Liberalism and Education

By Prof. Jan-Argy Y. Tolentino


A rough characterization of the liberal spirit might be "live, and let live". A friend would always remind me that it would be illiberal to insist on everyone following Socratic rule to examine and reflect on what is valuable. Liberals must let people live unexamined lives; their concern arises only when such people try to stop others getting on with their own preferred life-style.

If liberals should let people get on with their lives, always, except infringements on the equal liberty of others, it might seem that liberals should let people get on with bringing up their children, pretty much how they like. Unexamined modes of life can be reproduced. Let people get on with it.

An important value for liberals, which is often forgotten and yet is implicit in many of the things liberal strive for is Education. Education is a central liberal value. The liberal commitment to the individual doesn’t stop at the notion that the individual is the best judge of his/her own interest. The commitment to the individual includes commitment to maximizing opportunities and commitment to self-fulfillment.

It is a truism that the educational literature is replete with conceptions of education that tell us that in this context of bringing children into the human fold we have some special obligations to them that we do not have towards adults. Even when education is viewed as little different from any other mode of socialization, educators are not likely to advocate exposure to prostitution or child abuse as part of their offerings. Fortunately or unfortunately, what schools offer is colored by normative conceptions on everyone's view.

But the important point is that within this range of conceptions of education are some which stress intellectual detachment from what is socially given and promote intellectual independence and autonomy. It is likely to cut people somewhat adrift from their social moorings. Nor is it a particularly congenial site for toleration. We liberals want learners to get things right, not just do any old thing that occurs to them or is customary in their social milieu.

When liberals speak about education, it is not about learning by mechanical repetition of something so that it is remembered, often without real understanding of its meaning or significance, but learning to decide for oneself.

Our values define and affect our thinking on education policies. If you’re a right winger, your proposals would emphasize on tradition. You would probably would have greater emphasis on History, Literature, Arts, Geography of your own country. Maybe an emphasis on Religion. Your school rules will reflect tradition in the behavior it promotes. If you are left leaning, you will probably emphasize the importance of a uniform and unified single school system owned and controlled very closely by the state.

The purpose of such an approach would be to ensure that the system produces an equitable outcome. You will try to avoid coaching high performers, concentrating your efforts instead on helping those who have difficulties on education. But if you’re a liberal, progress as a liberal value is inconceivable without education. Liberals also put great premium on education. It is not important in itself but in the outcome it produces: better answers, greater quality and choices.

Liberals believe that Education is a tool. There is an old Bengali saying that knowledge is a very special commodity, the more you give away, the more you have left. Imparting Education not only enlightens the receiver, but also broadens the giver

In the seminar I attended in Gummersbach last year, the agora for liberal ideas, there are propositions that we put forward. And here are some of those

1. 1. Every human being has a right to education and a duty to educate himself. And Excellence is not the end all of it, the purpose is not just to make us winners but first and foremost fight ignorance.

2. 2. Education is primarily self development that provides emancipation, opportunity and security hence it is the responsibility, not just of the government but of all free citizens.

3. 3. Quality can be achieved through competition. This means competing schools, curricula and it also means direct control by consumers.

4. 4. Education is a life long learning. Was it Mark Twain who said “I don’t let my schooling interfere with my education” It doesn’t end after graduation. Even in our deathbeds we continue to learn

5. 5. Occupational Skills are just as important as academic skills. We tend to give importance to education that could provide us white collared jobs but can you just imagine a world without carpenters, waiters, attendants.

6. 6. In financing education, the liberal approach is to encourage and invite all potential actors to play their part in the finance and provision of education.

7. Access to Education is as important to the content of education.

We liberals also want everyone to be able to say, in some cases, "I accept –this idea (say Islam)- but I think you are not unreasonable not to accept it", but in others "I accept –the idea (of Islam)-, say and I think you are unreasonable not to accept it." The difficulty is to spell out a coherent sense in which you are reasonable to withhold assent while I am reasonable to accept a belief, when we are both confronted by the same reasons and evidence.

