ED.u.Cate.

A teacher friend, ABD, just sent his whole class outside. I thought it must be the 2-hour brown-outs. I was wrong; said it’s not PECO-related but brain-da related.

It’s is just not the only but one of the many whines I would often her from my teacher friends: students just getting dumber and dumber.

(News is…there’s a budget cut for the state universities. I wonder where that will lead us.) 

I wish to present a listing of valuable statistics on the decline of Philippine education but I still don’t have them.

One of my bosses, a former university professor, says the same. Teaching post-bacc is getting to be more and more frustrating because each year, students, she said, seem to be getting dumber and dumber.


What about us? In what spectrum of dumbness do we belong?

Then again…perhaps it’s where we are really heading? (If you googled for “Philippine education+students getting dumber” you’d get links to articles not only talking about Philippines dumbness.) Who knows what the teachers complained about me, or my batch perhaps? – students getting lazier to edit because of MS Word spellcheck and grammar auto detect? And how about the students, decades before? And the ones before? I’m wondering what the Egyptians or the Incans would complain when they see us now. Maybe laugh at our buildings and the atrocious planning? I’ll give them the liberty because after all, the Burj Dubai is really nothing compared to Machu Picchu.

Sending students out do not help, ABD knows that but sometimes it’s really too much. Either that or a heart attack. I will choose sending them out. Better to preserve ABD than a class of 30 morons. 

On to another friend. He helps students make their papers readable. He’s rather amazing, this friend of mine, because he’d actually allow himself to be subjected to such torture. He does it for a pay of course, and frankly, the pay is chicken feed compared to what these dumb students are subjecting him to. On some occasions where, I’d help revise a chapter or two, sometimes he’d beg me to help him. revising requires a lot of mental preparation. To prepare, I’d scan the first page, pencil in hand, to see the extent of work I’d have to do. Seldom would I encounter a paragraph, more so a sentence, that does not need any form of revision. And patience is a virtue that I always try to keep but standards is something else and before I lose them both, I’d resort to revising the whole first page. It doesn’t end there. Eventually, the decision would be to revise the whole chapter. It's no use revising a chapter what can be more clearly explained in 2 paragraphs (because the remaining 80% of the chapter is pure trash--apparently there's too much copying and pasting that happened).

This kind of black market “employment” is not commendable in the university where ABD, paper-revising friend (PRF)and I come from. I personally keep mum about it because it embarrasses me. I do not want to be called a thesis reviser, nor the local version of Recto. But I understand how it works with PRF—he has actually had a handful of “best in thesis” (both masters and undergrad) in his portfolio and numerous network established because of it. He should be proud of this achievement, and of the fact that in all of those things he’s done, he’s virtually made himself a dengue expert, a peace and order expert, a computer science expert, a childcare expert, to name a few. He learns a lot from them, I wonder if the experience is the same to the other party.

Of course, PRF learns from them because that how he’s reared by our university, the way ABD and myself were reared also. We know learning does not end after university education (and motherhood—thou shouldn't be your children’s slaves).

So how do we really make these dumbasses want to love school? How do we make them ask intelligent questions? How do we make them learn to problematize (beyond the “how’s” in getting the latest model iphone or ipod, or the latest in facebook), feed their curiosity, make them go to the library, make them read book other than their text books, make them work on their paper—not by copying and pasting, but, this time, by using their head, when we've practically done everything possible?

Dumbasses and morons, stand up. It’s time you defended yourselves.