EDUCATION FOR DEVELOPMENT Felipe M. de Leon, Jr

1. EDUCATION FOR DEVELOPMENTFelipe M. de Leon, Jr

2. Cultural Identity • Cultural identity is a sine qua non for becoming active in the world. It is the fundamental source of social empowerment. • Rob a people of their identity and they become passive, lost, indolent, uncreative and unproductive, prone to depression and substance abuse, and plagued by a pervasive feeling of malaise and powerlessness.

3. The Genesis of Subservience • To suppress and weaken this identity and successfully impose an alien culture on a people is to reduce them into a passive, docile mass subservient to the power wielders of the alien culture. • They lose their originality, native intelligence and skills, treasure troves of knowledge, accumulated wisdom, and creativity.

4. The Genesis of Subservience • They lose their collective will and vision of life. They become disunited, self-serving, indulgent and short-sighted. This is why the first objective of a colonizing power is to erase the cultural memory of the conquered people, to induce a collective amnesia about their past and supplant it with the culture of the colonizers, especially through education. • In this lie the roots of Filipino derivativeness and inferiority complex vis-a-vis the West.

5. Un-Filipino Perspective • The moment we began to view ourselves through Western eyes, what we held sacred suddenly became worthless, our virtues turned into vices, and our strengths began to be seen as weaknesses. Anything indigenous became a source of embarrassment and uneasiness. We would hide whatever is native sounding or native in origin. Centuries of being regarded as backward and inferior by the white colonizers engendered in us this collective self-contempt, a psychic malady that afflicts all of us but most especially the elites.

6. The Curse of Smallness • Representations of the Filipino seemingly encouraged by the American colonial regime were of the smallest kind.The bahay kubo became “very small”. The little rice bird, the maya, became the national bird. The tiny sampaguita was declared the national flower by American Governor General Frank Murphy in 1934. Photographs taken of Filipinos and Americans together often deliberately exaggerated the Filipinos’ diminutive stature beside that of the towering American Caucasian. • Could this be an important reason why until recently many Filipino school children were expected to memorize the Latin name of, and even to be proud of having in Bikol, the smallest fish in the world? Most Filipinos then were not aware that we also have the biggest fish in the world in the same province.

7. The Curse of Smallness • Could this also be one of the psychological reasons why many Filipinos think small? Rather than become innovators, entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, producers and manufacturers, Filipinos, including U.P. graduates, are just too happy to find employment, especially overseas. In 1954 our government enacted a retail trade nationalization law, which took effect in 1964, preventing the Chinese from doing tingi, so the Chinese simply shifted from retail to the much bigger and more lucrative business of wholesale.

8. Alienation from Our Sources of Cultural Energy: Thinking in Borrowed Forms and the Economics of Dependency • Up to the present time, our educational system remains colonial rather than culturally appropriate, causing a great loss of cultural energy. • As a result, many of our schools do not produce people who are highly resourceful, creative and adaptable to a fast changing and extremely complex contemporary world. They encourage dependency, a job-seeking, employability mentality rather than originality of thought, entrepreneurial qualities and self-reliance on native skills, knowledge and strengths.

9. The Power of Indigenous Thought • Harnessing our own minds, understandings, definitions, categories and concepts is certainly to have confidence, power and control over our own lives. Economic power naturally follows from this. For instance, if we worship alien ideas of beauty, whose art works, music, fashion models and beauty products do we glorify and spend for? If we do not develop our indigenous pharmacology and healing modalities, how much do we spend for imported drugs and medicines?

10. Serving Another Country’s Need Through Education • Our country has been spending valuable public money for the education of Filipino professionals in the arts and sciences and many other fields. But since the cultural sources of their education are Western, it is inevitable that the expertise they acquire will be more applicable or appropriate to a Western industrialized society than to the rural, agricultural setting of most Philippine provinces. • So a great number of our graduates will end up migrating to rich Western or Westernized countries.

11. Serving Another Country’s Need Through Education • “It looks like the Philippines is spending its money for the training of manpower for the more affluent countries...This, then, is the essence of our colonial education - the training of one’s country’s citizens to become another country’s assets.” (Florentino Hornedo, “The Cultural Dimension of Philippine Development”)

12. Diminution of Self* • THE MOST INSIDUOUS BECAUSE SUBTLE ALIENATION OF THE FILIPINO FROM HIS CULTURAL ROOTS BEGAN WITH THE WESTERNIZED EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM THE U.S. ESTABLISHED IN OUR COUNTRY. THIS PROCESS CONTINUES TO THE PRESENT DAY: WE MAY OBSERVE THAT THE HIGHER (i.e., THE MORE SPECIALIZED) A FILIPINO’S LEVEL OF EDUCATION IS, THE GREATER IS THE LOSS OF A COMMUNAL OR SOCIAL SELF. ______________ *Those who receive a well-rounded, interdisciplinary education in which subjects are taught within a broad social, cultural and humanistic context, showing the interconnectedness of all things do not necessarily succumb to this diminution process.

