We students aspire to succeed in life and we turn to education as the key to achieving our goals. But do we really think that we are taught the lessons that we need to learn? The answer is, no. Today, we believe that we are being ‘uneducated’ by the college institutions that we have entrusted with our education. By being ‘uneducated’, we mean the intangibles that we need to learn as human beings and as well-rounded individuals are being neglected. Yes, we are given facts and information to digest, but the handful of methods on how we learn deteriorates our way of thinking as an individual.
Indeed it is ironic, but the painful truth is that this type of education contradicts our Filipino way of life, which is being naturally expressive, creative and open-minded. In Jorge Bocobo’s essay, he explicitly states three ways in which many students are getting a college uneducation: book-worship, professional philistinism or overspecialization, and misguided zeal or simply a loss of a sound philosophy in life. Book-worship is the delirious worship of the printed pages of books.
Many of us students will or have come to realize that we are or have been very dependent with the books and a dozen other references that our professors are recommending. And as some of us students have observed, some of our professors are indeed very ‘bookish’ and will not even accept any other answer or argument unless it is in their revered book that they themselves have come to know by heart after all their years teaching. They even tend to research and fixate on the book alone for their topic plans for their classes.
If the teachers and professors themselves are practicing this very bookish and pedantic way of life, then they will very well pass on this practice of theirs to their students – to whom they should bequeath knowledge unhampered by their delirious worship of the printed page and their love of focusing on minute details in books. Bocobo said, “It is thus that many of our students surrender their individuality to the textbook and lose their birthright – which is to think for themselves. If this problem is left unattended, this mean cycle of passing on the practice of book-worship from professors to students will continue to prosper — rendering our students with no other knowledge than what is printed on the pages of a book. Being dependent on books will cause us to paralyze and cripple our minds from thinking and criticizing. This is not to say that we should not read books, but that we should refrain from devouring every word printed inside the pages of books. Professional philistinism or overspecialization has, as all things do, its fair share of pros and cons.
It is good if you want to achieve a professional career; but oftentimes we are so caught up in achieving the degrees to call ourselves professionals that we forget to appreciate the little things that helped us along the way. Unless we students don’t develop in us a proper appreciation of what is beautiful and sublime in life, everything else and around us may start to seem tedious and commonplace. We might start seeing things in such an unappreciative and dull way. Our daily lives might become systematic and maybe even rigid, thus leading many students to such an unfeeling and dry-as-dust existence.
The last way in which we are being ‘uneducated’ is the misguided zeal or a loss of philosophy in life. Since we are aspiring to become such big-time professionals we are bound to acquire highly specialized training during college. This might hinder us from seeing the broader perspectives of life. If our philosophy in life is in danger of becoming of narrow and mean, it is because we are used to to think in terms of material wealth. In conclusion, the three things that contribute to ‘uneducating’ college students are book-worship, overspecialization, and neglect of forming a philosophy in life as a result of overspecialization.
