Tag Archives: education

Qwertyman No. 86: The Real Pasaways

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 25, 2024

THE LOCAL Internet came down hard last week on an anonymous teacher who was caught on livestream giving her students a scorching tongue-lashing for what she claimed was their lack of respect and discipline. Almost hysterical, Teacher X called them good-for-nothings without a future. Predictably, netizens deplored her derogatory language, which they equated with child abuse, and called on the Department of Education to investigate the incident and impose some disciplinary measure on the teacher concerned.

I agree that Ma’am seems to have gone overboard in expressing her displeasure over her students’ misbehavior, and that she could have been more circumspect in her choice of words. I’m certain that DepEd—which happens to be headed by someone who doesn’t mince words herself when it comes to court sheriffs—will use her case to remind teachers of the need for exemplary behavior, if not some sweetness and light, in classroom management. 

At the same time, having been a teacher myself for forty years, I can imagine and understand the exasperation that must have gone into a titanic diatribe like that. I’ve never taught in elementary or high school, where these aggravations come in spades on both sides of the teacher’s table, but I’ve heard and read enough to know what a cauldron of high emotions a Filipino classroom can be in the worst of circumstances. 

Let’s pack a room meant for twenty students with twice that number or even more, with the heat from a tin roof bearing down on everyone (or, in another season, rain leaking down onto desks and textbooks). The teacher recites her lesson in a funereal monotone, expecting her students (who keep themselves awake by sneaking glances at TikTok on their phones) to regurgitate what she has just said: “Class, how do you pronounce a-DO-le-scent?” 

Not that she truly cares what they say, because her mind’s on the box of chocolates she has to buy for the supervisor whose signature she needs for her salary loan. She’ll spend half that loan on a fence around her garden to keep the roaming pigs and pissing drunks away, and the other half on a new cellphone because her arch-rival Mrs. Buenafe has one that can take selfies without the blemishes. Maybe, if she took better pictures of herself, she could win back her husband Temyong from that tramp in Trece Martires.

Just then a fight breaks out at the back of the room because Etoy has dropped a ballpen to sneak a look at Corito’s underwear, in full view of Corito’s alleged boyfriend Mikmik. “Stop that, quiet, gademet, you imbecile a-DO-lescents, I order you to behave or I’ll squeeze your little balls until they pop! You have no future, you worthless pasaways! You’re going to rot in this living hell they call a classroom!”

Now, when Teacher X says “You have no future,” I take it to mean that Ma’am has read the Edcom II report on the sad state of Philippine education, which puts our young learners practically at the cellar of global achievement. Unless some systemic reforms are put in place by the same DepEd that will now trumpet the virtues of better decorum in the classroom, we might as well have cursed those kids that caused Teacher X to blow her top—and by “curse” I don’t mean the use of foul language, but rather a hex such as a witch might put on some unfortunate soul. 

Philippine education is full of pasaways, many of them more than ten or even fifteen years old. Some have been in the system for so long that they have mastered its ways and means (e.g., how to make good money off bad textbooks) to a level of proficiency worthy of a doctorate. Secretaries of Education come and go—some more lamented than others—but these pasaways remain, as they do in certain bureaus dealing with government revenues, because they ensure continuity, which everyone but the occasional and hopelessly naive reformer appreciates. They may even be well-mannered, with the nicest smiles and mildest dispositions you ever saw, because of their contentment with the world as it is and their philosophical acceptance of human frailty.

This brings to mind another kind of pasaway, a certain man of God—no, make that Son of God—who has steadfastly refused to honor a summons by a Senate committee looking into sex trafficking, of which this pastor has been accused, among other crimes and misdemeanors. Let me judged by the proper court, he has argued through his lawyers, although—if he is who he claims to be—then no one but God the Father will qualify for that privilege.

God must have been a prolific babymaker, because this prosperous preacher is but one of many around the world proclaiming themselves to be Sons of God. Nearly all have landed in some kind of trouble with the law, usually in matters of sex and money, paltry and mundane emoluments that Sons of God seem to feel especially entitled to, in partial recompense for the heavy burdens of divinity.

Someone should have assured our good pastor that the Senate is a decorous institution, exceedingly kind to its guests, as a recent hearing involving police officials being questioned by a former police official showed. A senator who walked out of that hearing out of disgust over the “babying” shown the witnesses by their inquisitor now himself stands accused of discourtesy. Notwithstanding the presence of a chairperson known for her intolerance of untruths, our Son of God can surely count on the professed and unshakeable friendship of some of her honorable colleagues to shelter him from the slings and arrows of earthly justice. We are a much kinder people than that apoplectic teacher might suggest.

Qwertyman No. 83: It Isn’t Just Money

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 4, 2023

MY RECENT column titled “An F for Philippine Education” apparently struck a chord among many readers who messaged me to say how appalled they were by the findings of the Second Congressional Commission on Education or Edcom II. Released just last January, the commission’s report graphically displayed just how poorly young Filipinos are faring in their schooling, especially when compared to the Asian neighbors they’ll be competing with for jobs down the road. 

To recapitulate just one particularly distressing finding, our best high-school learners are performing at a level comparable to the worst of Singapore. I read as much as I could of the report not just to be able to write about it, but—as an educator myself—to find out how this disaster happened.

There’s clearly a lot of blame to be thrown around for this situation, but to be fair, the report makes it clear at the outset that Philippine education’s systemic failures and shortcomings go back many decades, to problems being recognized by previous studies (notably Edcom I in the early 1990s) but left unattended rather than decisively acted upon. 

“This report was not crafted to point fingers,” say the report’s framers. “Our intention, instead, was to find things out and to instill a sense of urgency, along with a sense of doability—a clear horizon, and perhaps a sketch of the map toward that horizon.”

Its noble intentions notwithstanding, the report is a 400-page indictment of what successive Philippine administrations have failed to do, and it isn’t like they didn’t know or weren’t told. There’s been a plethora of studies of Philippine education between the two Edcoms in the 30 years separating them, and they’ve identified many of the same chronic problems plaguing the system today. The report identifies 28 “priority areas” such as governance and financing, in each of which specific problems and their implied solutions are discussed. 

One aspect that drew my attention was that of funding, which many of us, including myself, have thought to be the big problem of Philippine education: throw more money at it, and maybe it will go away. It turns out to not be the case, or in the very least, not the only major issue. Our “more” still isn’t enough, and even with more, the money needs to be spent, and spent wisely.

