What do we do with all our jobless nurses?

At the Cagayan State University, registered nurses constitute an entire section of the freshman class of the College of Medicine. Only a few years ago, they would have been queueing up at the United States and United Kingdom Embassies and then jubilantly celebrating the visas that then came so easily. But hard times have fallen on the nursing profession because like we often do, we overdid things. We opened innumerable schools of nursing, and recruiters promised a haven of limitless job opportunities abroad. Parents were deceived, students were duped , and schools and recruiters—who ultimately failed to deliver—profited! Even the Board of Nursing contributed its part to the problem. Wanting to glamorize the profession, it laid down onerous requirements that caused colleges and universities eager to offer the nursing course to purchase often tremendously expensive equipment. In a developing country like ours, educational policy is sound when it encourages the sharing of resources. This was the whole idea behind “Centers of Excellence” and “Centers of Development”. But the omnipotent Board of Nursing wanted every single school to purchase a multiple-paged list of equipment. One example of the the Board’s rather silly requirements has to do with the qualifications of a computer teacher in the colleges of nursing. In all other courses it is enough that the computer instructor is a graduate of computer science or computer technology and has the requisite master’s degree. The Board of Nursing wanted that teaching slot reserved for nurses only and so required that computer teachers in colleges of nursing had to be nurses as well! So far can absurdity really go.

The shimmer is gone; its glamor has waned. Registered nurses apply for jobs as call center agents, masseurs and even clerks. Quite reasonable then—and appropriate—was the admonition of an employment officer who urged students to take courses other than nursing. Its popularity and profitability had run its course. So what do we do with all our jobless nurses? The question goes beyond placement. It goes into the very heart of our concept of university education.

We have been told ad nauseam about the supposed mismatch between the graduates our universities turn out and the needs of the economy, both local and international. There is an assumption here about university education that should not go unchallenged: It is assumed that it is the function of university education to equip its students with specific skills for specific trades and jobs. Universities are not trade schools—which is not in any way to denigrate trade and industrial schools that have their rightful place in the scheme of education. It is not possible, nor is it desirable, for universities and colleges to tailor formal education to the performance of specific functions and the mastery of skills. Technology takes considerable leaps—and there is no way that colleges can anticipate the developments technology takes so as to familiarize students with them beforehand.

True, specialization has been helpful, but the specialization of education and of training is an ambivalent phenomenon. On the one hand, it is technologically useful; on the other hand, it results in the fragmentation of knowledge, the emaciation of a world-view (if one is ever formed at all as a conscious endeavor) and the consequent price that is paid in terms of meaning and significance. Heidegger already wrote in “Only a God Can Save Us” that where all things become tools, implements, where importance is reduced to the manipulable, human persons pay a terrible price: hardly anything is left that can claim to be meaningful and valuable, worth living and dying for. (I still have to meet a computer savant foolish enough to announce his preparedness to die for his computer program!)

What universities can and are expected to graduate are persons steeped in the methods of investigation, research and the canons of science, resting on a firm humanistic base. Because of heightened and honed skills of critical thinking, the cultivation of creativity and the nurturing of the propensity for discovery, they are able to carve their own niches in the work-place, humanize it and humanize themselves as well. The university is expected to prepare men and women who are trainable and who can train themselves for an infinite number of specific tasks who will not lose their sensitivity to the ethical, and who may remain responsive to the demand for meaning because they are wise enough—and have perspective enough—to form world-views!

If our nurses were schooled as university students ought to be schooled, finding them productive places in society should not be a problem. They will find employment and engagement in ways fulfilling both to themselves and to society—not necessarily in the traditional roles of nurses, not even perhaps in the domain of health care. But if they were trained—as I am afraid they were—as craftsmen and women, people skilled at performing a specific task, then obviously, when there is no further need of that task (because a thousand others are already busy at it) what you have is redundant labor, for which there is no easy solution at all.

A sound philosophy of education is of utmost importance—and this goes far beyond the sonorous phrases usually emblazoned or embossed on the walls of universities and colleges announcing the institution’s “philosophy”. You never carve philosophy in stone. When one rethinks, and is dissatisfied with what he has thought, comes up with alternatives and accepts the challenge that arises from the perspectives of others, always with the end in view of significance, then one has started to philosophize—and I hope our educators start philosophizing with earnestness and authenticity really soon! –FR. RANHILIO CALLANGAN AQUINO, Manila Standard Today

rannie_aquino@rannieaquino.com rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph