Re-Evaluating Education: An Anthropological Perspective

This article was adapted from an allocution delivered at the first internal conference of the Collegium Perulae Orientis.

When we think of education, we often imagine things like school, grades, textbooks, and classes. I would be considered an “educated” person upon passing my primary, secondary, and tertiary levels, and my status will increase upon obtaining a graduate degree. But all these are secondary to what education actually means.

Consider the plight of Filipino educational institutions, from whence come our roots. Contributions to Filipino intellectual tradition remain minimum or nil, and students confine their educational journey to the classroom and assignments.

Many teachers, on the other hand, have forgotten how to teach, often relying on rote or infamously, terror, in order to instill their values on their students. In our schools we see a prevailing cultural decay as many educational institutions are known for the proliferation of illegal substances.

There is also the ever-increasing plague of ideology, particularly woke ideology, which relies on social media culture and ‘cancellation’ to bring forth an environment of fear, stifling honest cultural discourse.

When confronted with these problems, teachers and students tend to point the blame at each other. There is too much coursework, the students are lazy, the professors have bad characters, and the students are entitled. These are all meritorious, but the realities expressed are only symptoms of a deeper problem common to all those involved in the process of education.

Let me provide an example. Students have to do lots of paperwork in exchange for their grades, which serves as a number promising them a better future. Teachers, on the other hand, also have to do lots of paperwork in exchange for their salary, which functions as a number promising them a better future. They are both in the same boat, living hand to mouth.

But is this all that the educational process has to offer?

If so, then we might as well forget about it. But it is not so. For the true essence of education is the promotion of a free person’s cultural life, a goal often hampered by the government’s educational bureaucracy, which seeks to push its own ideologies and standardize our curricula. In other words, they want to make a homogenous mass of workers out of us.

But we are not meant to be a mass! We are human persons, each of us being a dynamic and incommunicable reality. Yet still---those in power, in service to corporate interests, do not pay much regard to either the human person or human culture, unless they can instrumentalize both to maintain power over the largest number of people through false unity, so-called democracy, and a bland, lifeless, consumerism which discourages people from discovering their own dynamism.

Some people think that the government can fix this problem by passing more laws, but this will worsen things as the government is part of the problem. Rather, we should accept that education is not, and should not be, limited to the official educational system. Historically, this fact has been recognized and honored: education was at the hands of the Catholic Church.

Rather, we should return to an educational framework which focuses on the dynamic reality of each and every human person, one which cannot be reflected in a standardized grading system, where people are judged based on their ability to do the same project. For indeed, one’s education should not be reflected in grades, but rather on one’s lifestyle and one's contributions to a community's traditions, which they have hitherto received (John Paul II, 2001 World Day of Peace Message).

This awareness has not been lost on many, who share countless platitudes on how we should learn for the sake of learning throughout the academic year. But these are platitudes precisely because the educational system, by its form and function, discourages us from learning for learning’s sake!

For how can someone learn for the sake of learning with the Sword of Damocles above his neck, threatening his future if he would not learn enough to fit a particular standard in a particular time frame?

Many ‘terror profs’ boast about how most of their students, unable to adapt to their rigorous standards, fail their class. But this only fosters a transactional idea of education which encourages students to learn only for the sake of their grades. The student (homo liberalis) therefore becomes the producer (homo faber). And although it is true that many students are lazy, we can chalk it up to the fact that they have not found the true meaning of education in their lives.

So what, really, is education? According to John Paul II’s Address to UNESCO (June 1980), “To educate is to help man become ever more fully man, to enable him to ‘be’ more, not only to ‘have’ more, so that, through all he ‘has’, through all he ‘possesses’, man may become more fully capable of ‘being’ man” (p. 12).

If we read a few paragraphs back we will see that this description of man being more human pertains to nothing less than culture. For “[it] is through culture that man as a human being becomes more human, ‘exists’ more fully and has more ‘being’” (p. 11).

Hence, education is “the primary and indispensable duty of culture” in every nation (p. 12). A nation is a cultural community, and thus education is part of its essence and mission (ibid., p. 13). It is in education that we receive the past of our nation in order to steer it towards a better future.

And we must be at hand, on our own accord, to discover what this means for each and every one of us. We are not after those who reduce learning to a quest for straight A’s, or those who stick to ideas without commitment to the truth: For culture depends on the truth, it is man’s process of discovering the truth about his own humanity (John Paul II, Memory and Identity, pp. 91-92). And “[f]rom this open search for truth, which is renewed in every generation, the culture of a nation derives its character” (John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, par. 50).

And so I say that we are after gentlemen who are willing to discover the truth and steward it. Of course, by Truth I mean not simply the mere collation of facts, but the most sublime reality, i.e., God Himself.

Daniel Tyler Chua is the founder and president of the Collegium Perulae Orientis. He is also a contributor to the Philippine Daily Inquirer and The Sentinel PH.