At the time of Edcom I, the report notes that the Philippine government spent only 2.7% of GDP on education, rising to 3.6% from 2014 to 2022, and to a high of 3.9% in 2017 (do take note that these are percentages of Gross Domestic Product, not the national budget). That comes very close to the global minimum of 4.0% set by the Incheon Declaration, but still falls short of Malaysia’s 4.2% and Singapore’s incredible 25.8% in 2018. Even so, our expenditures on education are rising to an average of 16 to 17% of the national budget for 2023 and 2024, compared to 10.7% in 1987.

Nevertheless, we still spend significantly less on education than our Asian neighbors, and the PISA results show a direct correlation between levels of spending on education and national scores in math, reading, and science. It’s also possible that we’re spending our education money in the wrong places. The report notes that “Between 2015 and 2020, increased government allocations to education were actually mostly at the tertiary level, with per student expenditure rising from only P13,206 to P29,507. In contrast, during the same period, investments at the primary level modestly improved and even fluctuated.”

And it seems like in some cases, we’re not even spending it at all. As I noted in my earlier column, from 2018 to 2022 alone, the Department of Education had a total budget of P12.6 billion allocated to textbooks and other instructional materials, but only P4.5 billion or about a third of this was obligated and only P952 million or less than 8% of it was disbursed for only 27 textbooks for Grades 1 to 10, since 2012. The budget of the Commission on Higher Education grew by 633% from 2013 to 2023, but it wasn’t spent on the additional people that its expanding responsibilities required, with its staffing complement increasing by only 22.7%, from 543 to 666 within the same period. 

There’s a lot of room for reform in education, but Edcom II zeroed in on a problem even more basic than funding in trying to change things—one of institutional culture. “Scholars have criticized the sector’s inability to implement reforms due to frequent changes in leadership, resistance to change within the government, and the agency’s ‘culture of obeisance’ (Bautista et al., 2008)—a bureaucracy accustomed to jaded compliance.”

This reminded me of a point raised by a reader named Peter Traenkner, an expat who recently visited Norway where their youngest son and his family live.

“Almost everybody admires the Nordic educational system,” Peter wrote me. “Their economic growth took off just after 1870, way before their welfare states were established. What really launched the Nordic nations (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland) was generations of phenomenal educational policy. The 19th-century Nordic elites realized that if their countries were to prosper they had to create truly successful ‘folk schools’ for the best educated among them. 

“They realized that they were going to have to make lifelong learning a part of the natural fabric of society. Education meant for them the complete moral, emotional, intellectual and civic transformation of the person. For them education is intended to change the way students see the world, to help them understand complex systems and see the relations between things—between self and society, between a community of relationships in a family and a town.

“The Nordic educators worked hard to cultivate each student’s sense of connection to the nation: ‘That which a person did not burn for in his young years, he will not easily burn for as a man.’ That educational push seems to have had a lasting influence on the culture. All Nordic countries have the lowest rates of corruption in the world. They have a distinctive sense of the relationship between freedom and communal responsibility.

“High social trust doesn’t just happen. It results when people are spontaneously responsible for one another in the daily interaction of life, when institutions of society function well. When you look at the Nordic educational system, you realize that the problem is not only training people with the right job skills. It’s having the right lifelong development model to instill the mode of consciousness people need to thrive in a complex pluralistic society.”

In other words, we have to remember that education is about much more than teaching people the right skills so they can become good workers and earn good money. It has to teach them good citizenship, and their stake in the success of the nation.

Qwertyman No. 81: An F for Philippine Education

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Qwertyman for Monday, February 19, 2024

AN IMPORTANT document that’s been showing up in the inboxes and on the desks of both government and private-sector policymakers these past couple of weeks leaves no room in its title for misinterpretation: “Miseducation: The Failed System of Philippine Eduation.” Released last month by the Second Congressional Commission on Education or Edcom II, the report covers just the first year of the commission’s comprehensive review of the state of Philippine education. But the scenario it presents is so grim that, in the words of one of its crafters, “If this were Singapore, they would be declaring a national emergency.”

But then again, that may be the whole point. We are no Singapore—and indeed one of the report’s most damning and embarrassing findings is that “Our best learners are comparable only to the average student in Malaysia, Thailand, Brunei and Vietnam, and correspond to the worst performers in Singapore.”

Edcom II picks up from where its predecessor left off more than three decades ago, when Edcom I was set up under the leadership of then Sen. Edgardo J. Angara to undertake a similar review. In July 2022, RA 11899 created Edcom II to find ways of harnessing the educational sector “with the end in view of making the Philippines globally competitive in both education and labor markets” over the next three years. Edcom II was also charged with drafting the necessary laws to make this happen. It’s just begun its work, with in-depth studies and assessments of our educational system from the ground up, but its early findings already show how difficult the road ahead will be toward the global competitiveness the commission was set up for.

I’ll just quote a few observations from a summary of the highlights of the nearly 400-page full report: 

In terms of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) undertaken by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2018 and 2002, “Grade 10 Filipinos scored lowest among all ASEAN countries in Math, Reading, and Science, besting only Cambodia, with more than 75% of our learners scoring lower than Level 2, or the minimum level of proficiency in Math, Reading, and Science…. Grade 10 Filipinos scored lowest among all ASEAN countries in Math, Reading, and Science, besting only Cambodia, with more than 75% of our learners scoring lower than Level 2, or the minimum level of proficiency in Math, Reading, and Science.” This was the same survey that showed our best learners barely catching up with Singapore’s laggards.

“The proficiency level of our children across social class, rural and urban residence, gender, language at home, type of school, and early childhood center attendance is dismally low.” This means that our deficiencies cut across the social and economic spectrum and can’t be put down to just a question of money.

To underscore the global crisis in education (yes, it isn’t just us), the World Bank and UNESCO have come up with the concept of “learning poverty,” which they define as a child’s inability to read and understand a simple text by age 10. Among some Asian countries recently surveyed for learning poverty, Singapore and South Korea scored the lowest at 3; China came in at 18, India at 56, and the Philippines was highest at 91.

And for those who insistently argue that the problem with our education is that we don’t use English enough, and early enough, Vietnam, which uses Vietnamese as its medium of instruction in the primary grades, has consistently outscored us in nearly all indices, as have Malaysia and other countries that rely on their own languages to move ahead.

A good part of the report dwells on how important it is for government to intervene as early as possible in our children’s growth and development, to prime them for a proper education. Edcom II looked into the problem of “stunting,” a measure of childhood maldevelopment, most easily seen when children are too short for their age, because of malnutrition or poor health. This has implications for the child’s ability to learn.

