There are a few points I would like to draw attention to:
1. The book would be very much improved if it confronted the unavoidable question of how to pursue excellence without being beholden to government or corporate interests that are often the biggest funders of education and research institutions. It needs to debunk the thinking that neo-liberal education, both in its essence and administration, is a necessity for academic excellence. The book mentions commercialization in neoliberal education as lowering the standards and quality of Philippine education. But the reality is that top universities of the world, with their “grow or die,” “up or out,” “publish or perish” academic culture – as in Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, etc. – are controlled by neoliberals and are necessarily governed by the principles of neoliberalism, so how can this argument be challenged? Harvard University, which tops practically the criteria set for standards of academic excellence both in the U.S. and globally, is a very expensive and highly commercialized university. It has even successfully marketed its branded name, prestige and reputation. In the recent THES-QS World University Rankings, the private, commercialized universities led by Harvard consistently lead the pack in terms of excellence. Thus, in hammering the question of excellence, I also sense a continuing tension between the elitism spawned by the rigorous standards required for excellence versus equity, democratic accessibility especially in our admissions system. Excellence often brings with it a stamp of meritocracy and social privilege.
2. The bankrupt neo-liberal system seeks to reproduce itself through institutions like our universities, where it expects to have undisputed cultural hegemony. When U.S. imperialism created the University of the Philippines in 1908, it created it to maintain and reproduce the system, not to produce a counter-institution or counter-culture that would challenge the very system that created it, or produce revolutionaries who would undermine it. Educational institutions reproduce not only ideas, but also the managers and personnel of a neo-liberal economy. Let us not be deluded or be complacent about illusions of a “liberated academe” or a “Diliman Republic” that was inspired by the First Quarter Storm’s Diliman Commune. Ultimately, we should not underestimate the power of these institutions to mold and nurture neocolonial minds. Should we expect the institutions that are part of the ideological infrastructure of the existing dispensation to produce reformers and revolutionaries who would later challenge not only its fundamental assumptions but also the existing order?
3. Among the values that neoliberal education nurtures and perpetuates is competition, which undermines the spirit of cooperation. But is competition per se bad to attain the highest limits of excellence and achievement? Are competition and the neo-liberal credo a normal, and natural part of the air we breathe in our quest of pursuing the goals of excellence as it is made to appear? We must dismantle this view of the neo-liberals by dominating the intellectual debates in the classrooms, and reach out to the mainstream of public consciousness. For even if we cannot yet control the material infrastructures, at least we should be able to defeat with our intellectual initiatives the doctrines of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. At least, the intellectual infrastructure that defines, sustains and controls culture is turned in favor of the disadvantaged poor, the grassroots sectors who are enhancing community empowerment. The point is that, at the moment, it is still better to promote and advance an academic culture than a corporate one .
4. Lastly, I would have wanted to see more space in the book devoted to analyzing and critiquing the research role and function of our current educational institutions. The complicity of the academe in the repressive state apparatus is all too apparent in the research and consultancy role of our neo-liberal institutions. It is in intellectual work hatched through research and publications in some of our neo-liberal institutions that progressives have been complacent, for our impact on public policy decision making has been nil and dominated by market-dominated paradigm. We must understand that to transform the economic, political and social landscape, we have to first change the intellectual and cultural one. For ideas to become part of the daily life of people and society, they must be packaged, conveyed, propagated through books, magazines, journals, conferences, symposia, professional associations, mass media, and so on. Research and the knowledge generated and disseminated build the intellectual infrastructures to promote a particular worldview. U.P. as a research university has become one of the biggest institutional “think tanks” for the government and big business in the country, in such undertakings like preparing many of presidential decrees during martial law, and the notorious Tadhana project which haunts U.P. even today. It has also uncritically accepted research grants from foundations and governments which have tied their endowments to donor-directed research agenda. It is unfortunate that when it comes to research and generation of knowledge, many of our scholar-colleagues are more interested in accruing money from corporate or government institutions, than in critiquing it.
Educators will appreciate the excellent Teacher’s Guide at the end that completes the volume, helping to make it a most useful tool not only of pedagogical, but more important, of political enlightenment.
One theme ties together all the essays in this book: the need to understand what is at the root of our educational malaise and the system that perpetuates it, in order to better improve it. In this regard, the book’s contributors are at their best and they make for compelling reading.
I am heartened to note that we have many young scholars as contributors to this volume. For in the war of ideas, any movement is in trouble if it cannot renew its ranks of committed intellectuals, thinkers and writers.
Until that day of human liberation when we shall establish a new social order based on social justice and human dignity, the corporations, the government bureaucrats, their material infrastructures in the academe, and their academic pimps will continue to sustain one succession of scum regime after another.
As my parting word, may I commend the editors and contributors of this book for making it clear that victories can be won in our schools. And perhaps, after the schools, larger victories in society can also be won. The ultimate spirit and lesson of this book is that progressive change in our institutions and society is possible if it is linked with social movements and built through popular struggle. Let me quote from the American civil libertarian, Frederick Douglas:
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are people who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.” Posted by(Bulatlat.com)
