Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to describe scenarios in the Philippine social clime and its connection to the field of education—its practice and its affect. In line with this, the researcher embarked on an exhaustive library and internet research to chart such scenarios in order to weave a framework that spotlights the importance of a facilitator of learning—one whose foundations are built on the long-term goal of emancipation from hegemonic oppression and critical pedagogy—to commit towards leadership in education.
Keywords: Leadership in Education, Critical Pedagogy, Fordism, Post-Truth
Introduction
The Philippines recently underwent a major reform in education. The implementation of the K-12 Curriculum took the field of education by storm. Initially designed to adhere to standards set in most of the countries in the world, the said curriculum brought promise and at the same time challenges to educational managers and learning facilitators alike.
The positive side came with the chance for a majority of the students (who will become a huge part of the country’s labor force) to possess what they call “globally-competitive” skills enough to land a decent job regardless whether tertiary studies will be pursued or not. Employment means income, and income means taxation and purchasing power; this power will eventually mean consumption; which will then lead to production, which will mean more job opportunities as demand and supply oscillated on its economic dance-floor. A good economy will ensure that all the needs of the country are supplied, and its resources used efficiently.
On the other hand, this reform in curriculum also slaps the truth that the government is incompetent to provide jobs for their citizens and instead of addressing this problem, they offer this educational reform as a band-aid—better chance of landing a decent job on foreign shores. In short, labor export (Caleja, 2011).
The discussed problems in the preceding paragraphs branches out to two concepts that shall be explored further in this paper: Post-Truth and Fordism.
On Post-Truth and Fordism in Education in the Philippines
The Oxford Dictionary defines Post-Truth as those “…relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than [sic] appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Using this definition, this concept can be immediately connected to two phenomenon that prevails in our contemporary condition: the advent of fake news and historical revisionism.
Fake News often contain headlines that take advantage of easy-to-tickle senses. It screams statements that sound so convincing one does not need to click the link to the whole post—the headline says it all, and from there stem to a desired reaction—whether of gross disagreement, or blind-allegiance (in case of propaganda posts).
Historical Revisionism is the complete alteration and even distortion of long-held historical data to suit desired conclusions. Over-glorification of certain historical figures is the main ingredient of this abominable practice. Marcos as a hero, Bonifacio as superior to Rizal, Aguinaldo as a National Hero are some examples of this.
The advent of the digital age combined with the rapid development of information technology enabled these phenomenon to arise. With a simple push of a button, a wide array of information is readily accessible, most of which contain information that references falsified documents or untrustworthy sources. This opens the gate for confusion between what is readily available and what is being taught inside classrooms. A person will find bipolar decay in determining who to believe in: those that appeal directly to things that he himself wants to hear, or those lecturing about something he personally does not believe in.
Moreover, with the arrival of post-truth is also the underscoring of a cultural hegemony that sociologists call Fordism, a phenomenon that rose during the Industrial Revolution in Europe and remained prevalent up to the present time. Fordism is named after Henry Ford, an American businessman known for creating massive factories that manufactures automobiles. He is often credited as the one responsible for the assembly line, a system that structuralizes and systematizes the method of production. Because of this method, his factories (and by extension, his business) became successful.
The Assembly Line is a system—rigid, and compartmentalized. A worker is expected to come to work at a specific time (enforced strictly or else wages will be lessened), commit several hours of his day to tinkering with raw materials, earn wages, pay taxes, come home, and then come back the next day. This turned into a cycle, until the worker reaches a peak in his life—something that Marx called Alienation—the feeling of indifference towards one’s work. A worker’s labor is simply a job he stuck at because he needs to pay for his bills, and not something he really wanted to do, something that gave him a sense of worth or purpose. Businessmen recognized this alienation as a problem and sought to address it immediately. The solution they brought to the fore was motivational conditioning—by making it seem that if a worker does his job greatly, the intricacies of life will become good for him. By working hard, a worker may buy the house of a lifetime; or a new car; or have a vacation in the porcelain beaches of Boracay. Thus, the achievement of these “dreams” became the main focal point of his hard labor, and remain blind to the murky layers that lay beneath it. The system plays its game, and it plays its game best on the workers.
