‘Don’t let your studies interfere with your education’, went a line in an e-mail message sent to me by a university professor just before my leaving for the UK to attend a master’s programme in social anthropology. It was an admonition I heard repeated every so often in the mid-1980s by student and teacher activists to remind themselves (and their colleagues) that ‘one’s education does not happen inside university classrooms, but ‘out there’ in the real world’.
When explained to students curious and ‘unapathetic’ enough to ask, the students would be lectured on how the university is an ‘instrument of the state and the elite’ aimed at churning out graduates that would ‘perpetuate ruling class and imperialist interests’. Students would then be reminded of how ‘privileged’ their positions were, and how this was made possible only through the ‘oppression of the toiling masses’.
How a ruling class ‘instrument’ could allow such ’subversive’ critique to be made within its halls was attributed to the university being a ‘microcosm’ of the wider society, and thus ‘mirroring its contradictions’. The other pole of that contradiction was the ‘tradition of critical thinking’ in the university, then touted as ‘the last bastion of academic freedom’. Students would then be challenged to pursue a ’socially-relevant’ education that ’serves the interests of the oppressed masses’ to whom they ‘owe’ their privileged status.
In a highly polarised society where poverty is widespread, oppression stark, and repression intense, the above can be a very convincing argument. Indeed, not a few sons and daughters of the Philippine elite and middle classes found themselves during that period ‘immersed’ in peasant communities, workers’s picket lines, and urban slums, only to be entreated by the ‘masses’ to ‘teach’ them and to explain why such sufferings occur and how these could be ended. Behind the plea was the assumption that the students, having come from the university, were ‘educated’ and thus ‘knew’ the answers.
It was a strange irony: those who have come ‘to be educated’ were being asked ‘to educate’. And in those conditions, it was not difficult to answer the question, knowledge for whom? Indeed in many countries in the so-called Third World, the realities of the world ‘out there’ need not be sought far because these are often right outside the university gates, if these have not yet broken in. It was a world that was highly problematic, but not difficult to make decisions in about changing it.
To ‘iterate’ is not merely to repeat but to ‘revisit’, to re-view one’s data with eyes refreshed and widened by new understandings. This more than anything else, perhaps, is what most academics are preoccupied or would like to be preoccupied with. After all, it can be said that knowledge produced in the academic sciences (especially the social sciences) is an outcome of periodic and, sometimes, prolonged ‘revisits’ of their ‘data’–of people’s lives and of what other people know.
In the last half of the twentieth century, this activity has increasingly been aimed at the disciplines themselves, pressed by challenges to their ability to explain and make sense of social reality, and to meaningfully contribute to finding solutions to the multiple and complex problems facing humanity.
The most serious challenge to the intellectual and scientific authority of the academic sciences, however, has come with the realisation that the knowledge they produce plays a central role in justifying and reproducing the social injustices in today’s world. A large body of knowledge has been created, especially by scientists, and applied in ways that have only deepened the inequalities and increased the violence within and between societies. For those in the academe, the biggest task at hand, perhaps, is how the disciplines can ‘reinvent’ themselves and help rectify such injustices and inequities.
But more important, as today’s world has become even more problematic, the even bigger challenge is for everyone, and not just for a class of ‘intellectuals’, to create and make use of knowledge that would make our world less so.
* This piece is excerpted from an essay on knowledge, which is resurrected and revised here on the occasion of the impending ‘changing of the guard’ at the University. May the next university president possess the same independence of mind, commitment to social justice, and intellectual and moral courage as the outgoing UP president has, especially as he/she will serve under the corrupt, corrupting, and morally bankrupt regime of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
