EDUCATION FOR DEVELOPMENT Felipe M. de Leon, Jr

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EDUCATION FOR DEVELOPMENT Felipe M. de Leon, Jr
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Serving Another Countrys 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.

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Serving Another Countrys 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 ones
  countrys citizens to become another countrys
  assets. (Florentino Hornedo, The Cultural
  Dimension of Philippine Development)

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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
  FILIPINOS 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 Filipinos 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.

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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

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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.

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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 ones 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.

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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?)

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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

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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 peoples 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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 nations 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.

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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
  of pakikipagkapwa, whose deepest meaning is
  shared goodness or shared divinity.

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• DEVELOPING A FILIPINO AND HUMANISTIC
  PERSPECTIVE
• Curriculum and policy research can lay the
  basis for programs 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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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 nations 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.