Embedded Files
Joshua Caesar O. Elegado, 3rd Year Philosophy
University of Santo Tomas-Legazpi, Philippines
“Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. ... We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.”
-Jean Jacques Rousseau
There is a paradigm by which education comes into play, that is, for education to be able to function consistent with understanding for an average reasonable person on a larger scale, it then must be, in the means of education that caters for transforming societies into its utmost potential. Education as a constructive measure must be a mechanism to address social realities and must create an avenue to change the status quo, in this sense, education must be theoretical (theoria & methode) and at the same time practical and of course realizable (praxis). In the reality that we see in the Philippine context that concerns its status to be at the verge of problems such as; (poverty, low quality of life in the most parts, numerous cases of uneducated people, lack of opportunities, low employment rates, et cetera.) the need for a reform is indeed urgent, we can manifest or address such concerns in the means of transformative education; that is, we no longer need conventional education, which consists of; teacher-oriented, books oriented, knowledge-oriented, and other "absolutes" lower-order thinking skill category, rather, it must be an education that is grounded on a human level, able enough to be critical and able to grasp philosophical discussions (reasoning and inquiry, concept formation, meaning-making). We see this, for example, on education (mentioning lessons in regards to social realities vis-à-vis incorporating philosophical inquiries for transforming societies) we should teach kinder gardens about Socrates' Gnotchi Seutos, we should teach preparatory about Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract theory, Basic Education on Kant's Categorical Imperative, Intermediate on Mary Wollstonecraft, Junior high school on Karl Marx and Jose Rizal, Senior high school on Amartya Sen, et cetera,. With that being said, to implicate, assuming that such paradigm is regarded as true, with such level of education in that being, people then are critical to his communities, resulting in transformative qualities of a society there is, to where people engage in collaboration in the entirety to combat oppression that occurs in the reality, which results to transforming society in the practical sense; in realization, I doubt that the Philippines would ever face such problems of poverty and bad governance, to begin with, for people or citizens are very much educated in a sense of a transformative vis-à-vis constructive venue of education for social transformation, in a way theoretical and practical at the same time very much realizable.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse