Nature and Purpose of Education
By Christopher Ryan Maboloc, PhD
Modern schools are like factories. Schools produce doctors, engineers, nurses, etc. The curriculum is the operating manual. The central figure is no longer that young individual who is in search of knowledge. The emphasis has been policy, rules and regulations, outcomes or measurable outputs, reducing everything into some product or tool. Students no longer wonder. They are far more concerned about their grades, or in the case of schools, rankings. .
Where did all of this start? In 1979, the former secretary of education in the country talked about developing students to become productive citizens. This means that what we are fashioning out of the classroom are the future labor force of industries. But what this means for elite schools is actually more appalling. We are creating future oppressors who, as drivers of the globalized economy, will be taking advantage of the powerless.
The infatuation with outcomes simply means that we have reduced the university into an assembly line. By focusing on key areas or even specific goals, schools undermine the freedom of the human person, which is all about seeing the potential of each student, and not to reduce the same into a cog in the machine.
What we need is that individual who has a critical and open mind, one who is not wholly dependent on the economic apparatus that makes education a mere means to an end instead of being the very vessel in which a young man or woman can fully realize the meaning of creativity and self-expression.
When students enter the university, they are introduced into a curriculum and they are told to observe rules and guidelines. They do not see themselves. They see buildings and structures but they cannot fathom what the future holds. Administrators are the central figures of universities, instead of students.
Schools have become pragmatic or practical and have ceased to be that place where one finds the answer to life's deepest and most important questions. Our children decry the fact that they have been reduced into mere investments. That is, it is worth it to spend good money for education because of the return of investment that a parent expects.
The bigger problem of course is that many of our students have forgotten the real joy of learning. They are far more concerned about passing than understanding that education is not about individual achievement. The nature and purposes of education is about our sense of identity because a country is only as "good as the kind of education it gives its people."
But the trouble is more than that. Progress is the buzzword when it comes to modernity and by this we actually mean the economic well-being of people. As such, policy makers concern themselves with job matching. No one is talking about human character and what modern society is. The student has become invisible.
Administrators are into politics and education leaders deal with fiscal concerns but the student is simply a stranger, reduced into numbers, no more than a statistic as schools spend its competence on surviving in the same way as commercial establishments and less about what it means to be human and being more considerate about the situation of our fellow humans.
Education is meant to make us human, if not better human beings. It is not a question of means. The curriculum does not create a culture that pays real respect to identity and difference. Perhaps it is important to go back to Bertrand Russell, who said that every child is a potential, and the task of education is to help the same realize the meaning of this freedom.
