We had just gotten done with midterm exams, and – in a mood made more expansive by a few bottles of Canadian beer – were wondering half-idly where higher education was, and where it was going, in light of what we were seeing in our classrooms.
Now, it’s easy to imagine a posse of sophomores getting together in a bar swilling whatever they can get at their age (or despite it; the legal drinking age in Wisconsin remains 21) and moaning and yelping away at perceived injustices suffered at the hands of their sadistic, abusive, mean-spirited professors. Less familiar to most imaginations is the opposite scenario: those professors (no longer demonic, but wise and all-too-merciful) lamenting the decline of undergraduate civilization – manifest in the absence of manners and the overflow of vacuous thought in some of these young citizens – as the symptom of a larger cultural malaise (pass the pale ale, please).
John and I had fended off some rather nasty slings and arrows in our time in front of the blackboard, and appreciated the opportunity to trade professional gripes. John recalled, for example, how one student had dismissed his professorship by saying that "You’re just my intellectual chauffeur." Yet another student complained in his evaluation form that "This teacher forced me to think!" (Ironically, that comment would help secure John’s tenure at the college.) I told John about how one of my department colleagues had a student complaining about how "the exam she gave us was too difficult." Just that morning, one of my own students – having been inexplicably absent the previous day – had come up to me and blithely asked, "So, did we do anything yesterday?" (I looked at him with the thinnest of smiles and said, "Yes, we do something every day.")
But never mind the insults – for, more often than not, they know not what they say. John and I were speculating where higher education was headed, and the outlook seemed bleak.
Fresh on my mind was the growing chorus back home for "English! English! English!" as though learning it quickly was some kind of panacea that would cure our economic and social ailments in a fortnight, courtesy of the booming call-center industry and other English-using service industries. (More on this next week.)
"There’ll be a greater demand for skills," I said. "Faced with an academic smorgasbord, students – and universities and colleges – will identify which specific courses they need to meet the minimum requirements for certain jobs, and will find the shortest and straightest route to a diploma."
"That’ll be the end of liberal education," John said, and I could only agree.
As we saw it, the problem is that we often mistake the acquisition of skills – as important and indispensable as they are, especially in societies in desperate need of employment – with a well-rounded college education, or the idea itself of "education." Skills allow you to perform tasks; education, well, forces you to think – not just about which buttons to press, but which judgments to make for the greater social good.
Education involves values, and these values are learned in less direct ways than through flow charts and pronunciation guides; they concern right and wrong, good and evil, beauty and the lack of it, justice and injustice.
Not everyone can have or can afford a college education that rounds the person out; most of our countrymen (and many Americans, for that matter) will just have to get by on their driving, typing, tailoring, plumbing, and janitorial skills. They’re nothing to scoff at; they keep the rest of us alive and our economy afloat, and we have these workers to thank for our relative leisure – including the leisure to sit back and gripe.
But what a sorry waste it would be if our colleges and universities that can do something more and something else for our best-prepared citizens reduced themselves to technical schools – and if our students and their professors rode on this well-greased slide to mediocrity.
Ah, ale, more pale ale, please!
The Times reported that "For nine months of the year, Dr. (Shing-Tung) Yau is a Harvard math professor, best known for inventing the mathematical structures known as Calabi-Yau spaces that underlie string theory, the supposed ‘theory of everything.’ In 1982 he won a Fields medal, the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize."
For the other three months, however, Dr. Yau – born in 1949 in a poor village outside Hong Kong – returns to China to help produce new PhDs and push China’s science agenda forward.
The Times continued: "‘In China he is a movie star,’ said Ronald Chan, a Hong Kong real estate developer and an old friend... And last summer Dr. Yau played the part, dashing in black cars from television studios to VIP receptions in forbidden gardens in the Forbidden City. He ushered Stephen Hawking into the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square to kick off a meeting of some of the world’s leading physicists on string theory, and beamed as a poem he had written was performed by a music professor on the conference stage. It reads in part: ‘Beautiful indeed / is the source of truth. / To measure the changes of time and space / the smartest are nothing.’"
A world-class math professor recognized and lionized in his own country who goes out of his way to replicate himself: does that speak to anything Filipino? Many of our best minds go abroad – and stay there. If and when they come home to offer help, no one knows them; if anything, they’re looked upon as meddlers and interlopers, with nothing to contribute to their local counterparts and juniors.
And did I say math? We’d rather sing and dance – that’s what all the lunchtime shows suggest we do, if our poorest people want to get anywhere in life and in this world.
I have nothing against entertainers and movie stars, many of whom are indeed exceptionally talented professional artists who work very hard, and who deserve every accolade they get. But even they know and understand the need to broaden their horizons – and some of them are doing something about it. Former film star and Playboy model Tetchie Agbayani is completing a master’s degree in psychology at the Ateneo; Sharon Cuneta (of whom I must admit to being a longtime fan) has quietly been taking distance courses with UP’s Open University.
It’s a long hop from intellectual chauffeur to movie star, but if our students were just as willing to think a few things through with us, I’m sure that John and I wouldn’t mind driving them around this maze we call an education – at the end of which neither would we mind a VIP reception or two.
To commemorate that event, Romblon officials and their guests will converge today in my hometown of Alcantara, thanks to the efforts of the Romblon Cultural Heritage Association Inc. headed by Gen. Dominador Resos, in cooperation with the office of Rep. Eduardo C. Firmalo, the Philippine Navy (particularly Rear Adm. George Uy, commander of the Philippine Fleet), the US Military Retired Activities Office in Manila led by its director, Virgilio A. Medina, and the local government units of Romblon.
I can only hope that beyond marking such military milestones, that cultural heritage association will soon embark on significant cultural projects for Romblon’s present and its future. The real battle, gentlemen, is no longer on the ocean, but in the mind.
It’s done by something called "masked forwarding" – in other words, you click on the "penmanila" shortcut but you’ll actually be delivered to my longer "homepage" address. That means, though, that I had to buy "penmanila.net" from Yahoo for around P500 a year – not too bad a price, I think, for the convenience. Even if you don’t have a blog, and just want a simple Web page to put your personal or professional shingle on (say, to advertise your expertise, as you’ll see by checking out www.acesinfo.info), buying a domain name (as in yourname.com) could well be worth it. Depending on what’s available, you can even choose from .com, .org, .net, .info, .biz, etc.
To learn more or to sign up, go to http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/domains. (Now, can’t they shorten that to something easier on the fingers?)