“The Philippines has one of the highest prevalence of stunting under-five in the world at 26.7%, greater than the global average of 22.3%. Policies are in place, but implementation has been fragmented, coverage remains low, and targeting of interventions has been weak.” (For example, more than 98% or 4.5 million children 2-3 years old are not covered by the DSWD’s supplementary feeding program.)

Here’s another eye-popping revelation: “Since 2012, only 27 textbooks have been procured for Grade 1 to Grade 10, despite  substantial budget allocations. DepEd’s budget utilization data shows that from 2018 to 2022 alone, a total of P12.6 billion has been allocated to textbooks and other instructional materials, but only P4.5 billion (35.3%) has been obligated and P952 million (7.5%) has been disbursed.” Not to mention the fact that many of these textbooks are riddled with errors!

Higher education presents its own host of problems and challenges. “Higher education participation is high given our income level,” the report notes. However, “Access to ‘quality’ higher education narrowed in the last decade…. Most beneficiaries of the tertiary education subsidy were not the poorest…. Between 2018 and 2022, the proportion of the poorest of the poor [in higher education] declined markedly, from 74% to 31%.”

A key part of the problem is the quality of our teachers, who themselves are poorly educated. “Between 2009 and 2023, the average passing rate in the licensure examinations for elementary (33%) and secondary (40%) has been dismally low, when compared to passing rates in other professions. Worse, between 2012 and 2022, 77 HEIs offering BEEd and 105 HEIs offering BSEd continued operations despite having consistently zero passing rates in the LET.”

Our supervisory agencies themselves need to be properly staffed. “The staffing levels in CHED and TESDA have not kept pace with the growing responsibilities of the agencies and the increased investments in education from both the public and private sectors. 

CHED’s budget increased by 633% from 2013 to 2023, but the agency’s staffing complement only increased by 22.7%, from 543 to 666 within the same period.”

The money’s clearly there, but it’s not being spent where it should be. “Budget allocated to education is increasing, but there is a tertiary tilt despite profound gaps in basic education….While government investments have increased substantially, the bulk of the additional resources went to higher education–which is typically regressive. From 2015 to 2019 per capita spending surged from P13,206 to P29,507. Meanwhile profound gaps remain in Early Childhood Care and Development and basic education…. 30–70% of the school MOOE budget is spent on utility bills alone, which leaves meager funds available for improvement projects and initiatives that could address local needs and support better learning.”

We could go on and on—and the full report (downloadable at https://edcom2.gov.ph/) does. But you get the picture: Philippine education gets an F. The question is, will our national leadership recognize this as the national emergency that it clearly is, and respond accordingly?

Qwertyman No. 47: An Open Door

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Qwertyman for June 26, 2023

A FEW weekends ago, the traffic was tied up in knots around the University of the Philippines campus in Diliman, where we live, and we knew why. Many thousands of high school seniors hoping to enter UP were taking the university’s UPCAT or entrance exam, which had gone back to its old physical, face-to-face format after two years of being suspended in favor of a statistical formula because of the pandemic. This year, over 100,000 applicants took the UPCAT, out of whom about a tenth will be taken in, the actual number of admissions being determined by the capacity of UP’s eight “constituent universities” like UP Los Bañ0s and UP Mindanao, aside from Diliman, to absorb new freshmen.

As a campus resident and now a retired professor who still teaches a course every semester (an option I avail myself of, just to keep my foot in the classroom and know what the young people are thinking), I witness this ritual every year, and smile every time I see those bright and eager faces, squinting at the sun and looking a little lost; the first challenge every UP freshman faces is finding out where things are and the fastest way to get from Point A to Point B. 

That’s literally thinking on your feet, which is a survival skill we inculcate in our students. If there’s a smarter way to solve a problem than brute force, we’ll find it. (I recall how, in the middle of an exam for a Shakespeare class which I usually aced, I was stumped for the right answer, and in despair just responded with a quotation from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “So quick bright things come to confusion!” My professor let me off with a 1.25.)

Frankly or perhaps unkindly, UP people are called pilosopo, magulang, or maangas by those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the forthrightness and cleverness that our academic culture encourages. At worst, we’re called “godless communists” by those who don’t see how packed our chapels and parking lots are (although of course, today, the most successful communists are called oligarchs). On this point, I can guarantee you that no one can be more annoyed if not enraged by a UP person than another UP person; our faculty feuds are legendary. Indeed that has become a liability with some employers who prefer to hire graduates who will simply do as they’re told without asking “Why?”

“Why?” may indeed be the wrong entry-level thing to say, but it’s also what has moved science and society forward, quickly followed by “How?” If no one asked it, we’d still be chasing animals over clifftops for food and sacrificing our first-borns for bigger harvests. This urge to apply reason to the most basic of human and natural functions again can be occasionally irritating, especially when it is accompanied by the unflinching (or perhaps juvenile) certitude that one is absolutely right. 

As a teenage activist in Diliman, I was sure that the only way out of the mess we were (and continue to be) in was an armed revolution; Marxist logic said so. Approaching 70, I’m just glad that I lived long enough to reason my way out of it, but looking back at that pimply 17-year-old who carried Harry Shaw’s College English in one hand and Mao’s Little Red Book in the other, I can understand why I thought the way I did. And no, it wasn’t like my professors force-fed me with rebellious notions. I was a reasonably bright kid who read the news—murders and massacres here, extreme poverty and hunger there, corruption and scandal all around, with few of our leaders seeming to care—and I was looking for a comprehensive and compelling framework to explain all this and map out a route forward. The Left offered that.

It’s important to note that then, as now, most UP students and certainly most Filipino students didn’t feel the same way and do as I and my comrades did, which was to put activism over academics. Our protests may have hogged the headlines and typecast UP for good as a school for rebels (although it had been a hotbed of student protest since Quezon’s time), but the majority of UP students then continued attending their classes, turning in their assignments, and picking up their diplomas, as was their right. Like I often emphasize, as vocal dissidents, we were (and are) in a distinct minority. That comes with the territory of resistance—not just in a university but in society as a whole.

Given what’s happened since, were we wrong to protest and did we waste our youth (and, as some politicians and red-tag-happy trolls might say, our people’s money as well)? Some of us persisted and stayed on that path; many paid with their lives, or devoted the entirety of their lives to their cause. Some turned 180 degrees and now rabidly renounce their past, casting their lot with their former enemies. Some, like me, now see moderate liberalism as the only viable way forward—to endure and survive, gaining ground from one generation and one community to the next, instead of in one fell swoop. Somehow I understand all of these outcomes, which are all human, all fallible, and none of them assured of success. I can only be hopeful, and not certain, that my option is the best one.

