a sense of complacency that so long as we graduate many students, then we are successful in our endeavor to be the suppliers of agents in the economy.

The question is, have they been productive as expected? Or more so, have we trained them sufficiently for them to have that capacity towards self-determination and self-exploration?

That is because the system was authoritarian in nature, which it has extended to a point that we order students to learn only through a fixed set of resources, because this is what is written in the book. The system does not cultivate a culture of personal exploration, including training students to be critical, to be analytical and to be trained in real life situations, based on concepts or theories they support or even criticize.

The Age of Information (and Engagement)

Today’s age of information is the moment I believe we can leverage on the powerful array of technologies available to create a culture of interactive learning, one which makes students not only get information, but appreciate, process and create new thoughts for their generation. Moreover, the approach must deviate from logistical tools that easily wore out (books) to more advanced equipment which has a longer life span.

There should also be a mechanism for teachers to continuously train themselves through online training modules which should be mandated by our Higher Education authorities, in view of the fact that they must also rapidly progress in their knowledge of the subject matter. It should be made as a compliance standard towards the renewal of their teaching licenses.

At this point in time, I think the focus should not only be towards structural changes in the system of our education, but more so, on the instructive side of the situation. The systemic attack should be two-fold, instead of one dimensional, because these two sides of the coin are correlative to the success of any educational system, whose goal is to produce productive agents of our society, not merely graduates for compliance purposes.

Our country is in greet need of new thinkers, new philanthropists, new philosophers to make our lives better off, and it all starts in our educational system, where success stories must not only be made possible, but guaranteed for this age and the many generations to come.

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