In every class I have had in my 6 years of teaching at the Ateneo, I have met many types of students. There are the lazy, the lost, the bored, those who merely coast along, and there are also the enthusiastic, the intensely curious and the achievers. This was not a real revelation to me since as a college student, some 36 years ago, I noticed that my batch had its quota of all these types as well.
I myself was a late bloomer. I felt mostly lost and bored. It wasn’t because I was not a curious student who wanted to excel. I desired good grades too, and in reality, I did get them quite often. The biggest problem for me was that education seemed mostly about just the fulfilment of academic credits and getting the diploma.
Often I felt my classmates and I were like dolphins which were being trained to perform tasks just to please our teachers. When we submitted work and fulfilled requirements, or agreed with the teachers, we got our ration of fish. In a way, one might say we were hardly being educated. It was more like we were being trained.
If it weren’t for a few teachers who actually jolted me and really challenged me to get out of a lot of rigid, parochial, and egotistic thinking common among the young, school life would have come and gone without my imbibing anything significant.
Teachers like Dr. Tony Romualdez who taught Philosophy, and Rolando Tinio who taught literature really pushed us out of our comfort zones. They impressed upon our young minds not just the gift of their ideas but most importantly, they dared us to challenge them.
Philosophy classes under Dr. Tony were expansive and liberating. It opened our minds to a bigger self we did not know existed. Rolando Tinio on the other hand was both entertaining, and also provocative. He dazzled us with his brilliant insights about the materials he had assigned us to read, while at the same time, he liked to challenge us to question the very premises of his arguments. He needled us with wit, humor, and sarcasm delivered with great flourish, and at times with shock effect. Sometimes, he liked to gang up on his students intellectually. All this made us want to study as much about the subject just to get back at him. There was this sense of awe on our part that we were engaging teachers who had lived their truths and were sharing their experiences of them with us.
To me, a meaningful education must be transformative. The whole idea is not just learning the lessons and subjects. More importantly, an awakening that one’s life path can have an irreversible trajectory of perennial curiosity and inquiry must happen. It is about igniting the fire of life-long learning and thus freeing one’s mind.
A lot of what is being taught in schools now will be irrelevant in a few years. Maybe some of them are already outdated as I write this. To merely pass on knowledge is inadequate. What a school must do is to enable students to engage and live the rest of life with passionate curiosity.
Should teachers go beyond just teaching subjects and pass on life values when possible? I believe so. They must show that they too constantly put knowledge to the test and learn from the experience.
Looking at how many students of the Ateneo are 100 percent focused on grades alone, we must rethink education. While mastery is important, the cultivation of the taste or passion for life’s mysteries is more crucial. Rewarding conformity must take a backseat to setting spirits on the course of loving learning. We want schools to produce not dolphins but graduates who want look forward to being students of life—for life!
Musician, writer, and activist, Jim Paredes graduated with a degree in Communication. He is currently a lecturer and an educator with the Communication Department.
