[PULITIKULTURA] Equipping students with shit detectors

If there is anything that should finally convince CHED and EDCOM to restore a robust liberal arts education to undergraduate curricula, it should be the degrading spectacle at the Senate the night of May 13.

If there is anyone at the Commission on Higher Education and the Second Congressional Commission on Education who has the time (and many have the wisdom) to connect the dots between the treacherous normalization of idiocy in the Senate and an already-collapsed education in what it might mean to be a responsible human, the association is self-evident.

Of late, the arts, culture, and social science communities weighed in—strongly if not stridently—against college education for the mass production of skilled labor unprepared for critical thinking. EDCOM has heard the appeals and promised to reconsider the present plan. The quality of response remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, perhaps the obscenities at the Senate can further persuade EDCOM to provide for a secular moral compass.

The now-you-see-Bato-now-you-don’t knavery, and the reversal of majority-minority in the manner of a coup at the Senate is an extraordinary argument for rebuilding secondary and tertiary education on precision thinking as social responsibility and civic duty.

Democracy cannot prosper on unintelligent interpretations of law.

A  liberal arts education that becomes a dimension of Philippine culture should make it impossible for sitting senators harbor a man charged with crimes against humanity, in the senate itself, and spew quack-legal justifications. Within such culture, it would be unimaginable.

Neither should Filipinos be ignorant of the line separating human rights violations—typically state sponsored, for the special attention of a Constitutional body, the Commission on Human Rights—and other forms of crime that belong to the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system.

The Senate should be able to perform a high duty: to explain that delivering a suspect of crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court does not in any way diminish sovereignty. No educated Filipino should be able to argue otherwise.

And no educated Filipino should renege on the responsibility of in turn educating the rest of the citizenry about the difference between decolonization (necessarily a national project) and nationalist blather (something to outgrow).

In fact, cooperation with an international body expresses and strengthens a nation’s sovereign will to belong to the community of nations. Civic and humanistic education would have fostered the ability to reject ersatz nationalism built on a culture of victimhood.

A politics of victimhood should be seen, by a learned critical eye, for what it is: an appropriation, by cynical politicians, of the opportunity to recognize and redress true historical injustice.

No Filipino who went through the Philippine educational system to tertiary level should be able to use the peanut butter gambit: that smearing one dirty politician smears all, hence no one is honest, honorable. The pare-pareho-sila gambit is ridiculous and forecloses hope. And hope is a true value for the intelligent citizen.  

No Senator, much less a Senate President, should be able to trample on the Constitutional principle of separation of Church and State with performances of religiosity to claim any kind of moral high ground; certainly not to pitch a legal argument. Proper humanistic education would have seen these performances as plainly inimical to democracy. And comedic.

A liberal arts education fosters discernment. The graduates of Philippine schools should have sharp shit detectors.

It should not be possible for manipulative politicians to assume their base is made up of idiots. And that’s because political illiteracy—political idiocy—should have been mitigated against by schooling in valid and invalid, or learned and stupid, interpretations of the legal and ethical infrastructure of a democratic state. And the equipment to tell the difference.

The constituencies of bad actors in the political life of the nation are Filipinos who were, and are, ill-served by an educational system sliding precipitously into intellectual and moral decay.

The declining interest in fostering a culture of discernment, by an education officialdom focusing now on supplying labor markets with unthinking minions, is folly. This should have been made clear, these last few days, by a Senate-become-cesspool, where filthy pseudo-ethics are clothed in the “majesty” of the “law.”

Marian Pastor Roces works internationally as an independent curator, critic of institutions, and analyst of culture and politics. Through her corporation, TAOINC, she curates the establishment of museums. She is also a founding Partner of the think tank, Brain Trust, Inc.

She has long argued that governance, civil society action, and policy making in the Philippines are weakened by the absence of cultural analysis. Such analysis, in turn, needs to work with updated data. Hence Pulitikultura, Roces’ platform for probing the intersection of culture and politics.