Surely the only reasonable thing to do is to withhold assent until something good enough to determine acceptance (or rejection) becomes available for both of us. It is not only self-defeating to defend tolerance by arguing for the falsity of religious or other views that might reject it, it fails to capture an important element in the liberal defense: we tolerate for reasons you can endorse too, not for reasons you have to reject.

Before I end, I’d like to quote a Muslim friend from Mindanao “If Muslim and Christians or protestants or Jewish and other children do not mix, and nor do their families-they become ignorant of each other, then suspicious, then fearful and hostile…there is no doubt that those promoting faith based schools have laudable intentions, but it may prove retrograde step. Schools should be used to provide bridges, not barriers.”

Delivered by YLDA MemComm Chair and KALIPI Sec.Gen. on the occasion of the International Youth Day, August 12, 2006 in Lahore, Pakistan in a forum organized by the Future Youth Group of Pakistan

Wretched

By Dennard D. Dacumos

Camila can hardly wait another year to finish her undergraduate degree program in a state-run university. She stopped going to school for six months to work as a full-time customer service representative in a call center. Both her parents were laid out from work so she had no other choice but to find a job and earn big money. She has plans to go abroad and settle with her family there eventually.

Is Camila being selfish or has she been a victim of an education that conditions the mind of its recipients to apply their knowledge somewhere else but here? ‘Education for the masses’ is what the government aims in allotting a huge chunk of budget to the country’s education sector. But let us not forget that ‘education for the masses’ should be rooted into a system of ‘quality education’. ‘Quality education’ must not only pertain to teaching the best theories, practices and skills to the students. Inculcating the value of nationalism must go along with it too. No wonder the Philippines is suffering from brain drain because we can’t convince our professionals to come back and help our ailing motherland. It is a pity that we are always relying on OFW remittances when what we really need are their advanced abilities and knowledge to help rebuild this nation. RP education prepares its youth to become exports for the world market. At the end of the day, we end up losing more than gaining more.

Will there be more Camilas in the coming years? The answer is probably yes especially when you have a national leader who thinks that a 1:100 teacher-student ratio is the proper way to address the shortage of classrooms. Planning to work in a call center? If you are willing to be employed in a company that doesn’t really need what you studied for four years in college, why not?

Putting a Price on Learning

By Jan-Argy Y. Tolentino

To say that the modern public puts a premium on education is to state the truly obvious. It seems hard to imagine a world with high levels of ignorance and illiteracy.

Especially with the advent of the “Information Age,” one’s education determines the options that one has in life. A good life and a successful career are usually linked to the quality and level of one’s education; mavericks like Bill Gates and the Tai Pans – who never finished or took up a college education – of Southeast Asia are usually exceptions rather than the rule when it comes to accomplishment. So for most people, even a high school diploma is usually the key to a better future.

Discussing the price of educating a country’s public inevitably leads to the age-old debate on whether education is a right or a privilege. Most modern societies adhere to the principle of education as a right, and thus the proliferation of public schools. Indeed, in the world’s foremost democracy the grand majority of its young are reared in public schools. This creates a link between the quality of education for the masses and public expenditure, best exemplified in public outcry over decreases in the education budget. It would seem, to most people, that the efficacy of a country’s education program lives and dies by the amount of money allocated by the government to it.

In assessing the education situation of the Republic of the Philippines, its Department of Education (DepEd) noted that, despite wide and strong public support for education as well as constant prioritizing in the national budget, the sector still faces significant problems, foremost of which are the low cohort survival rate and the lack of facilities and “equipment” – e.g. textbooks – for those in primary and secondary education. One possible cause for the largely dismal state of Philippine education, according to DepEd’s own estimate, points to political support that is “focused more on capturing allocated resources, less on using resources for instructional effort, even less on attaining desired learning outcomes”.

Even former Liberal Party President and DepEd Secretary Butch Abad admitted in an interview, quite frankly, that the education sector was “in crisis”. Only 6 out of every 1,000 Grade Six elementary graduate students are prepared to enter high school. Only 2 out of every 100 Fourth Year high school students are fit to enter college. Only 19 out of every 100 public school teachers have confidence and competence to teach English. The Philippines is No. 41 in Science and No. 42 in Mathematics among 45 countries.

