What to teach

After delays brought on by A(H1N1), the virus about which a good portion of our student population had kindly thoughts about, particularly for its capacity to grant a reprieve from the onslaught of schooldays, classes on the collegiate level have commenced. Once more, instructors and professors work on syllabi, on course and class objectives and on the exacting and vexatious table of specifications. What do we teach?

Let us teach our students thinking because there is not very much of that taking place these days. In a book taken from his 1950 lectures, Heidegger asserts: “We are not yet thinking.” To understand what he meant by that cryptic, denunciatory and to some, officious, declaration would call for an inquiry into his later philosophy which I will not get into now. But one of the points he makes remains a salutary reminder to us: Thinking is neither as common or as straightforward as we make of it. Very recently, Dr. Raul Pangalangan, former dean of the UP College of Law and an esteemed friend, and I met and we took up one of our favorite themes: the teaching of law. We sang a duet of a dirge to the kind of “teaching” that goes on in many if not most law schools these days. Obsessed with getting students to pass the Bar Examinations, many law professors have accepted as pedagogical wisdom the technique of compelling law students to memorize provisions of law so that “at least they have something to write” when they do not have a definite answer to a given problem. This is certainly pathetic. At one time, from the ranks of the law profession came pioneers and trail-blazers in thought. I dread the prospect of an entire generation of lawyers prepared to recite the oddest provisions of the Civil Code but quite incompetent at thinking. Among the many things that it is, thinking is demanding reasons and using the reasons one finds to establish connections between the items of thought so that the new and fresh combinations have the potency that rote and rehash can never have. I fear too that philosophy, instead of providing students with an experience of the boundless horizon that the question opens, has degenerated into a dreadful disease that fills students with loathing. Who, for example, relishes the prospect of having to remember the many odd questions Descartes raised, the answers given by the entire procession made of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, all the way to Kant, only to dismiss them one by one as crackpots?

Why is it that law professors seldom coax their students into asking questions on the relation between human freedom and the obligations of contracts? Why is it seldom a subject taken up in property class that the jura of ownership rest on a concept of the world and the things in it that is by no means universal? And before we teach them the difference between reclusion perpetua and life imprisonment, why do we not ask them what good is done to the injured party when detriment like imprisonment is visited on his assailant? There is nothing involved about the answer: Because these questions are not asked in the Bar. Much the same thing can be said of most of the subjects students are compelled to take by Commission on Higher Education decree in college: one meaningless fact or pseudo-fact after the other committed to memory or to writing, to be regurgitated at the next examination, with nothing to occupy thought! I hasten to add: The less CHED mandates courses, the less it prescribes curricula, the better for thought and for academic freedom. I detest, for one thing, the use of Technical Panels: the institutionalization of the snobbery of select institutions that can, with the habiliments of authority, then look down on lowly institutions that are not “in their class” exacting not really excellence but conformity with their idiosyncrasies.

Let us teach our students the practicality of the impractical. In matters of great importance, wrote one very influential thinker, there is nothing more practical than a good theory. And yet, there seems to be a pandemic not of swine flu (or whatever animal we have blamed for our woes!) but of an allergy for theory. Many school administrators —among them deans and department chairs with ponderous titles following, and often exceeding their names—will warn the teacher: Do not be too theoretical. Thank God, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Einstein, Bohr and the whole train of philosophers, jurists and theologians I admire never had such administrators, or never received such advice. It is the nature of insight, said Lonergan, that Jesuit intellectual who definitely loved theory, to pivot between the concrete and the abstract. Thought is provoked by a concrete concern—and arrives at an answer that far transcends its lowly origin in whatever petty “practicality” may have provoked it. Archimedes was asked to assure the king that the crown given him as a gift was really gold, and not some counterfeit. Really, it was a very petty concern arising probably from the paranoia of a king who had several times been duped by duplicitous gift-givers. And it was that concern that preoccupied the poor Archimedes even as he took to the baths of Syracuse. But when he had consolidated his thoughts on displacement and specific gravity, he ran from the baths with the shout history remembers him for “Eureka”—calling attention to his discovery and, of course, to his nakedness as well. From that time on, the Archimedes principle has had very little to do with Hiero’s crown— that just faded away into the realm of the impertinent to which it really belonged—and what the world (and troubled high school students in particular) have been hitched to is the abstruse principle of specific gravity. The student who complains about taking analytic geometry because he does not need it to pay taxi fares is stupid, to say the least, and should be given a double dose of the subject. And the student of the natural sciences who chaffs at ethics and philosophy of science shows the first signs of turning out to be a dangerous person: one for whom science is detached from its human moorings and its moral imperatives.

The fortunes (or misfortunes) of nursing should be instructive. One of the members of my local choir wanted so much to be a violinist and he has managed a commendable standard of proficiency at the violin. Obviously, college should have meant for him matriculation at the Conservatory of Music. This did not take place because his parents had decided that he had to be “practical”, and for them that meant taking nursing. Any school administrator who is worth his salt knows that not too long from now, nursing will go the way of the dot-com hype about two decades back: boom and then bust! Even now, there is a steady decline in nursing enrollment. That is only to be expected. When nearly one-third of the student population wishes to be a disciple of Florence Nightingale, there will follow—as indeed has already come to pass—the ridiculous phenomenon of patients being roused from otherwise needed rest ever so often so that student-nurses may have some use for their Baumanometers and their sphygmomanometers and their multi-colored stethoscopes. Time was, patients complained that there were not enough nurses to care for them; today, when a patient gets a sponge bath, it will most likely be the case that he will be initiated into the exotica of exfoliation and body-scrubs, because with too many hands at work on one body, chances are that repeated passes of the sponge in the varying pressures brought to bear by multiple hands all eager for some practice to log into their records will take a heavier toll on the epidermis than would a regular sponge bath.

Finally, let us teach them that there is a real difference between right and wrong—and that discovering the difference is not as impossible an intellectual task as trying to discern what Congress of the Philippines will do next. Let us teach them that there are habits of mind and of the heart, and that not everything goes. In many ways our country reels from the wages of moral bankruptcy. Colleges and universities cannot be nonchalant about this. –Fr. Ranhilio Callangan Aquino, Manila Standard Today