A repost of an essay which I read from eons ago. I want to thank Elizabeth Lim for letting me.
As in every ordinary day in the lives of students, I, a student myself, have to endure the routinary going and going to schools, of attending to classes, of reciting memorized facts and unloading it on the test paper, of pleasing our professors, of pretended listening to them and to our classmates who report on it.
But did we really ask for this arrangement? Did we really ask for us to be educated in the first place? We always say that we wanted to study, so we will have a better future blah, blah, blah, but is this really what we want? If yes, why then are we always dragging ourselves to attend our classes? In rainy days, why do we always choose to sleep in, and not hurry because we will already be late for the first period? I certainly don’t know the answer of course. But we always said that we wanted to study because we wanted to be better individuals. Many parents have said that education is their only legacy to their children, that is why at our very young age, we, the children go to school in an effort to fulfill our parents’ wishes, which, inevitably and unconsciously, we will imbibe as our own conviction. This is the very reason why we work our butts of for fourteen to sixteen or more years: we are not studying for ourselves; we are studying (and eventually we will work) only to fulfill somebody’s dream.
As in every ordinary student, we fulfill our professors’ wishes disguised as academic requirements. We endure attending classes all in the name of fulfilling the 10% requirement for attendance even though we already know what will happen: the same professor babbling the exact thing written on the subject’s reference book, the exact same slides which were used for god knows how many semesters already, the exact same classmates not listening to the babbling and who are having their own mini-conferences, reading a manga or texting, or simply staring by the window at the swinging palm trees and the neighboring building.
The students are bored, the teacher is bored, and so what do we students get? Nothing. We endure memorizing facts only to be unloaded in our tests papers indifferent to the value of the facts itself (whether or not it can be a million peso question in some TV quiz show). Yes, we know that we belong to the species homo, the Philippines is near the equator and will always be, but we really don’t care. Besides, we can’t really use those facts right? What is its significance when we will work abroad as engineers, or nurses, or mechanics, or domestic workers right? We memorize that the age of fishes is the Devonian period and we are in the Cenozoic era and the Piltdown man is a hoax. We memorize and memorize and memorize. Write the correct answer on the blanks provided. Pass your papers. Get out of the testing room, and pray that you will get enough points to pass the exam.
We endure submitting papers which were made supposedly for us to contribute to the banks of knowledge and sharpen our grasp of a certain topic, we write about a paper on nationalism, of ultranationalism, a reaction or a discourse analysis of a modern adaptation of “As You Like It”, a reflection about Corazon Aquino’s death and its implications on Philippine politics, and a case study about the English speaking skills of a Korean. We tap on our laptops, desktops, or make our fingers bleed in writing drafts to be later typed on a desktop computer at an internet shop. We do those papers, yes, even in the ungodly hours of the night, midnight, and early morning. Click File, Press Print, OK. The clerk manning the internet shop will snatch the print-out and hand it to you and you the most obedient student will hold it as carefully as you can, and check for any errors, crumples or misprints. Oh, you find a misprint, and you say to the clerk, “Uhh, can you reprint it? The whole text is misaligned.” You see the clerk frown and turn to the computer, and reprint your whole 11 pages paper to be submitted right now. We then run to our classroom to hand it over to our professor. Or if our professor suddenly decided to postpone the class, or if he did a no show, we will just have to slid it under the professor’s room, tack it on their office’s door or put it on their pigeon hole of their department.
We also endure that thing called reporting. I admit, sometimes its good, but most of the time it is not. Just imagine yourself listening to another student who was assigned to report, say, Perennialism and Essentialism, you already read the reference book, and you liked the theory of those two, but suddenly, your classmate seemed to just read everything from the book when he presented it. You walk out of the classroom feeling dejected, and feeling that you shouldn’t have attended the class at all. There are also times when we report on something, and the professor suddenly barks that you are wrong. Then if it is wrong, the professor shouldn’t have required reporting in the first place when he doesn’t trust his students anyway. It is ironic to think that we entered the university to study and to learn from these enlightened people, but then what happens is that we endure listening to our classmates who are also groping in the dark about their assigned topic. Pity them for no one will help them (only the very unreliable internet), and pity those who listen to them for they will get nothing. It seemed that the professors, enlightened they may be, are not really experts in imparting that knowledge, because what happens in the classroom when they “teach” is that the students are fed with too much technical terms and jargon: syntax, subject position, phenomenology, objective correlative, chemiosmosis blah blah blah that the students get out of the classroom feeling dizzy. As a remedy, these enlightened professors do not simplify their words, worse, they make the students do their work. Thanks to them, reporting became the sole teaching technique in most subjects in the university.
Who is to blame for all this boredom? Well, that is like asking the chicken and egg question. Of course the professors will blame the students, and the students the professors, but thinking about it, it is not so much about the students being lazy butts. On the contrary, we students are not, because if we are, then we wouldn’t really waste our precious time in fulfilling academic requirements, worse, we could just have dropped out of college. This boredom of the students comes from the repetition of everything that they already know by instinct. They already know that a professor will teach them, they already know that the said professor will give them requirements, and they already know that they will have to do everything that a student needs to do like listening and sitting for one and a half hour without speaking, passively accepting every information and every word from their professor. Why? Well, we students have been sitting and standing and listening for a good fourteen or so years of our lives. In preschool we were taught to behave, to sit properly to be labeled a “good boy” or “good girl” and to be given a star at the end of each class. In grade school, we are taught to respect our teachers and to do what they say we do like dusting the eraser, or buying the teacher her merienda during recess. In high school, we have our all rebelling hormones that tell us to do the very thing our teachers don’t want us to do like smoking or petting in CRs or bringing mobile phones, or simply not wearing our uniform properly. But in the end, we are harassed by school officials, saying that we must not do those, lest they will give us low grades in Values Education. We are taught not to think, not to question, and just please everybody, so we will be labeled a good boy or good girl. If we question, if we defy, if we talked back and reason, we will be labeled “bad” students, and be sent to the guidance counselor.
And then college, all of those restrictions that kept the teenager from pursuing what he or she really wants during the earlier years of schooling were tossed to the pits of history, no more uniforms, no more teachers telling you that cellphones are not allowed, no more preaching teachers, and most importantly the teenager can now be free to reason and to think. However, boredom came in, and the poor teenager’s passion was doused with water, with apathy, not caring anymore if he or she passes. She just continues with her life, waking up and preparing herself to school, entering the classroom and listens to the professor and if it happened that it is her turn to report, she will just read from the powerpoint presentation that she prepared, and go on to the next class, and repeat almost everything that she did in her previous class. All of this we have to do for four to five years in college. Why did it become like this? Well, maybe we became too obedient when we were in grade school and high school that we became very passive students, and we will just yawn and heavily lift our butts from our seats if ever we encounter a professor who wanted to stoke the fire of energy in us.
Then we will suddenly realize that we are out of college; that we are already in the adult world, and no thanks to the education that we received for fourteen years or so, we basically still don’t know what to do. Even though we already have that piece of paper called diploma, we would still end up following the whims of somebody: this time, our boss, our manager, our supervisor, our principal, and Ma’am and Sir. We will still end up in crutches, and it is because we were controlled too much in school, and unknowingly, we followed too much.
The education we received, therefore, is not education, but a control that made us dependent on other people; that made us like servants waiting for a master to tell us what to do. The schools are not producing better individuals therefore, it only produced stringed dolls that can’t think and are blind, and ever wary of the perpetual gaze of the panopticon.