As I looked at the UPCAT examinees posing for selfies in front of the Carillon and the Oblation in Diliman, I remembered that eight UP students are now facing charges for their recent attempt to storm past a closed door at Quezon Hall to protest an unpopular decision by the Board of Regents. Among the complainants’ grievances, ostensibly, was that the wooden door was part of UP’s heritage, and had to be protected at all costs.

That saddened me, because the last image that one could imagine to stand for a university like UP is that of a closed and impregnable door. UP’s true heritage doesn’t lie in its furniture but in its tradition of free speech, and even of protest, the occasional overflow of passion included. I can only pray that UP’s new and compassionate president, Jijil Jimenez, can draw on his own activist past to see that point, and to keep an open door for his constituents to his mind and heart.

Qwertyman No. 42: Life Lessons for the College Student

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Qwertyman for May 22, 2023

TWO YEARS ago, well before I began writing this column, I was asked to share some thoughts with fellow teachers of General Education—that special recipe of college courses in various disciplines meant to give incoming students a basic but challenging introduction to the issues of life and society. Instead of giving a lecture, I decided to come up with a list of 12 “life lessons” that I thought every undergrad should learn, one way or another, over their four years in college. I’d like to share them here as well, with further notes from me in parentheses, to reach a larger audience—and yes, even well beyond college. Here goes:

1. You don’t have to understand everything right away. In any case, you can’t. Some things in life will forever remain mysteries—some of them wonderful, some of them perplexing. Staying curious is what matters to the lifelong learner. (Aside from being usually obnoxious and insufferably arrogant, know-it-alls never learn that they can’t possibly know everything.)

2. Engagement helps—and by engagement, I mean investing yourself, putting in your time, effort, and maybe even money behind some belief or idea or activity that means something to you. Sometimes engagement is the best way of knowing, learning, and finally understanding. (Talk is cheap; get off your butt and actually do something. Remember the “community pantry”? That was because somebody took charge of an idea and put it into action.)

3. Not everything has to have practical value—at least not yet, or maybe ever. Value can mean more than utility or money. Delight and discovery are their own rewards. (All art involves finding beauty in the abstract; even sport is the quest of abstract perfection. Of course both art and sport have ironically become big business, and their best practitioners deserve every reward, but just as ironically, their greatest feats are driven by love and passion, not money.)

4. You are not the center of the universe. Not everything has to do with you. However, every connection you can make to the world around you leaves a mark that you were here—and that, in your own way, you mattered. (Know the difference between history and Instagram.)

5. Learn to see time in years and centuries, not seconds or hours. If you want to foretell the future, look back to the past. We may seem to be headed for the future, but in fact we will all inevitably be part of the past. How will you want to be remembered? (Repeat: Know the difference between history and Instagram.)

6. Intelligence, cleverness, knowledge, and wisdom are very different things. Knowledge without values is worthless and even dangerous. The middling student who has a sense of good and bad and right and wrong is worthier than the summa cum laude who doesn’t. (The people who have methodically impoverished and destroyed this country are no idiots; they are experts at what they do, or can hire whatever expertise they need.)

7. The first thought that comes to your mind may not be the best one. Pause and think before you speak or write, especially in these days of Facebook and Twitter. Speech but also silence can require courage and good judgment. (Live and write as if there were no “delete” or “unsend” buttons at your fingertips.)

8. Learn to love something larger than yourself, your family, and your prized possessions. “Nation,” “freedom,” “justice,” and “equality” are very attractive ideas, but you have to learn to bring these big words down to earth, in concrete forms, actions, and decisions. Can you accept that you are your housekeeper’s equal as a human being? (Good citizenship is always personal. Bad leadership is no excuse; be the example to your family, friends, and community.)

9. Be prepared to take risks and to make mistakes—and even to fail. You can learn more from failure than from over-performance. Everybody—even the very best of us—will fail sometime, and it will be good to believe that we are all entitled to at least one big mistake in our lives. (Being humbled by failure is always a good starting point; as we like to say in Diliman, you have nowhere to go but up!)

10. Be prepared to change your mind. As you grow and learn, some things will become more simple, and others more complex. You are not a fixed entity; you are changing all the time, and you can change faster than the world around you. (In my twenties, I thought I had the world all figured out in black and white, and would have been prepared to die for my causes. I’m glad I didn’t—I needed more time to learn that the world is mostly shades of gray, and that “compromise” is not necessarily a bad word.)

11. Technology can be deceptive. It can lead us to believe that the world is changing very fast and for the better. That may be true for some of us and for the way we live. But for many others left behind, the world is no better than it was a hundred years ago. (Technology, even artificial intelligence, is amoral. It’s only as good as the person who uses it, and his or her intentions.)

12. Competition is good, but cooperation is often better—and necessary. Poems are written by solitary genius, but bridges, cathedrals, and nations are built by many minds and hands. The best way to deal with loneliness is to find meaning in the many—to learn from and to contribute to the experience of others. (And I’m not talking here just about networking online; indeed nothing has made us lonelier in this century than the Internet. Share a cup of coffee, and learn to listen—their causes could be more urgent than yours, and you might even have the answer.)

Qwertyman No. 38: Getting into UP

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 24, 2023

(For this week, let me offer a little family drama about my favorite school, this being exam season, and before I get the usual calls from anxious friends.)

“HEY, UPCAT is back, they’re holding UPCAT live again!” Marides waved the newspaper in her husband Bong’s face. Bong was watching a car show on TV where they found old cars in barns and turned a bucket of rust into a gleaming, raging roadster. Somehow it gave him hope that, down the road when he became a senior and ached all over, they could ply him full of oils and sealants and make him go like a teenager again.

“What UPCAT?” At least the question proved he was listening. Marides had that godawful habit of intruding on his most blissful moments with some real-world problem, and then getting on his case when he ignored her. Twenty-five years of marriage, four kids, and she still didn’t know when to leave him be. 

“UPCAT—the University of the Philippines College Admission Test, the same one I took and passed thirty years ago, which led to me representing UP and meeting and beating you in an inter-collegiate debate, remember? After which you got my number and asked me out and proposed to me three months later, remember?”