13. Alienation from the Community • As one ascends the academic ladder, the more Westernized and alienated from his cultural roots the Filipino becomes. That is why the more specialized a Filipino’s education is, the more likely he or she will find his means of livelihood away from his community, perhaps in Manila or some other country. • An Ifugao child who receives only a high school education is more likely to remain in his community than another who finishes college. And the reason for this is not just because the latter has greater work opportunities, but because his education is not culturally rooted in his community, especially if it is a rural, indigenous village.

14. Constriction of Social Consiousness • Especially prone to the diminution of social consciousness are professionals in highly technical, narrow specializations. It used to be that a doctor specialized in EENT medicine. But eye specialists have since parted ways with the ear-nose-throat doctors. And now there is even a left-eye or right-eye specialist. • By reducing reality into small pieces, the narrow specialist is “in danger of losing all sense of reality.” He and his tiny circle of co-experts tend to define their own limited field - that is, their specialized theories and methods - as the final reality or the representation of total reality

15. Specialistic Innocence • This naivete makes him utterly helpless in facing many complex issues of today. Thus, he is apt to surrender easily to all sorts of ideologies. The modern specialized intellectual gets nervous outside his field of expertise where he feels an awful sense of emptiness. All throughout history, it has been the technocratic scientists or engineers, who, because of their ignorance of the social processes and political contexts in which they operated, easily succumbed to the whims of dictators and fascists of all kinds.

16. Professional Tribalism • Narrow technical, professional education may develop expertise and the professions but may also breed selfishness, lack of social responsibility and professional tribalism, which arises from the cult of the professional ego(promoting one’s profession at the expense of public good). • This is clearly a manifestation of the materialism of industrial or industrializing societies where, for instance, scientists advance science for its own sake no matter what the social costs, medical doctors gang up on outsiders to protect the medical “establishment,” and businessmen sacrifice valuable goods or form cartels just to maintain enormous profits.

17. Professional Tribalism • Society becomes splintered into ruthlessly competing self-interest tribes of experts, each with its own god or king (celebrity figures such as Stephen Hawking in physics or Bill Gates in technology and business), church or temple (convention hall, opera house, museum, etc.), holy book (professional journal or manual), sacred language (jargon) and religious attire (business suit, white laboratory gown, etc.). Each tribe is after its own good alone. Professional advancement is the highest good. And financial success the highest reward (a market of warring, competing tribes?)

18. Barbarism of Specialism* • The “specialist and his small circle of co-experts are inclined to define their own little field(i.e. their specialized theories and methods) as the final reality or as the representation of total reality.” (Zejderveld, Abstract Society). Thus, he has a tendency toward arrogance inspite of his naivete in all matters outside his own limited field. Typically, he feels detached from the larger communal, social context in which he lives and become solely devoted to the advancement of his profession. ________________________ * Narrow specialization

19. Barbarism of Specialism • Who then cares for society as a whole? It seems that with few exceptions, we have in our midst economists who formulate policies as if people do not matter, scientists who pursue knowledge uninformed by social considerations, artists who create for other artists and art experts alone, politicians who place party interests above all else, and officials more worried about self-preservation than their people’s well being. These things are now common knowledge and much thought and study have already been made on the “barbarism of specialism”. Can we educate the Filipinos, whether formally and non-formally, against this barbarism?

20. The Monstrous Cultural Divide • Colonial, narrowly specialized education paradoxically creates a situation where our most educated class, paradoxically, turns out to be the least nationalistic Filipinos - an elite with whom the colonial powers could easily collaborate. • A serious consequence of this is cultural fragmentation. In the Philippines, this created the monstrous cultural divide between the Western-educated ruling elite and the more or less culturally indigenous majority.

21. The Monstrous Cultural Divide • Without a common cultural identity there is no common action. A culturally fragmented and atomized mass is the worst conceivable source material for the development process. We have a soft state because of self-serving elite intervention and manipulation. As a result, the culture of the bureaucracy, including the police and the military, is more attuned to the needs and values of the elite than to the vast majority of Filipinos.

22. A people can only be united by the things they love, and divided by the things they hate. • Generations of contempt for Filipinos by the colonizers have been imbibed by many Filipinos themselves, especially by the ruling elites, who were most exposed to Western rule. This is largely the source of their feeling of privilege, disregard of, and abusiveness towards Filipinos beneath their class and their notorious disrespect for the laws of the nation they themselves helped make. • Actually, as a research of SWS has indicated, it is this class who have the lowest regard for themselves as Filipinos, having been the most conditioned to idolize Western ways. Their low regard for Filipinos is in reality an expression of self-contempt.

23. Anything positive about themselves always unites a people • If we are to become one nation, we have to begin deconstructing the very negative self-images that have been ingrained in us by centuries of colonial misrule and miseducation, especially among the elites who are the power wielders and thus have the greatest responsibility to serve and be one with our people. We can never erect a viable nation if we continue to denigrate ourselves, even in the presence of foreigners.

