THE MOUNTAINEER

Education: The great leveler
Edison L. Baddal

It is June once again. Being the start of the school year, schools open wide their portals once more to welcome back students into their fold. As usual, the hustle and bustle of activities within the school environs accompanied such opening.

Typically, the kaleidoscope of scenes that materialize during the season include teachers and school staff rushing to and fro to prepare and refurbish classrooms, personnel readying school paraphernalia and others setting in place important school odds and ends.

Offices, too, become noisy beehives of activities. Of course, topping it all is the slow moving and long queue of students in counters to transact business. These arrays of activities usually confound staffers so some get snappy and edgy what with a plethora of transactions to attend to, particularly when some students become obstreperous and intractable.

Their frazzled nerves having been relaxed by the two-month vacation, students are no less fired up and raring to continue from where they have left off prior thereto. At some point, boredom may have marred their vacation and they certainly fidgeted to get back into the groove of schooling.

From hereon it won’t be fun as face the travails of hectic school activities. Such will be their lot and occupation for the next 10 months with almost no time for gallivanting (for those who take their studies seriously, I mean).

Meanwhile, queue lines quizzically manifest a microcosm of equality. This is so as queue lines, that invariable feature of every school opening, is governed by the unwritten but well-organized rule that those ahead in line should be attended to first.

There is absolutely no preferential treatment accorded to anyone in the line. Any attempt then by anyone in the line to throw his weight around to get ahead of his turn will surely get him under the skin of the rest. It is somewhat of a paradox to watch those off springs of well-to-do families patiently waiting for their turn at the queue line with those not so endowed.
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In retrospect, the stages in the development of education from the pre-Christian era up to the ultra-modern era is stupefying, to say the least. In ancient Greece , Socrates conducted his lectures to his students under the shade of trees. When Jesus Christ Himself was fulfilling His earthly ministry, He conducted lectures on the shores, atop a hill, inside synagogues, private homes, open grasslands and public plazas. At present, schools are housed in behemoth buildings which is a far cry from the ancient times and simply unimaginable by then. During Socrates’ time, students did not pay tuition fees as it was purely voluntary and informal with no organized activities.

When education became organized and structured later academies were set up. But these were installed more for training able-bodied men in military science and fighting skills. This was especially true during the time of the warmongering Greek leaders like Philip of Macedonia or Pericles. But even so, other disciplines like Philosophy, Arts and letters were integrated in the subjects in those military schools. By then, education was fully subsidized by the government.
The commercialization of education most likely started during the middle ages when catholic ecclesiastical authorities set up private schools independent of government coffers. For such schools to pay their own way, enrollment fees were charged.

Since then the practice has been perpetuated and at present it is being carried out with more savvy and gumption. Nowadays, education is very much commercialized with Ivy League schools charging exorbitant fees that only moneyed people could afford. In the case of state schools and colleges, they are subsidized by the government but only to some extent as basic fees are still charged from students for maintenance and other purposes.
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Perhaps, the importance of education may have been first realized when Socrates emphasized the improvement of virtues among children of Greek citizens. At that time, he urged them to treat the instruction in virtues in same level of importance with their responsibility to provide wealth and food to their children. He likened the noncultivation of virtues among children as akin to that of a horse who is fed well “but never trained.”

Bluntly, he stressed that although food nourishes the body and wealth provides comfort, both cannot improve the mind. He added wealth may be necessary to make one’s way into the uncertain paths of life but an improved mind enhances one’s way. That’s how he valued education and in the process treated ignorance with much disdain.

This attitude was evident when he professed that “it is better to be unborn than to be ignorant, as ignorance is the root of all misfortunes.” It is thus that the mind should be developed well so as to conquer the evils of ignorance, illiteracy and blight.

Percy Bysshe Chelley averred that if any individual “is worth anything, he should spend his manhood unlearning the follies, or expiating for the mistakes of his youth” (Sic). As youth is a period of carefree behavior, shallow thinking, purposeless ventures and oftentimes, misguided decision, education uncovers such follies with mechanisms devised to correct them.
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On a personal level, my mother bewailed her illiteracy all her life. Unable to read, write and perform simple computations, she always reminded us to take our studies seriously to eschew her plight. I always sensed a seething vexation in her towards her old folks whenever she relates how they forbade her to go with her friends to school when she reached school age.

She related that her parents beat her up whenever she forced herself to go to school with her friends. This was because she was given the task of looking after her younger brother while they worked in the fields. When she came of age, she was tied down by her parents to tedious farm work. Hence, among all her siblings, she is the only one who never tasted school so she became a benighted woman throughout her life. Fortunately, in deference to her admonitions all us, her children, managed to achieve a college education save for the youngest.
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For all its worth, education is acknowledged as a potent tool for upward social mobilization. In a poor country like the Philippines , education is generally perceived as a poor man’s avenue for improvement of his lot. It is a means to a more comfortable life.

The bulk of Philippine households, as in the Cordillera, belong to the low economic rung which barely subsist on below poverty line income. Thus, ranged against such a deplorable backdrop, having a college degree is a big deal to a poor and downtrodden man who is usually not accorded much deference in a community.

Being a poor man’s tool also to penetrate the world of decent employment, gain a foothold in big time companies, or simply to maximize one’s potentials, it is likewise a passport to a gravy train or access to rub elbows and shoulders with the rich and powerful. Being such a big deal, it goes without saying that it is a road by which a poor man could redeem his dignity and decency.

Hence, we oftentimes hear a solicitous and doting parent admonishing his kid with this oft-repeated reminder: “Haan tayo nga nabaknang, anak ko, isunga pangaasim ta ipapatim nga makaadal ka. Ikarigatan mi met nga aramiden iti amin nga pamuspusan tapnu matustusan ti panagadal mo.” (“We are not rich, my child, so try your darndest best to finish your studies. We will likewise do everything we can to support your studies.”)

In an agricultural and backward country like ours, lack of college diploma usually results in one moiling as husbandmen under insufferable tropical heat in the bucolic milieu. Or engaged in unskilled labor in big factories owned by oligarchs or cartels who have no qualms squeezing out every seat from laborer’s brows for low pay. Or it also causes one to end subsisting on the munificent bounties of the sea.In effect, as a means for a secure future, a college diploma is a leverage for an employment away from moiling in the farms or engaged in a toilsome and humdrum existence.

Indeed, a poor man having no capacity to join those in the aristocracy of wealth, power and influence can give the latter a run for their mental prowess by becoming a member of the aristocracy of the intellect through education.

The capacities of the mind being boundless and many poor people having been enable to achieve power through education, it can thus be concluded that education is a great leveler in the same way as that of a disaster and other providential incidents.