Bong hated it when Marides reminded him of that first encounter and its outcome, which became a given of sorts in their household—she was smarter than him, she had all the better arguments, and who knows what she could have become—a corporate genius, a Supreme Court justice—if he hadn’t saddled her with babies and insisted on working for the both of them. He was good with the money, she had to grant him that, because he was the agreeable type who made all the right connections and who could hustle his way out of a guilty verdict if he had to, as he more than once had to. 

“So what if UPCAT’s back?” he asked for the sake of asking. On the TV, two mechanics were staring at a big hole where a Corvette’s engine should have been.

“Dondon is in his senior year. He’s supposed to be taking it soon. We need to make sure his papers are in order. Where’s that boy? Dondon! Come out for a minute, will you?” 

A teenager with frizzy hair and a phone glued to his ear straggled out of his room and deposited himself in the nearest chair, across the room from his parents, still mumbling on his phone.

“You know UPCAT is happening, right? Have you filed your application yet?”

“Yes, Ma—mumble mumble….”

“Will you please put that phone down while your parents are talking to you? Bong, could you teach your son some manners—”

Bong: “Mumble mumble….”

“I’m serious! You two listen to me—our family’s reputation is on the line!”

“What reputation, Ma?” Dondon grudgingly put his phone aside, and Bong yawned and stretched his arms to acknowledge that he was in for a long spell.

“The one I started, by passing the UPCAT, getting into UP, and serving the people any way I could!”

“But, Ma, all you ever did was to bear us babies, and look what we became—Ate Glo is divorced in the States, all Kuya Jeff does is drive Papa around, and Kuya Milo thinks more tattoos will make him a better rocker. And all of them passed the UPCAT because you told them to!”

“Well—that was my service—to them, and to our people. I give you the opportunity, and what you make of it, well, that’s your business….” Marides started sobbing, and Dondon ran across the room to embrace her.

“Aw, Ma, that’s not what I meant. I just wanted you to see that getting into UP doesn’t guarantee anything.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying all these years!” Bong added. “We’ve been sending our kids to a school for communists, and they don’t even make good communists anymore!”

“No, they don’t,” Marides shot back, “because those communists took the top five places in the bar exams!” She sniffled and Dondon handed her a box of tissues.

“Don’t cry, Ma. It’s all right, it’s all okay. Applications are done online now and my school sent all my papers in last week. I just didn’t tell you both because—well, Papa wanted to explore other options—”

“Other options? Like what?”

“Like sending him abroad to a school of his choice. We have the money—”

“What, you’ll be sending my baby, our bunso, away for the next four years?”

“Or he can pick any other school here he wants to! UP’s not the only good school for engineering or science in this country—”

“I don’t want to be an engineer, Pa….”

“What? You’re a science high school scholar! You have to be an engineer—or a chemist, a physicist, do something with numbers, you don’t have a choice!”

“I never did, Pa, you and Ma chose my high school for me, I just took the exam. Maybe I should have just failed it.”

“So what the hell do you want to do with your life? Who’s going to take over the business when I’m gone?”

“Maybe you should trust Kuya Jeff more. Keep him in the backseat with you. Me, I want to draw, to paint, to design, do something creative. I know I’m good—you’ve seen my sketches, you just haven’t paid much attention to them.”

“We just want you to be happy, son,” said Marides. “We’ll support whatever you decide—won’t we, Bong?”

“Uhm—yes, okay, sure, if it makes you happy, but will you stop crying? I’ll make sure Dondon gets into UP, even if he fails the UPCAT—”

“Pa!”

“I’ll call an old friend of mine, you know me, I know all the right people. He used to be a VP in Quezon Hall, I’m sure he can pull a few strings and get you in—”

“Pa, that’s not how I want to get into UP, that’s not what UP’s about—”

“Oh, you mean that guy who now writes a column about funny things like fountain pens and his wife Weng for a newspaper? Forget it. Chuchay called him last year to ask for the same favor, but he said sorry, no, he won’t do anything of the sort, that it’s just not done in UP!”

“Why, that useless jerk! Doesn’t he know how things work in this country? I’m sure UP’s just as full of jokers and crooks as Customs, Congress, the Palace, you name it! Don’t half the people in those places come from UP?”

“Maybe, Pa—but that’s why I want to go there, because it still has people like your friend who won’t let me in unless I pass the UPCAT! Don’t worry, Ma—I’ll do my best, I promise.”

“Oooh, my son’s going to be the next Amorsolo!” Starts singing: “UP naming mahal, pamantasang hirang….”

“I have a friend who owns a gallery….” Bong began.

Qwertyman No. 34: America the Paradox

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 27, 2023

“AMERICA THE Paradox” was the title of an undergraduate paper I wrote on Carlos Bulosan for my class in Philippine literature, in which I observed—as many had done before me—that Bulosan felt deeply conflicted by the two faces that he kept seeing in America. On the one hand, it was the mother with open arms, calling out to the world’s orphans, and accepting of all brave and enterprising spirits. On the other hand, it was the hard fist of racism, viciously averse to all complexions other than white. 

Bulosan arrived in Seattle in 1930, a time of great economic turmoil, and he soon found himself fighting for the exploited poor, becoming a labor organizer and writing radical poetry. He would remain poor for the rest of his short life, despite achieving some degree of literary celebrity following the success of his semi-autobiographical 1946 novel America Is in the Heart. He died of tuberculosis in Seattle in 1956, never having been able to come home. I was so moved by Bulosan’s travails that I gifted our daughter with a signed first edition of his novel as her wedding present, and paid my respects at his grave when I visited Seattle some years ago.

Last Thursday, March 23rd, I joined several hundred other guests for dinner at the Sofitel to celebrate a joyful event: the 75th anniversary of the Fulbright program in the Philippines. Over that period, the Fulbright program, which selects and sends scholars from all over the world to study in the US, has sponsored over 3,000 Filipino scholars and 1,000 American scholars coming to the Philippines. The Philippines—through the Philippine-American Educational Foundation (PAEF)—has the longest-running Fulbright program in the world, dating back to March 23, 1948, hence last week’s big commemoration.

It isn’t hard to see why Sen. J. William Fulbright believed that such a scholarship program was a good idea then, with the Cold War brewing and America projecting itself as the champion of the Free World. For the Philippines, it was a continuation of the prewar practice of sending pensionados to the US, thereby ensuring a cohort of Filipino intellectuals and administrators sympathetic to the American cause.

I myself went out on a Fulbright twice—in 1986, for my MFA at Michigan and then my PhD at Wisconsin, and then in 2014 as a senior scholar at George Washington University. It would be an understatement to say that the Fulbright—especially that first five-year stint—was life-changing for me. The learning was exhilarating, but the living—away from home and family—was fraught with pain.