24. Pride, Commitment and Excellence • Lack of pride in being Filipino results in lack of commitment to the nation and, consequently, a low level of achievement or even mediocrity, the “pwede na ‘yan” mentality.For the anthropologist Dr. F. Landa Jocano, pride, commitment and excellence are inseparable.

25. Social Self-Images As Self-Fulfilling: The Need to Develop a Strong Shared Vision • It is the image a people create of themselves that is the psycho-cultural basis of their strengths and weaknesses, triumphs and failures. For a nation’s self-image tends to be self-fulfilling(Kenneth Boulding, The Image). If in our minds we think we will be defeated, we have already lost. If we think we are an inferior people, we will tend to lower our standards and be satisfied with good enough. Negative self-images, whether individual or collective, can cause untold social and cultural damage. • We have nothing to lose by creating and working for the most exalted and inspiring images of ourselves, especially because we are a highly relational, holistic, participatory and creative people with a strong nurturing and caring orientation.

26. Balancing Individual Freedom with Sense of Community • What our schools need is to have a balanced general education, one that can promote the Western ideals of individual freedom as well as the profound and lasting Asian values of communal togetherness, national unity, spiritual oneness of humanity and, especially, the Filipino ideal ofpakikipagkapwa, whose deepest meaning is “shared goodness” or “shared divinity”.

27. DEVELOPING A FILIPINO AND HUMANISTIC PERSPECTIVE Curriculum and policy research can lay the basis forprograms that can: 1. Heighten social consciousness and sense of responsibility to the nation by • Making students know deeply the history and cultural geography of the Filipino people, with emphasis on local strengths. • Broadly situating in a socio-cultural context the teaching of highly technical courses, especially in the professional colleges. • Dwelling on Filipino psychologies of kapwa, cooperation and communal ways.

28. DEVELOPING A FILIPINO AND HUMANISTIC PERSPECTIVE • Maintaining core subjects or themes on: What it means to be human and Filipino, Sustainable living and understanding of the ecology, Realization of creative potential, etc. • Imparting truly interdisciplinary perspectives that broaden intellectual horizons and promote multiple intelligences and demonstrate the interconnectedness of all phenomena. • Establishing, especially for the youth, pasyal-aral activities for cultural immersion and increasing face to face interactions for social understanding among Filipinos

29. DEVELOPING A FILIPINO AND HUMANISTIC PERSPECTIVE 2. Promote people participation, local genius and cultural diversity • Identifying local cultural genius and promote it nationally, based on the assumption that we are bound together by the good or the positive • Affirming local cultures to enhance cultural energy and productivity. To achieve this the educational system must be culturally rooted, appropriate to the conditions under which most Filipinos live, and relevant to their needs. Indigenous concepts and ideas, knowledge systems and practices, forms of expression, traditional arts and native languages that continue to exist today are the basis for a culturally-rooted education because they are in consonance with our psyche and our needs, containing wisdom tested through time. Local genius or indigenous strengths are the chief cultural and economic resource of a community.

30. DEVELOPING A FILIPINO AND HUMANISTIC PERSPECTIVE 3. Demonstrate that the arts are not isolated from other cultural phenomena, and are the most lucid mirrors of social consciousness • The arts do not exist in a vacuum. Every artistic statement is also a political one, even from the most seemingly, innocuous decorative ones. There is no escape from social responsibility. Its either you are promoting art for the common people, for the elite, or for the nation as a whole. “For whom does the artist create?” can always be asked. • Interdisciplinary, world arts, arts and ideas, comparative and other expansive approaches to art studies can be an antidote to specialistic innocence • Participation in artistic creation is for all

31. Promoting the Local But Thinking National or Global: Human Communities, not the State, are the Ultimate Actors in the Development Process • In mainstream development thinking, the state is always seen as the social agent or subject of the development process. From a human development perspective, human beings or small communities of human beings, are the ultimate actors. Most states are, after all, artificial territorial constructions, usually the result of international wars or internal colonialism. • The concept of a nation-state implies that the territorial boundaries of the state coincide with the boundaries of a culturally homogeneous nation. This is the exception rather than the rule in a world with about thousands of culturally diverse peoples but only about 200 states.

32. Promoting the Local But Thinking National or Global: Human Communities, not the State, are the Ultimate Actors in the Development Process • We have to encourage celebration of the unique cultural identities of cultural communities through various activities and expressive forms to provide for communication and sustainable development. Failure to do this may lead to violence, deviant behavior, depression, and suicide. Positive programs can encourage harmony and engagement in society. Underlying these programs is the attitude of tolerance and respect for cultural diversity. • A nation’s development, then, can be viewed as proceeding along apparently divergent directions, one, towards a shared cultural universe at the national level and two, towards the greatest possible intracultural diversity at the local level.