Perilously educating the young

Coming across a withering plant on a windowsill near my classroom, I decided to bring it to class and use it to underscore the irony of modern education in the best university in the country. I thought of engaging the class in a candid discussion of how an institution that neglects its plants probably would also fail to nurture its students, a far more delicate crop than anything the plant kingdom might offer by way of a challenge.

However, before starting with an examination of the plant’s patently poor condition. I asked my students – 35 UP college freshmen and sophomores, all successful examinees of the UP College Admissions Test for UPCAT – whether anyone could identify the shriveled growth before us. About eight inches, lanky as a plant desperately seeking more water and light would be, with leave beginning to have yellow tinges indicative of its largely sered experience, the plant baffled UP’s best and brightest young wards.

A student finally hazarded that it could be a mongo plant. When pressed, a classmate more tentatively guessed "papaya?" A third, after approaching the object and examining it closely, finally decided that it looked like a mango plant. The rest were quiet, their quizzical looks focusing on the plant sitting on the instructor’s desk.

Not a single student in that class could identify an honest-to-goodness, dying tomato plant.

A series of "Ahhh’s" ensued when I identified the plant and cognition finally dawned on the puzzled students.

Later, the students confidently talked of the basic needs of a growing tomato plant. They discoursed well on the tomato’s presumably inalienable right to life, sunlight, moisture, all sorts of fertilizing nutrients and several varieties of life-sustaining soils.

The students were also conversant with the key role tomatoes play in soups, sauces and various culinary dishes.

Between a toh-ma-toe and a toh-may-toh, the students’ lore could not be faulted. Some could even write full treatises on the historic role of tomatoes – preferably the overripe ones – in solidly forgettable theater performances and incredibly vacuous political presentations.

Articulate, imaginative and confident, our best and brightest young UP students are absolutely in their element discussing the rise and fall of the nation’s tomatoes. They reflect encyclopedic recall in tracing the history of tomatoes as they are picked, sliced, crushed into pulp for some pedestrians sinigang dishes and – in the case of the largest and most impressively voluptuous among them – as they are delicately, surgically incisioned to hold the choicest ground meat and baked to mouth-watering perfection.

Such comprehensive familiarity with tomatoes. At the same time, such demonstrable ignorance of the actual plant, their sole source.

Is it possible that we are educating our young people largely through categorical forms and truncated processes which keep them from having a full sense of – and full contact with – their realities? For instance, are democracy and democratization being learned today such that college students become familiar with various concepts and theoretical processes but are unable to recognize an actual democracy staring them in the face?

In the context of this country’s dominant political history, perhaps the more interesting challenge would be the youth’s education focusing on oligarchy, even more so than that concerning a democracy. Are students learning extensively about the formal properties and the predatory history of Philippine oligarchy and at the same time – in full confrontation with the brutal fact at any point in time – are paradoxically conditioned not to recognize it?

It would be sad for this country if its college students – the nation’s successor generation – were to be so educated, or as a nationalist scholar more precisely described it – miseducated. Young people who eloquently discourse on tomatoes would do better if they are also able to identify the plant which eventually yields the fruit. When they become the nation’s leaders, they will not harm the country as much as their predecessors.