Still, we Fulbrighters had it much better than Bulosan. Most of our expenses were borne by the American taxpayer (although, because of a budget crunch, I had to teach and also to work part-time as a cook, cashier, and busboy at a Chinese takeout). Our return home was guaranteed (indeed, legally mandated). Most of us enjoyed the hospitality and support of new Fil-Am and American friends. 

Although here and there we had the inevitable brush with racism, we saw America in the best possible light, as a source of knowledge and of the democratic spirit. Arriving in Michigan just after EDSA 1986, I too was seen as living proof of the long and beneficial reach of America’s cultural influence: I could speak English like they did, and (mild boast coming) could write at least as well if not better than they did. 

I recall how, in one Shakespeare class, I was the only one who could explain the difference between “parataxis” and “hypotaxis,” and how, in another class, our professor wrote up a long sentence from one of my stories on the board to demonstrate “Jose’s perfect command of punctuation.” But all that was presumably because of my Americanized education—not even in America, but in the Philippines, where we had seemingly prepared all our lives to come to America, only to find ourselves more indoctrinated than many Americans. (I had memorized all the state capitals in grade school in La Salle, confounding my American friends at Trivial Pursuit.)

Ironically, I also belonged to the First Quarter Storm generation that railed against “American imperialism,” that learned about our colonial exploitation and about the primacy of American self-interest in its transactions with the world. We rallied at the US Embassy against the war in Vietnam and against the US bases in the Philippines. We denounced Ferdinand Marcos as an American puppet, and saw Washington’s hand in every instance of political mayhem around the globe. Where did all that militancy go? Was a scholarship to Hollywood enough to negate these accusations?

Seated at that Fulbright dinner and listening to the speakers extolling our special relationship with America, I thought about Bulosan, the FQS, my Fulbright experience, our daughter in California, my teaching of American literature, and such recent issues as EDCA and the Chinese presence in our territorial waters to sort out my emotions. 

The America that had been such a paradox for Bulosan remains, in many ways, a chimera for us today—speaking with moral authority against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and yet still enamored in many places of Trumpian demagoguery; espousing peace and human rights while allowing assault rifles on its streets; and promoting education and global literacy while hosting the world’s biggest engines of disinformation. We want to believe in the America that believed in us, although the cynical can argue that “believed” should be taken as “invested,” of whose efficacy this column offers ample proof. 

In the end, I reminded myself of what I tell my students: (1) The American government and the American people are not necessarily the same; (2) The American people are many peoples; there is no single, monolithic America; (3) We study America and its literature not to become Americans, but to be better Filipinos; and (4) We often take the terms “America” and “American” in an ideal or idealized sense, a compound of expectations and aspirations shaped by Abraham Lincoln, Hollywood, cable TV, and Spotify.

We went to America not just to study there, but to study America, and that study continues. 

(Image from pacforum.org)

Qwertyman No. 26: UP’s New President

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Qwertyman for January 30, 2023

TWO FRIDAYS from now, a change of leadership will take place at the University of the Philippines, when outgoing President Danilo L. Concepcion turns his office over to Atty. Angelo “Jijil” A. Jimenez. Elected by the Board of Regents last November after what was known to be a tightly contested three rounds of voting, Jimenez will serve for the next six years as UP’s 22nd president. (By tradition, the BOR’s formal announcement of the vote declares it to have been “unanimous” although, to the best of my knowledge, it never has been, at least in modern times.)

Jimenez is no stranger to UP’s political and academic culture. A sociology and law graduate from UP with a master’s in management from the National University of Singapore, Jimenez served twice on the Board of Regents as Student Regent in 1992 and as Regent from 2016 to 2021. 

How he will win over the faculty is something else. It’s no secret that many professors emeriti and other faculty members—myself included—openly declared themselves in support of the candidacy of UP Diliman Chancellor Fidel Nemenzo, whom his supporters saw to have the best academic and administrative experience among all the six candidates for the position. That did not mean that no one else was qualified, and the BOR apparently saw something more in Jimenez that we did not, and so we will have to live with that decision.

The faculty’s chief concern may have been that Jimenez has never taught full-time in UP, raising fears that he might not appreciate or respect UP’s academic culture as strongly as a UP president should.

Academic culture is hard to explain to outsiders, but it is a way of life founded on intellectual meritocracy, on the idea that authority and respect are earned through hard-won knowledge, the currency of learning. And “intellectual” here doesn’t simply mean knowing something and being smart (and in some cases, insufferably arrogant), but actually doing something about it—through teaching, research, or some form of social action. Universities value people who contribute to our understanding of ourselves and to the improvement of human life. This is more than gaseous talk that nobody else can understand. It’s doing the deep thinking that nobody else will do, because they either have no interest or see no profit in it, or because they’re not trained to. A national university like UP, funded by our taxes, applies that thinking and learning to real-world problems and places its resources at the service of society. UP demonstrated this social commitment during the pandemic through the heroic sacrifices of its staff at the Philippine General Hospital and the research conducted by the Philippine Genome Center, among others.

Nonetheless, I can sense that despite their initial misgivings, many members of UP’s academic community are willing to give Jimenez a chance to prove himself as a protector and promoter of UP’s interests rather than someone imposed by the powers-that-be to bring the unruly natives to heel. 

“Jijil knows UP’s academic culture, and he listens. He studies things carefully before making a decision,” a highly respected colleague who knows (and once taught) Jimenez assured me. I have to say that in the few times that I met and observed him when I served as Concepcion’s VP for Public Affairs, I was impressed by Jimenez’s grasp of the issues and his willingness to learn. And this will not be the first time that someone perceived to be an outsider was chosen to sit in Quezon Hall; the most notable and perhaps the most effective of such predecessors was Edgardo J. Angara in the 1980s, who had no qualms about using his powers to modernize and streamline UP’s aging bureaucracy, against stiff resistance from within.

Jimenez has led a colorful life that included being posted as labor attaché in war-torn Iraq and him and his wife adopting a baby girl who was left at their doorstep. As a labor lawyer, he will understand the plight of the disempowered, and know how to speak to power and, just as importantly, to negotiate with it as well. 

Ultimately, it will be his character that will be on trial—how he will perform and decide under pressure from both left and right, what values lie at his moral core, and how he will steer the university and ensure its well-being under an indifferent if not hostile political regime. 

