On February 2007, Atheista wrote a post on Chiz Escudero for a Dumber Philippines. I’m going to quote the same privilege speech because ironically the house server couldn’t open it out:

So here goes the privilege speech:

Mr. Speaker, ang isang dahilan kung bakit kada taon marami tayong classrooms na kinakailangan ay dahil napakaraming nasisira sa kakulangan ng supisyenteng pondo para i-maintain at i-repair lang sana ang mga classrooms na ito.

Secondly, Mr. Speaker, we should and we propose that the curriculum be restudied. Mr. Speaker, I know that this will generate a lot of debate but I hope that our colleagues will listen for awhile. Sa ngayon, umaabot sa nine to eleven ang subjects ng ating mga estudyante sa elementary at high school. Nakukuba na ang ating mga estudyante sa kakabitbit ng napakaraming libro. Subalit ang tanong ko ho: Ito ba ay angkop pa rin sa pangangailangan ng ating bansa sa ngayon? Ang kanila po bang pinag-aralan ay nagagamit nila sa kanilang buhay sa labas ng paaralan at magagamit kapagka sila ay naghanap ng trabaho?

I can only cite myself as an example, Mr. Speaker, but mula po nung natapos ako nung high school hindi ko pa nagamit ang Calculus, hindi ko pa ho nagamit and Trigonometry, hindi ko pa ho nagamit and Algebra, IYUNG GEOMETRY, SA BILYAR KO LANG NAGAMIT. At iyong mga ibang itinuturo ay marapat sigurong ituro sa kolehiyo kung nais maging inhinyero ng isang bata. Iyong mga ibang itinuturo, marapat sigurong ibigay na lamang nating sa kanila sa kolehiyo o bilang elective pagdating ng high school.

This isn’t about defending the current state of education in the Philippines, which has been discussed time and time again by The Jester-in-Exile and blackshama (update: must read, btw those two articles, which show insight into education). This is about building and designing the future and Mr. Escudero seemingly, in spite of his youth, doesn’t have the understanding, imagination nor courage to do it. To a certain extent, so far, none of those thinking of running or planning to run seem to have it as well.

If you’ve been reading my posts for quite sometime, you’re probably so sick of me quoting Sir Ken Robinson’s TedTalk on why schools kill creativity:

But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel round the world; every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects, everyone. It doesn’t matter where you go. You think it would be otherwise, but it isn’t. At the top are Mathematics and Languages, then the Humanities, and at the bottom are the Arts, everywhere on earth. And in pretty much every system too. There’s a hierarchy within the Arts; Art and Music are normally given a higher status in schools than Drama and Dance. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches Dance everyday to children the way we teach them Mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think Math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they are allowed to, will do. We all have bodies, don’t we? Did I miss a meeting? Truthfully what happens is as children grow up we start to educate them progressively from the waist up and then we focus on their heads and slightly to one side.

If you were to visit education as an alien and say, ‘what is it for? Public education‘. I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output… Who really succeeds? Who does everything they should? Who gets all the Brownie points? Who are the winners? I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education, throughout the world, is to produce university professors, isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top and I used to be one, so there! You know, and I like university professors, but, you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life, you know, another form of life. But they’re rather curious and I say this out of affection for them. There’s something curious about professors in my experience, not all of them, but typically they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. You know, they look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. You know, it’s… don’t they? It’s a way of getting their heads to meetings. If you want real evidence of out of body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics and pop into the discotheque on the final night. And there you will see it; grown men and women writhing uncontrollably off the beat, waiting to end so that they can go home and write a paper about it.

Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability and there’s a reason; the whole system was invented round the world there were no public systems of education really before the 19th Century, they all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is reasoned on two ideas; number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you had probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don’t do music you are not going to be a musician. Don’t do art, because you won’t be an artist. Benign advice. Now profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of human intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance and the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at in school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatised and I think we can’t afford to go on that way.

In the next thirty years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history, more people. And it’s the combination of all the things we’ve talked about; technology and it’s transformational effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly degrees aren’t worth anything, isn‘t that true? When I was a student if you had a degree, you had a job if you didn’t have a job it was because you didn’t want one. And I didn’t want one, frankly. But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games. Because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA and now you need a PH D for the other. It’s a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet.

(emphasis, mine).

We live in the 21st Century and though sometimes it doesn’t seem like so, the world is moving towards a technological and digital universe. War is being fought via remote control, flying UAVs, governments are attacked left and right using the Internet. That is just the beginning. Everything we do from shopping to communicating with each other is done in a digital universe. Whether or not it is medicine, public service, architecture, even cruise ships are seeing massive transformation. And behold they use math and computers and the basis, the infrastructure of those things run on things like Calculus and the hard sciences. Music has its basis on Math, as well. We need literature and an understanding of sciences. They go hand in hand. They’re not mutually exclusive.

The sciences also make us less superstitious and in my humble opinion makes us more religious, if we choose to see it that way.

Not surprisingly too, the future of digital media, require tomorrow’s graduate to be verse not just in the technical aspect but in the creative side, the arts as well.

The point is, if we make education simply geared towards making employees to find jobs that is doing our people a great disservice. That’s not education at all. Schools become factories. I’m well aware of the stark reality: jobs to feed the family. That’s not an excuse for making people smarter, nor opening whole new worlds.

I’m also well aware that all men are created equal, meaning having equal rights, but not all men are exactly created the same way. Some are smarter. Some are faster. Some have a talent for cooking. Some have a talent for other things. If we do not shift Education to be geared at making a person, we’re creating generations of slaves. We’ve got to see Filipinos for the boundless possibility that they are: human beings.

Tomorrow is about a total human being: a creative intelligence. We must reconstitute our conception of the richness of the Filipino capacity. So I ask you this: If all Filipinos would disappear tomorrow, would it make a difference, at all?

I don’t think our politicians whether Escudero or the rest of them realize this. I hope I’m wrong but a vote for Escudero, in particular, as well as every candidate running for public office, so far, is a vote against Geekdom. It is a vote for a dumber Philippines. It is a vote for making future Filipinos the underclass of the world. That’s just gut wrenching. Filipinos are better than that. There is so much more out there. There is a rich Filipino capacity, we should have the willpower to unleash it.

Oh, before you comment below, If you haven’t had a chance to read ‘em: Benign0 wrote about Platform, plez and Primer asked “President Panilio?” and I think both are must reads going into the next presidential election.

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