Fordism works hand-in-hand with our system of education. Paulo Freire (1993) best summarizes it in one statement: “Schools are factories”. Because of negative practices in schools, he likened schools to factories that produce graduates who does nothing but follow the system, the status quo. With the practice of Banking Concept of Education—where students are seen as hollowed containers devoid of any knowledge and teachers as the fountain-source of knowledge (while at the same time the main authoritative figure inside the classroom—students are indoctrinated to do what is required of them. Students are encouraged (or even forced) to study in order for them to land a job that pays well so that they may be able to buy the things that they want and have a great life. Actor and TV personality Joey De Leon best describe it in his statement shirt: “Trabaho, Ipon, Travel, Enjoy” (literally Work, Save, Travel, Enjoy). Instead of highlighting the importance of education as a path to enlightenment and/or even the desire to examine and to know about the world, students are conditioned to just work hard and enjoy. But since there is a lack of jobs in their country, these graduates are exported to other countries where they will earn hard currency. No matter the separation with the family, no matter the brain drain, as long as they earn the wages they think they deserve in order to afford a decent living condition. School-as-factories produce nurses so they can work in hospitals and clinics abroad. They produce engineers to work on infrastructures abroad. They produce chefs to cook foreign cuisines served on foreign tables. In short, the long-term of goal of a Fordist education is to produce graduates that will benefit other countries as remedy to the festering wound of unemployment in the Philippines.
Now, with the advent of Post-Truth and Fordism in Philippine society, tied with the issues and concerns to the K-12 Curriculum in as much as it pushes forward for labor export, then are we, as Educational Leaders, workers in the assembly line that produces robot-graduates to adhere to this status quo?
The Role of an Educational Leader
Emancipation from the status quo is what the educational theorist Paulo Freire explores in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). He highlights the practice of what he calls critical pedagogy—an educational praxis based on the works of the Frankfurt School of Thought (Adorno, Habermas et. al.) that aims to turn the Banking Concept of Education on its head. Basically, critical pedagogy promotes a dialogic mode of learning where power relations between the teacher and the student disperses. With this, the teacher learns from the student and vice versa. Curriculum design will also be spearheaded by the stakeholders of education, with the betterment of the society where they belong to as its end-goal (Mahmoudi, et. al., 2014). Practices of traditional pedagogy (Banking concept, indoctrination) will be eradicated and only authentic and empirical data, with complete references, will be put to the fore, thus crushing the negative impacts of post-truth and Fordism. With the eradication of the latter aforementioned concepts through dialogic learning and emancipation from the status quo, then schools are no longer factories that produce robots, but institutions that educate humans—beings that work to become the best they could ever become.
By guiding our students to the betterment of their lives without the false-promises brought by Capitalism, then we have encountered, if not achieved, great social change. Enlightenment shall always be the means of education, and we facilitators of learning / leaders of education should be the ones to carry the light.
References:
Caleja, Erika. “DEPED Program K-12 will only Reinforce Labor Export Policy—League of Filipino Students”, June 9, 2011. Retrieved from: http://bulatlat.com/main/2011/06/09/deped-program-k-12-will-only-reinforce-labor-export-policy-league-of-filipino-students.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York : Continuum. 1993.
Hobbs, Renee. “Teaching and Learning in a Post-Truth World”. Citizens in the Making. Vol. 75, No. 3. Pages 26 – 31. November, 2017.
Mahmoudi, Ayoub, Khoshnood, Ali, and Abdolrazagh, Babei. “Notes on Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy and its Implications in Curriculum Planning”. Journal of Education and Practice. Vol. 5, No. 4, 2014. Retrieved from http://iiste.org. Accessed last September 10, 2017
Sarroub, Loukia R. and Quadros, Sabrina. “Critical Pedagogy in Classroom Discourse” from The Routledge Handbook of Educational Linguistics. Edited by Martha Bigelow and Johanna Eunser-Karanen. New York & Abingdon: Routledge. 2015.
“Paulo Freire and the Role of Critical Pedagogy”. Retrieved from http://daily-struggles.tumblr.com/post/18785753110/paulo-freire-and-the-role-of-critical-pedagogy, and accessed last November 23, 2017.