PAAJ, as he will be known in UP (Concepcion was PDLC), will have to contend with the rabid red-taggers at UP’s gates (and some of them well within its campuses), who will expect him to deliver UP, and specifically Diliman, on a platter to Malacañang. Curiously, just before the voting, Jimenez—a Duterte appointee to the Board of Regents—was denounced by another newspaper’s resident canine as a communist, alongside Fidel Nemenzo. UP has never had a shortage of detractors rooting for nothing less than its closure, but expect the troll armies to work overtime the minute PAAJ asserts its academic freedom.

Internally, Jimenez will have to deal with the conditions and demands of a constituency just emerging from the temporary and unnatural constraints imposed by the pandemic and eager to spring back into normal academic life but with even more incentives to work and to teach. Some colleagues will berate me for this, but “serve the people” no longer seems to be reason enough to study and to teach in UP. The sense of entitlement afflicting society at large has also crept into UP’s culture, with students complaining about their grades, freshly hired instructors complaining why they haven’t been promoted, and professors complaining why their work wasn’t given more points in their evaluation. Economic issues are easy to understand in a time of rampant food prices (and gross profligacy on the part of public officials), but this goes beyond a bigger paycheck. 

Given his two stints on the Board of Regents, Jimenez will be familiar with these issues down to their minutiae, as perhaps a lawyer can best comprehend. Appointing a capable executive staff will be key to his success, but again, they can only act on judgments emanating from the president’s fundamental sense of good and bad and right and wrong.

Arguably, the visible function of university presidents has changed in recent times, from being exemplars of scholarship and ideological firebrands to resource generators and managers. (Concepcion was particularly adept at the latter role.) How Angelo A. Jimenez will distinguish himself over the next six years will be a story entirely his to craft. I will be eager to read it, and wish him well.

Qwertyman No. 5: A Rhetorical Question

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Qwertyman for September 5, 2022

(Photo from philstar.com)

TEACHER LENLEN’S chest swelled with pride when she opened the door to her 8th grade classroom in Gen. Pupu Noknok Elementary School in the town of Bugbugan, province of Kalamias, in the People’s Democratic Republic of Kawefo. Freshly painted in the fluorescent green that seemed to be in favor since President Ongong’s election, the cavernous classroom held exactly 100 chairs, and was reputed to be the largest elementary-school classroom in the archipelago. It was so huge that Teacher Lenlen had to use a microphone hooked up to two loudspeakers in the back of the room to reach the farthest students, from Wutwut to Zygzyg. 

“Good morning, class!” she shouted on the first day of school, oblivious to the idea that she didn’t need to scream because she already held a microphone. “My name is Mrs. Lenlen Fayfay, but you can call me Teacher Lenlen, and I will be your homeroom teacher. Now, what is a homeroom teacher? According to Wikipedia, a homeroom teacher ‘is responsible for almost everything concerning a homeroom period and classroom. At the start of the school year, it is the homeroom teacher’s responsibility to make sure that each student gets relevant textbooks and materials, which are supplied by the government. The teacher is also responsible for the attendance.’ Is that understood? Did I make myself clear? If yes, then answer ‘Yes, Teacher Lenlen!’ If you did not understand what I just said, raise your hand and approach the microphone when I recognize you. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Teacher Lenlen!” The answer, magnified by the three standing microphones set up at key points along the central divide between left and right, reached Teacher Lenlen like a towering tsunami, forcing her to cover her ears.

“You don’t have to shout!” she shouted back. “Just speak in your natural voice! Okay, class?”

“Okay, Teacher Lenlen!” Another wave rolled over her, drowning her shriek of protest.

“Teacher Lenlen! Teacher Lenlen!” A boy’s hand shot up from the middle of the room.

“Yes? Who are you and what is it?” Secretly, Lenlen felt relieved to be dealing with just one student, whose solitary voice she could easily overpower. “To the microphone!”

The boy scurried to the nearest mike, giving high fives along the way to his giggling classmates. “My name is Marmar Pwepwe, and I have a question.”

Teacher Lenlen raised her hand to stop him before he could speak, seizing upon the moment as a teaching opportunity. “Before you answer me, let me make this clear, this being our first day of class. Because there are one hundred of you, we have to make sure that every question you ask is important, all right? Wait, wait, wait! Don’t answer me! If you want to say ‘Yes, Teacher Lenlen!’, just nod your head—quietly, like this.” She nodded her head, keeping her lips sealed. “Is that understood?”

“Yes, Teacher Lenlen!” came the bone-jarring reply.

“Eeeek, stop! Stop it! I told you to nod your heads! How hard is that? Didn’t your parents teach you to nod your heads? Okay, everybody, let’s nod our heads together—up, down, up down! That’s good, do it again, up, down, up down! See? A nation that can nod together can be great again!”

“Teacher Lenlen! May I ask my question now?” said the boy Marmar.

“Oh, all right! What is it?”

“Well—I googled what you said about homeroom teachers, and I discovered that it’s the definition of a homeroom teacher in Afghanistan. Teacher Lenlen—are we in Afghanistan?”

A roar of laughter erupted. His classmates had known Marmar to be a smart aleck since the lower grades, for which he had been sent to the guidance counsellor’s office more than once.

Teacher Lenlen’s cheeks turned red. It was true—there was a long list of definitions in Wikipedia for “homeroom teacher,” and she had conveniently picked out the topmost one, for Afghanistan. So what? How different could Afghanistan—wherever that was—be from Kawefo? 

“Before I answer you, don’t you know that cellphones are prohibited in this school during class time? And how could you google anything, when even I can’t get a decent wi-fi signal in this room?”

“I didn’t use a cellphone, Teacher Lenlen! It was a tablet with cellular data, which my mother gave me for my tenth birthday, for Zoom!”

“Oh, so your mother gave it to you! Maybe I should talk to your mother about using tablets in class, when we’re no longer using Zoom, but meeting face-to-face. Class, are we still on Zoom, or meeting face-to-face? DON’T ANSWER! That’s what’s called a ‘rhetorical question’—a question you already know the answer to, so you don’t even need to answer it. Everybody write this down!” She went to the blackboard and wrote “R-H-E-T-O-R-I-C-A-L!”

“What does ‘rhetorical’ mean, Teacher Lenlen?” asked a little girl in the front row. Lenlen was glad that nobody else seemed to have heard her, because, come to think of it, she didn’t know, except that when you added “question” to it, it meant exactly what she had just said. She went up to the girl and whispered, “I’ll tell you tomorrow. That’s tomorrow’s lesson.”

Marmar was still standing at the mike, and said, “If you want to talk to my mother, Teacher Lenlen, I’ll give you her phone number.” 

