Academic calendars and misguided nationalism

Does misguided nationalism explain the lingering resistance at the University of the Philippines Diliman to moving the class opening from June to August to align with universities abroad? We must broaden our concept of education in step with advances in communication and transport.

My most impressive friends in Singapore are Richard Hill, Shawn Low and Koh Zheng Yang, presidents of the Harvard College Singapore-Indonesia-Malaysia Association when I lived in the Lion City. I invited them to coffee one summer vacation and they opened with casual elevator pitches of lofty career goals and hobbies that spanned competitive ballroom dancing, advanced mathematics and founding an NGO in high school. I saw them apply the same disarming confidence when we invited the likes of bank CEOs and Lee Kuan Yew’s most trusted diplomat to coffee.

How were Richard, Shawn and Kohzi different from our best students? The answer cannot possibly be intelligence. By sheer mathematics, 95 million Filipinos must produce more talent than the Little Red Dot. Nor can it simply be money. Although the Philippines cannot match the resources per head of the Singapore public school system, the Internet is a great equalizer and UP students can to a great degree access the same materials used at Harvard or the National University of Singapore.

My subconscious insists that the answer is mindset. Beneath the stereotypical Hahvuhd swagger lies a ready openness to the world. There is a sense of empowerment that makes one think anything is possible, from spending a summer organizing ancient scrolls in a Florentine monastery, to volunteering in an endangered species preserve, to inviting a country’s senior government, academic and business leaders to host a class on a field trip. And there is something about the mighty Hahvuhd marketing machine that makes the rest of us believe it, too.

My first experience outside the country was awkward. I skipped one month of college classes to attend the China Synergy Program, which took 200 foreign students on an all-expense-paid tour of China, all the way to the first emperor’s terracotta-warrior-filled tomb in Xian in the far west. Beyond touring a US car plant in Shanghai with Communist Youth League members and the inside of Tsinghua University’s particle accelerator, I learned how hilarious it is to make an American, English and Australian student speak in English to each other. I had a bewitching bus seat mate from the London School of Economics with whom I would later spend my first night in Manhattan, watching “Rent” on Broadway and seeing firsthand how living in New York City naturally teaches girls to run in high heels.

I felt quite different being in that tour group. Debates whether to try to start a finance career in London or New York were alien to me. And imagine going to a bar with a girl whose purse had pounds to your pesos. I was practically gawking at a world I was never conscious of before.

The academic calendar was not helpful. The trip was in July and would end just before midterms, so I brought my economics textbooks on the bus. (My seat mate told me my senior Ateneo material was her freshman material.) Later, I lost a year when I had to take the Philippine bar exam in September and wait for the following September to begin a master’s degree abroad.

It is different today. Since Ateneo management students began their Junior Term Abroad program, I have fielded curious questions about graduate degrees or working abroad to get more exposure. The context is not to try to escape the Philippines but to explore natural paths they are now realizing are there. I began Chinoy, a student Chinese culture magazine, and one student told me how she did its layouts while on slow trains in the French countryside. Others campaigned for positions in elections while abroad. (The difference in calendars is obviously a problem for JTA students, beginning with applying for slots abroad.) Speaking to fresh grads is invigorating because one feels how the world is truly becoming their oyster. With budget airlines, it has even become natural for them to spend long weekends exploring Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh City and Bangkok.

Part of me wishes I considered college abroad when I was finishing high school, wonders if I should have explored the paths the likes of Richard, Shawn and Kohzi found early in life. Perhaps I was swayed by a misguided sense of nationalism then, from a sense that leaving even for a little while would be to sell out, to listening to parents proudly say their sons consciously decided not to go abroad because they still needed their parents’ guidance. When I finished my studies, Jaime Zobel de Ayala (whose foundation generously subsidizes Filipinos in Harvard) shared his mindset that young Filipinos should be empowered to go see the world because most will eventually come back to enrich the country. Part of me wishes I had spoken with him earlier.

Education today is changing so rapidly that it cannot be considered complete unless our universities empower their wards to engage their peers abroad. Our students cannot interact with the world on equal footing unless they have actually seen it. Aligning academic calendars cannot in itself upgrade our school systems but neither can we afford to underestimate its intangible effects. Now is not the time to tie patriotism to geography or mistake parochialism for it. If nothing else, every student deserves to meet girls or boys with sexy accents in the name of education.

Oscar Franklin Tan (@oscarfbtan, facebook.com/OscarFranklinTan) cochairs the Philippine Bar Association Committee on Constitutional Law and teaches at the University of the East.