Well-meaning friends have warned me about doing this article. However, I am getting this feeling we are missing out on the big picture, a perspective not popular as it fairly detaches the thinker—or the debater—from the discussions on the field, as it is also less dramatic.
At the center of the debate is history, not the narrative per se, but the discipline and all those who engage in it mainly because they are equipped with the mind, the tools and the strategies. The historians are under attack, we tell ourselves. History is besieged! Truth is doubted. That is how the online discussions present the problem.
I do not see that as the problem. That makes it the problem—the fact that we have zeroed in on the historian as crucial to the current conflict or debate. There are more to this crisis than intellectuals. As with afflictions, these are only the symptoms we are looking at.
One question we need to ask is this: how did we become this nation where logic and intelligence appear to be suspect? Look again, are we really contending with a dumb nation or are we caught in the scenario of a nation presenting itself as a significant entity online?
Is there really a dumbing down of Filipino society or have we submitted to the illusion that the world online has significantly defined who we are and what we are?
The fact is we are dealing with what has been happening for many years—the decline of education. Behind that realization are the other facts: pedagogies that have become irrelevant because they do not address a population; an educational system that has remained divided—one public and one private, one progressive and one regressive; and, a political economy that favors a few. You could parse further these facts and talk about how education has remained slow—and traditional—in its delivery of educative goods and services.
The teachers are not to be blamed, for they at present as in the past, have proven to be steadfast and brave in being teachers. I am, of course, speaking of the regular teachers—they who automatically lead cleanliness campaigns whenever the government sees the need for sanitation and they who become the whipping boys and girls when election time comes. They suffer under a bureaucracy that is ultimately corrupt, unfeeling and unthinking.
This is the same bureaucracy that has shifted its course many times, under different administrations, one wonders if education scholars ever think of looking at this sordid evolution of our educational system.
It is from the same educational system where we derive our sense of history, or the lack of it. Given the present dispensation, we can go further and claim this educational system has removed our knowledge of history.
Against this backdrop, we situate the ongoing heated discussion where history is taken for a gossip or rumor. For those who have benefited from good education, such a claim is not only preposterous but also absurd. But how many of us have had good education, or at least, have learned to think through topics or issues, the hallmark of critical thinking? What lessons in the classrooms allow students to critique systems and structures without that teacher mistaking said openness to a disrespecting attitude?
Online, we (for I consider myself as belonging to a class with the luxury to think) know who we are and what we stand for. We are conscious that there are individuals similar to us in the ability to stand outside a theme, dissect the contours of issues and pursue an analysis. We may not agree with each other but we know where we are coming from. We can even fight over ideas and come out at the end as friends. Deconstructed, we mirror each other. But then again, we have forgotten about the other worlds, the other communities. Online are entities that are to us amorphous; we do not know who they are. They remain without form because we do not care about them. We do not listen to what they say because their words are different, vulgar, ordinary. However, they are into technologies we dread to use. They have mastered tools of communications we never thought —not in our middle-class, or upper-class, nightmare—could be persuasive for a significant population.
They TikTok their way into existence. They vlog experiences that are about their daily food, the crassness of their humor. They are not timid to display their sexual proclivities. Their candor can be terrifying as it can be disarming. They have reversed our snobbery: ours is a surplus of knowledge, theirs is the lack of it. We hold on to truths and problematize them; they invent truths for that is how they have survived in this society that never gave them a chance to air their voices.
The new technologies they have made their own to induce new ways of knowing among themselves while said technologies have formed for us echo chambers. The democratizing element of online transactions has actually divided our world: us and them. This leads us to many actions. We correct their grammar thinking such skill matters to them. We make fun of their preposition combinations forgetting that it is our private joke from which we dangle our lives of modifiers, and from which they will never derive material benefits. We call them “dumb” and yet we cannot understand how they have kidnapped the social media and other instruments while we, with our wealth, cannot ransom them back.
Education has failed them. And, we who have received the boon of a selective and discriminatory education, have failed ourselves. From the edge of a mental promontory, we look down helplessly as historians are pitted against starlets, and institutions rally to support thinkers in languages a majority of this republic cannot comprehend nor care about.
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Image credits: Jimbo Albano