“I was speaking rhetorically!” Lenlen retorted. “I’m talking to you, not to her!” Marmar’s confederates snickered in their seats. “What’s so funny?”

Another boy piped up. “Teacher Lenlen, Marmar’s mother is the governor!”

Marmar Pwepe… Governor Pompom Pwepwe—of course, she should have made the connection! The governor was known for her fiery temper, punching sheriffs and other public officials who crossed her path. Beads of sweat began to form on Teacher Lenlen’s forehead.

Just then, a squadron of policemen appeared at the door, discombobulating Teacher Lenlen further. Had she been reported so quickly? What was going to happen to her pension, to the trip to Bangkok she had been planning for so long?

“Ma’am Lenlen Fayfay?” asked their commanding officer. “I’m Captain Shushu. We have been deputized by the regional office of the Inter-Agency Counter-Subversion Agency—” 

“Oh, no—you have the wrong person. I’m Mrs. Fayfay, yes, but I swear to God, I’m not a subversive! I never said anything bad about President Ongong or… or Governor Pwepwe….” She stared at Marmar, begging for mercy.

“We’re not here to arrest you or anyone, Mrs. Fayfay. We’re here to requisition thirty chairs for the regional office, which needs more furniture to properly perform its solemn duties. I trust you agree?” Captain Shushu turned to the students, counting heads. “The first three rows, get up!” His men took their chairs out into the corridor. Lenlen could hear a similar commotion happening in the other classrooms.

The students sat forlorn on the floor, clutching their bags. Teacher Lenlen wondered if she needed the governor’s phone number, after all.

Hindsight No. 5: The Dropout Factor

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Hindsight for Monday, February 14, 2022

(Image from thetimes.co.uk)

HOW MUCH of a factor is Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.’s being a college dropout in making people decide whether he’s worthy of being voted President or not? The anti-Marcos forces seem to think it’s a viable issue, on two counts: first, that Junior failed to complete his studies at Oxford and subsequently at Wharton, despite the extravagant resources put at his disposal; and second, that Junior and his people have repeatedly asserted that he graduated from both institutions, despite clear evidence to the contrary. 

One would think that, in a country where higher education is widely seen to be the only ticket out of poverty, Junior’s profligate ways should have turned off if not outraged large swaths of the CDE electorate that everyone now acknowledges will effectively choose our next leader.

The picture of him posing as a top-hatted dandy in front of a Rolls Royce when he should have been sticking his nose into a book in the library should be sickeningly ridiculous to anyone who has had to take three sweaty and dusty jeepney rides to school. That he or his cohorts would insist that he has a BA and an MBA from the world’s top universities without proof of an actual diploma should offend anyone who failed to finish college, despite a bright mind and high grades, for lack of money—like my father did.

But sadly I suspect that for many of Junior’s supporters, the dropout factor is a non-issue, for a number of reasons. To begin with, going by the statistics, ours is a nation of dropouts. Even well before the pandemic, according to one study, the graduation rate from college was only 61%, which means that two out of every five students fell off the rails. So Junior should be in good company. 

I myself dropped out of UP in my freshman year because I was becoming increasingly more involved with student activism, and I was also itching to get a job and earn some money. Like many dropouts who managed well enough on their own, I wore my undergraduate status for many years like a badge of honor. But there came a point when I simply longed to learn in a more structured way, so I went back to school, and graduated with my AB at age 30.

To Junior’s defenders, dropping out of Oxford is understandable. “Oxford is even harder to get into than UP!” said one online. And besides, said another, he did get a special diploma, which “is already equivalent to having a degree. UK educ system is different from PH system. Between him showing certification vs emailing Oxford, I would believe him.”

As I noted in last week’s column on “Denial and Dissonance,” the politically captive mind will fashion creative explanations for everything from the “fake” landing on the moon to Donald Trump’s “stolen victory” over Joe Biden.

A Reddit thread on the topic overwhelmingly agreed that being a dropout wasn’t the problem; rather, lying about it was. “At least Erap admitted to being a dropout, and he still became President,” said one poster.

Publicly exposed, Junior back-pedaled. His official Senate resume in 2014—digitally preserved for all time on archive.org—clearly showed him claiming a master’s degree in Business Administration from Wharton and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, Philosophy, and Economics from Oxford. This has since been amended to “graduate coursework” for Wharton and a “special diploma” for Oxford.

(Image from rappler.com)

But there’s another side to this college-dropout issue that’s worth thinking about: what’s a diploma really worth, anyway, and what exactly have we done with ours?

We have many thousands of college graduates working well beneath their professional capabilities as domestic helpers overseas, or in jobs that require more use of their hands than their brains. So a diploma has never guaranteed success (and as Junior’s example shows, you can get very far in life without one). 

But also, since when was a college degree a measure of intellectual ability and, even more importantly, of moral probity? What has our incumbent Palace dweller done with his law degree, beyond assuring the tokhang brigade of his full protection and threatening to defy the Supreme Court? At least Ferdinand Sr. used his to cloak his every ploy with a veneer of legality. 

In terms of intellectual caliber, Marcos had probably the most illustrious Cabinet members in our history, with PhDs from the world’s foremost universities, but even they could not rein in his regime’s excesses, and some even abetted them. The good ones left early; a few tried to draw a line; others became willing accomplices to dictatorship and plunder. As idealistic and upright as they may have been or started out, Marcos suborned many of these technocrats and forever compromised the edukado in Philippine society, turning that respected figure into a minister at the foot of a despot, his wife, and their whimsy.

Our incumbent burnished anti-intellectualism into a virtue to curry favor with the crowds, and got flunkies with LLB’s to explain away his bad behavior like auditioning comedians. You listen to their tortured spiels and you ask, was this what they went to college for?

Wealth and power hold far more charm for many of us than schooling, because we see education as but a means to those ends. To be rich is to be smart and praiseworthy enough. If the rich behave imperially, impudently, irresponsibly—well, they earned it, didn’t they? We can forgive and excuse them no end; we still think like tenants thrilled to be invited into the big house for a cup of chocolate. 

We seem surprised and suspicious when a well-educated person with an honest heart claims to love and understand us, and promises to improve our lives, because we no longer recognize real goodness and ability when we see them. So we go with the devil we know, and who cares how he fared in History or Philosophy? As Ping Lacson puts it, logic was never our strong suit: “Ayaw mong manakawan, tapos, boboto ka ng magnanakaw?” I have a PhD, and I can’t figure that one out.