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Sunday, September 11, 2005
Sun.Star Essay: Blackboard headbang
By Myke U. Obenieta
WHEN something awful happens, it’s supposed to teach us a lesson or two. Damn, such a bitter pill to swallow. Or as the locals would say: “Nakakaon og tagam.”
Eat our hearts out, but weren’t we told there’s always an upside to a downer? What can’t kill us is supposed to make us stronger and wiser. Or, failure to learn about living well in the wake of other’s or our own’s “unexamined life” would have whittled the living down to the level of wrigglers, maggots or caterpillars, without ever transcending to the realms of mosquitoes, flies or butterflies.
Lest we be condemned to stay stuck in a condition no more foul than a can of worms, knowing “the way, the truth and the life” is not only a piece of catechism; it’s also common sense. Or so goes the gospel according to the Australian Ambassador to the Philippines who just visited Cebu City after his government saw how come development in this archipelago, long overdue, remains on the larval stage. Concerned about the inadequacies in the country’s public school system, Australia is reportedly keen on sending in experts to help address education problems hereabouts.
Our situation, explains Ambassador Tony Helly, is “a continuing challenge for all of us to develop ways on how to address” our inability to know any better. Here this city, for instance, the tenacity of headaches---the lack of qualified competent teachers and the short supply of the basic necessities like rooms, chairs, equipment, etc.---smacks of a single-minded sloth, if not failure of imagination, to learn from the long and winding pattern of wrongs.
That, indeed, is hardly startling in a nation synonymous with stagnation, where the mediocre and the morally dim-witted hold sway.
Appalling and undeniable is this racial phenomenon, if not a national habit, of frittering away our gains and resources as we perennially lapse into the same head-shaking ho-hum---a state of drift while despair and cynicism make waves through the oceanic tide of rueful policies and rotten politics, washing away like flotsam such notions as decency and visions in public service.
Numbing and mind-boggling both, this question’s disquieting triteness: When will we ever learn?
Outright, urgent is the audacity to start the painstaking process of unlearning. When Helly thumbed down on the way Science has been taught here (“content-driven rather than concept-driven”), he might as well have referred to the regrettable “science of governance” here on this backwater of enlightenment where leadership seems scaled down for any guttersnipe to grab. Reckon, for instance, the ongoing leadership crisis and how the rabble-rousers are drooling to arrogate upon themselves the right to rule or “serve the people” beyond constitutional rule. Then again, can one ever teach old dogs new tricks?
Good, if they can wag their tail at the example of USC’s Fr. Roderick Salazar Jr. who, while being steadfast as a priest on his stand against contraception, also holds his ground in his responsibility as a university president, to “to push the frontiers of knowledge.” Spearheading a forum on population and development, he avers there’s no need to be scared of such discussions on repercussions of the country’s population explosion. Or, a spawn of stunted minds out of the monstrosity of poverty, this festering sore upon which maggots or flies become an inspiration for the self-anointed saviors.
To alleviate the abysmal quality of learning in public schools, the Cebu City Council is eyeing on crafting an “Education Code.” This, they hope, will lay the groundwork for excellence and innovation. Something that some people in high places also ought to take their cue from. Indeed, rudimentary is the need for them to have a refresher course on anything that ought to blow away the cobwebs in their minds and the dust of their miseducation.
(September 11, 2005 issue)
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