If one should advance the proposition that university and college education must guarantee the employability of the graduate—and therefore curriculum must match industry, market and governmental needs, there will be virtually unanimous, even enthusiastic, concurrence! That is, after all, the prevailing ideology. Habermas’ concept of “colonization” is apropos—education has been colonized by the steering mechanisms of money (economics) and administrative power (government). The fragmentation that the phenomenologies of MacIntyre and Giddens show to be one of the driving forces of modernity is not only evident but dominant in higher education. Every program of study must have some major field—some specialization—to be useful and worthwhile. A.B. General no longer exists because it was too—general! Medical practitioners who prefer to remain GPs are thought to occupy a lower tier than those who can confound the public by a catena of cryptic abbreviations indicating “fellow” or “diplomate” of one or the other society of specialists. And yet, in many of the country’s towns and villages, it is the GP who is the more useful and helpful fellow, one with whom a family can forge truly close bonds. OJT is now held to be “obligatory” for almost all courses, and one that has no need of apprenticeship is marked out to be scuttled pronto!
I am all for outcomes-based education, if by that, one means that higher education must target outcomes that can be evaluated. That one must plan backwards—from the identification of outcomes to the fashioning of programs and the design of curricula and the methods of delivery—makes a lot of sense. We want results, after all, and demonstrable ones at that. That is only reasonable. It is, however, the concept of “outcome” that can be deceptive, especially when it is taken to mean preparing graduates to fit into existing job opportunities and placement possibilities.
Not too long ago, I watched a television report on call centers. The manager commented that most of the call-center agents are nurses. And then, he followed that observation with the typical comment about “mismatch” between college education and the work of a call-center agent. In the first place, that is to be expected because in our national obsession with sending Filipinos abroad and nurturing this deleterious equation that work abroad equals prosperity, we have created a terrible glut of nurses. But now, really, does one need four years of university education to be a call-center agent? I do not demean the occupation of call-center employees. The job rakes in for the country almost as much as remittances from our OFWs abroad. What I decry is the transforming of higher education as the preparation of call-center agents, front-desk receptionists, flight attendants, gaming-center specialists, etc. It now seems like university education is one extended on-the-job-training period! In fact, it should not be too difficult to see that that is exactly where the risk lies: When the nurse is schooled to be nothing more than a nurse, then what you get at the end of four or five years of higher education is a young man or a woman who can do nothing more than be a nurse and is fit for nothing else other than a medical or a health-care setting. And when you have a tourism graduate who is an expert at booking flights, routing clients’ trips, and plotting the most economical routes for tours and travels but who thinks that Picasso was a plumber and Mozart, a famous cat, then you really have very big trouble. There is nothing that impoverishes a nation more than citizens with emaciated spirits and shriveled souls!
In fact, there is something incoherent about the targets of higher education these days. On the one hand, there is a premium on the dictates and the demands of employers. They are now officially known as “stakeholders” and, as such, have a very powerful voice in the determination of curricula and educational programs. But research is also required of universities, in particular. A teacher who does no research is doomed to remain fixed in her present rank for a very long time. But research can only be the product of a free spirit. Research is synonymous with intellectual unorthodoxy. There is plenty of insight in professor Clarita Carlos’ bold generalization: The academic is by definition left-of-center! It is the refusal to accept established answers, the choice to avoid the well-trod course. The ethos of the researcher is that of a discoverer: If everyone else sails west, why not try the eastern though uncharted course? To do research, one must be unshackled from the demands of the quotidian and the enslavement of the commonplace, the imperialism of the “way things are”—lured by the prospect of “how things can be.”
In fact, many of the discoveries and inventions that have given modernity its present configuration were not the products of specialists—but they certainly came from men and women of vision, with a profound understanding of things and of wide-ranging interests. That breed will soon be extinct if we allow the present colonization of higher education to go unchecked. It has been my thesis that the infinitely trainable person is not one who has been schooled to perform specific tasks, formed to fit into societal and employment moulds. One has only to call to mind those who authored the American Constitution and wrote the seminal papers that engendered present-day American democracy. It was because they were men (the women do not figure prominently in historical accounts!) who put to good use intrepid spirits and truly liberated and capacious minds.
If the graduate of entrepreneurship, for example, looks for employment in existing enterprises, that defeats the purpose of the entire course. But many who do take the course end up jobless because a successful entrepreneur is one who has a profound grasp of human nature, of the dynamics at work in societies and in the interaction of persons and one who does not forget that aside from effective action, there are also the moral qualities of “good” and “bad,” “noble” and “ignoble” that spell the difference between enterprise that is worthy of us, as persons, and whatever might be unworthy and demeaning. Of these, most specialized courses are regretfully incognizant.
There is still much to be said for Aristotle’s concept of the “liberal arts”—because these need not mean pointless pursuits and the leisures of the idle wealthy. The human spirit is most inventive, most responsive to the demands of situations, most practical when it is liberated. And it is this kind of liberation that higher education should offer the student!