A magna carta for students?

A “magna carta” for students is in the works in the Lower House. Party-list Representative Ulan Sarmiento, a colleague at San Beda, furnished me with a copy of one version. I will not comment on that proposal here, but on the proposal of a “magna carta” in general.

Drawn up by vassals chaffing from the caprice and arbitrariness of King John, the charter the whimsical monarch begrudgingly set his hand to has become paradigmatic for all “charters of liberty”. I have my misgivings about a magna carta for students. It is will certainly win for its proponents, sponsors and advocates students’ votes in the coming elections, but it does not augur well for formal education, if it is born of the same tradition of putting one’s foot down against one’s liege! It is dramatic—to be sure and it can ignite a torrent of polemic that will be fodder for the blighted media that we have allowed to thrive in this country, but the whole system of schooling may very well end up being the loser!

A magna carta is by history and often by intent a document of confrontation. It will empower students, to be sure, and it can hardly be doubted that students already have tremendous powers. The law governing state universities and colleges, for one, directs that a student sit as a member of the governing board. The Campus Journalism Act emancipates student publications on the tertiary level from any form of administrative control and supervision. Will a confrontational document be helpful to higher education? To empower the student by disempowering school authority— because that is many times how the mal-equation goes—is a promise politicians may make to students that holds no promise at all for the cause of education.

To provide, for example, that higher education institutions may not turn away students on the basis of ideology, gender (or sexual orientation), religion, ethnicity, etc. sounds not only politically correct but even noble. But what happens with the settled jurisprudential doctrine that academic freedom includes the freedom of the university, college or faculty to determine whom to teach? Should students be forced on an institution or on a college? The free exercise clause of the Constitution guarantees religious sects and denominations the right to activities pursuant to religion that do not run counter to law, and under the “benevolent neutrality” doctrine articulated by now Chief Justice Reynato Puno in the Escritor case, this certainly includes the right of a religious denomination to establish schools for religious purposes. Now then, if a higher education institution will no longer be at liberty to turn away students on the basis of religion, will that provision compel a sectarian college or university to admit a student who openly and unabashedly opposes the doctrines of that religion or sect? In more practical terms, will Catholic seminaries now be compelled to accept “seminaristresses”, or Muslim madrasas, to accept Catholic polemicists against Islam?

The Romans were thoughtful people when they chose disco—“I learn” (not “I disco”, which most of our students would really much prefer!) as the root of the word disciplina. Not only is there a relation between discipline and learning. No learning can take place without discipline. Students who do poorly in such demanding disciplines as law and medicine—and of course, serious (emphasized!) graduate school work—are those who have not developed the discipline of study. Discipline is one word that a magna carta for students will assiduously avoid and that, to me, is the problem with all such proposals: a suspicion that discipline is antithetical to student rights. Whenever a draft law is a set of rights against it is by logical necessity one-sided, and it is of such laws that we must, with good reason, be suspicious. Draft magnae cartae in the past as well as those today read like a litany of what administration may not do and what a student, by contrast, is free to do. To constrict the latitude with which an institution may formulate rules of discipline is to presume that one can, through legislation, determine the optimal conditions for teaching and learning. As in most things, leave specialized concerns to specialists. Leave education to educators—and the farther away politicians keep their hands, the better for us all.

Why do we allow military institutions to institute that kind of discipline that goes by such obviously nonsensical rules as “obey first, question later” and be most unwilling to impose strictures in our higher education institutions? Is studying no less demanding than soldiering, and are the stakes of society and social life in the capacities of a student any lower than its stake in the skills of a soldier?

What a law on schools and students can helpfully do is to create the environment for meaningful exchange between administration and students so that the rules that are in place and the discipline that is exacted (as some disciplines should always be exacted) is accepted because both can advance reasons that either side recognizes as good reasons. I do not favor unreasonable school policies, and I do not accept the relativistic proposition that we cannot decide about what is unreasonable. To demand for example of each student that he or she own a car to be able to enroll is not only unreasonable; it is an attempt at that putrid elitism that goads the irate mob to lop off some heads. What the law can and should do is to provide the institutional framework for that exchange by which rules of discipline, institutional policies, methods of delivery, systems of evaluation and rating are argued for or against under circumstances that enable administrators and students alike to treat each other as unconstrained interlocutors. Once more however, the presupposition of this communicative exchange is the willingness of persons to be convinced by sound reasons.

When an institution, for example, proposes a rule against pre-marital sexual relations, let the school’s administrators be prepared with sound arguments against such liaisons and for the rule that prohibits them. On the assumption that the students are prepared to be persuaded by reason (which is an assumption that we tacitly make in most circumstances that we argue), let them demand further justification if they have lingering doubts and accept the rule when they are given unassailable reasons. Certainly, a magna carta that provides that schools may not draw up such prohibitions does not foster this kind of meaningful exchange.

I think that instead of starting a fresh round of hype and histrionic over a magna carta, it might be more worth our while to give ourselves to cordes magna and mentes magnae… great hearts and great minds! –Fr. Ranhilio Callangan Aquino, Manila Standard Today

rannie_aquino@rannieaquino.com