Education 101

First, Abigail Valte said that the students protesting the paltry budget for state universities and colleges would do better “to focus on their studies.”

Then Butch Abad came out to say that hiking the SUC budget to P45 billion, which the protesters are demanding—Abad has approved only an increase from P23.7 billion to P26.1 billion—is not feasible. “If we gave all agencies their maximum budget, the total budget will go past P2 trillion, which is way beyond what we can afford.” And it won’t solve anything anyway. “Note the recent international survey where the well-funded Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University and UST (University of Santo Tomas) fared worse than the underfunded UP (University of the Philippines).”

What benighted responses to the protest. First Abad’s:

If you simply diverted the fortune you are pouring into Batanes and the Department of Social Welfare and Development to the SUC, you won’t exceed anything and you will produce infinitely happier results for the present and future. Certainly ones that would have a more profound and lasting impact on the next generations. True enough, if you gave all the agencies their maximum budget, government will be in debt. But why on earth should you? Not all agencies are created equal, some are more important than others. Education is, and epically so. Last I looked the Constitution still said education was the No. 1 priority of this country. Not Batanes or the DSWD.

What’s your logic in saying that impoverished UP is doing better than well-endowed Ateneo, La Salle and UST in the ranking of schools—underfunding universities and colleges helps to improve performance? For all you know, all the ranking proves is that a secular environment is more conducive to learning than a religious one. If so, then you pour vaster amounts into the secular schools and they will do even better than they are doing now.

The proposition that there is little or no correlation between a school’s performance and its funding is silly. You don’t have good teachers, you won’t have good education. And you won’t have good teachers if you keep paying teachers conscript wages. Which is what we have now: The salaries of teachers are criminal. Psychic income, which is the bulk of the income teachers get today, may be good for the soul but they do not buy the groceries. You raise the salaries of teachers (and reduce the budget of Cabinet secretaries, in direct inverse proportion), you recruit better teachers. You recruit better teachers, you’ll get better ranking for schools, particularly the secular ones.

Second, Valte’s:

At the very least, her advice is patronizing. It’s all of a piece with the Communications Group telling workers and jeepney drivers to leave economics to experts. Not quite incidentally, the people protesting the meager sums going to the SUCs are not just students, they are also teachers. Even the students themselves might teach Valte a thing or two about life outside the cocoon of Malacañang. Certainly they can teach her and her boss a thing or two about communications, which they can’t seem to grasp, managing to piss off people when they really should be trying to get them on their side. Or their boss’ side.

At the very most, it’s unenlightened. First off because it lacks a sense of history. If students did not make it a point to protest the protestable, or violently iniquitous, we might even now still be under martial law, with Marcos’ generals in lieu of him overseeing it. It was the students who stormed out of their classrooms to protest Marcos when nobody else would, some of them marching up all the way to the hills, and kept the fires of freedom alive in the darkest pit of his rule. If the students had focused on their studies rather than swelling the ranks of the throng that gathered outside the camps, we might never have had an Edsa. Which harvest P-Noy has reaped, along with his people in Malacañang. Ingratitude is never a sign of grace.

At least today, the students (and teachers) are just huffing and puffing about not getting their due. An eternity ago, a one-centavo increase in oil prices would have been enough to ignite an explosion of outrage. The problem today is not that the students have become wild, it is that they have become tame.

Second off because it posits a myopic view of education. Education is not something you get in the classroom alone. It is not something you get from books alone, though you can get a lot of education there, enough to not need the classroom all. But that’s another story. The students in fact are tending to their studies, if not indeed focusing on them, by being aware of the realities around them, by trying to do something about the realities around them. Those are studies, too, in ways Imelda never contemplated in her University of Life. That is education, too, in ways schools have not contemplated in their curriculums.

Learning there is a world out there, that there is a value that goes beyond looking out for No. 1, is learning. It is studying. It is getting educated. The UP students protesting the SUCs being shoved into the backburner of budget priorities are living up to a glorious tradition, one the Collegian put this way: “Kung hindi ngayon, kailan pa? Kung hindi tayo, sino pa?” It was the students then and the students now who grasped the fundamental truth of that motto, the compelling imperative of that battle cry, who lived, and have lived, up to the ideal of being a iskolar ng bayan. They were and are the ones who have served the people.

The others? Well, they just focused on their studies in the narrowest sense of that idea and went abroad afterward, little caring about the country they left behind, crying, “Good riddance.”

That’s not education, that’s insulation.