Private initiative in supporting education has usually met with skepticism if not outright hostility. Recognizing that the Philippines’ premier state university, the University of the Philippines Diliman campus, was seeing a deterioration in the quality both of the caliber of its education and its facilities, endeavored to seek private support to augment the “meager” budget allocation it receives from the government. This was to be done through using idle land in the expansive campus for commercial purposes. Such a move was met with much opposition, mostly from militant students based in the university. Instead, they have asked for an increase in the budget for education, echoing the general perception that the infusion of more public funds into the sector will solve its problems like some magic bullet.

Abad during his time as DepEd secretary, initiated several reform measures that veered away from further burdening the national budget. One of the best examples involved the construction of classrooms; in the Philippines, some classes are held in makeshift locations such as the school gym or garage, or even under a mango tree. Having a limited budget for the construction of new facilities, Abad instead turned to the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce (FFCCC) to build the classrooms. FFCCC-built classrooms cost P 150,000 less than the normal (graft-ridden) cost of P 400,000. He also adopted the voucher system, where certain students are sent to private schools, decreasing further the backlog for classrooms and other equipment.

“We can work with what we have,” Abad said, adding that one simply needed to think outside of the box in order to address the lack of funding for the sector. This is, of course, contrary to the belief that solving the education “crisis” could be done simply by infusing more money into the system.

One area of Reform that I am proposing is that government must learn to let “market” forces in the education sector regulate itself rather than to call for increased allocations to education from an overburdened budget, or for greater regulation of the sector even to its private learning institutions. The private schools have seen the adverse effects of abnormally high tuition fees, as more and more students flee towards the public schools following a sharp spike in fees. Even given the realities of the situation, the private schools will most definitely react to this response of the “market” by improving their facilities, ensuring the quality of their curriculum and/or lowering their fees. One of the more distinguished-yet-expensive schools of the Philippines, the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila University, has decided on a compromise in a (relatively) low increase in its tuition while increasing the number of students it accepts for the incoming batch of freshmen. Other schools implement increases in tuition only for the incoming freshmen, while upper years keep their old rates or see much lower increases. For State Colleges and Universities, I am proposing that they be given full fiscal autonomy instead of outrightly privatizing them. Only by giving them the power to look for their own resources and utilize their assets will they become independent and creative in managing their respective institutions.

It is true that, in a world facing the impact of increasing access to knowledge and information, education will play a key role in the viability of whole nations as much as they dictate the choices available to the individual citizens of these nations. Pouring in more money to old systems and habits will only waste the already-scarce resources of the State to a move that does not and cannot guarantee substantial positive results. It is only by going beyond the preconceived notions that higher capital infusion equals higher quality of education – thinking out of the box, as Sec. Abad said – will we be truly be able to address the issues confronting the education sector today.

Second area of reform must be in the education curriculum which also needs a thorough review of its efficacy. Which subjects remain effective and able to be of use and of relevance to the studentry? Is the way of instruction for the basic knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic effective in keeping the population effectively literate? There will be no use in infusing the system with fresh capital while the system itself is ineffective in delivering its mandate. Curriculum creation and revision processes must include other stakeholders like the students, alumni and the parents. Students must be able to choose subject that is of their interest and will help them develop the career they want to take.

Lastly, Social mobilization must be done if we still hope to see some genuine upgrading in the academic performance of the Filipino students. It is as imperative that community's resource holders whether individual or private businesses realize that education is too complex an issue to be left to the government alone. Students, Teachers, School Administrators, Parents and other stakeholders like the Business sector must be made aware that they have it in them to bring about positive change in the sector. We could very well devise a system on the mechanics of stakeholders involvement in pursuing reforms. Complacency and lack of imagination among these groups has allowed the system to perpetuate in its inability to educate. If we all – even those in public schools – demand results at least to the level of their money’s worth, then school administrators and the government will be forced to act as they are the key constituency of this sector. Those in private schools can make use of the business aspect of such institutions to demand their “rights” as “consumers” of the “product” being offered. For those in public schools, just because it is relatively free education doesn’t mean demands cannot be made; it is, after all, a question of whether your hard-earned taxes are working for you.

These are the Price we have to pay for Education.