Education for globalization kills culture of poor countries

Globalization has become the buzzword in every ambitious undertaking the government is trying to project in its policies. Its objective is to be attuned to trends in the socio-economic and political scenes in the world.

The dictum is we are now a “borderless” nation because of the advent of globalization. In other words, we should be world-class and be at par with other developed countries in the world of competitiveness in all aspects of life.

Globalization is actually an IMF-WB doctrine that focuses on 3 primary agreements – privatization, liberalization, and deregulation. It’s none other than the process of keeping the world in line with the consensus in Washington. In the near future, United States engineers and architects can practice their professions anywhere in the world, including the Philippines, and Filipinos could also practice their professions in the US without barriers whatsoever.

Sounds pretty good – as if there’s now an equal playing field in the practice of every profession. In this regard, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) has introduced the outcome-based education (OBE) in orienting and in evaluating the kind of education that will be implemented in the country.

As noted by some educators, OBE is basically a student-centered approach in the execution of an educational program. The curriculum topics in a program and courses contained in it are expressed clearly as the intended outcomes are achieved. According to study, the World Bank wanted curricular and structural reforms in education as outlined in its draft “World Development Report 2004: Making services work for the poor people.” It describes the purpose of education as mainly to prepare workers for jobs in a global economy where capitalism can move jobs anywhere in the world as it wishes.

Public schools cannot be everything for everyone, according to the advocates of OBE. The purpose is to provide students with a common core of fundamental knowledge and skills.

They added that during the past decades too many burdens have been placed on schools – from school lunches to sex education, coping with death, environmental awareness, AIDS awareness, global relationship, cultural sensitivity, and family violence sensitivity. Each of those, individually, may be of merit, but largely they take time and distort the focus of schools away from teaching skills that students will need to succeed in their later studies and in employment and personal lives after school, they added.

The same OBE approach will be the basis of CHED evaluation for each university aspiring to be the center of excellence in the country.

In the United States , for instace, Obama pronounced that the government will stop subsidizing schools that are not producing good results. Some observers said that the program centers around a “rating system” that will “encourage colleges to do more with less.” Federal funding for institutions will be tied to institution’s ranking. They are talking about “job readiness,” “fast-tracking into the workforce,” and “flexible scheduling.”

But as noted by some analysts, politicians are not talking about enriching education with diverse subject matter, time to engage in critical thinking, or participation in political, cultural, and intellectual life outside the classroom in a campus setting. They are actually talking about skills-based classes that provide the training and certification that used to be provided on the job. This set up takes away from corporations the cost of training workers and places it on the back of the students.

That is why subjects like Filipino will be side-tracked to a K-to-12 curriculum, giving way to the “internationalization” of the courses – that is, to give more importance to English course in college which will be the “standard language” in the global market.

How can we develop our national language if we keep on killing it in the guise of internationalization? It’s not only killing the Filipino language but the other languages in the country as well. They are killing the way people think in their own language. They are killing our culture and selling our souls to the wishes of the multinationals, the IMF-WB, and transnational corporations that hamper our growth as a nation. 

Globalization is killing the distinct culture of the less developed countries. The spirit of collectivism in operating complex dynamics of society is what Asians are used to. But as a result of the borderless operation of capital in different parts of the world, they are now replaced by the neoliberal concept of individual freedom, freedom to exploit one another, freedom to make excessive gains without just compensation or service to the community, freedom to keep technological inventions from being used for public benefit, and even profit from the public calamities secretly engineered for public advantage, as observed by some analysts. Democratic rights for the dispossessed people are simply tokenism because true liberty resides on property ownership.

In the US, for instance, one of the key elements in the educational  program is limiting access to higher education through the imposition of higher tuition and reduced government support to institutions and individual students, and the initiation of a uniform curricula with “culture-free” materials for today’s neoliberal economy.  As noted by some analysts, the program highlights not only anti-intellectual and anti-humanistic assumptions of these curricula but it is also downscales what the students should expect to learn.Globalization postulates that schools are no other than a business, with teachers as workers and students as products and commodities.  

The teachers are expendable; they can easily be replaced by another expendable teacher. The streamlining of general education courses into non-social science in orientation will produce passive, submissive, and apathetic students in order to be part of a reserve army of unemployed workers in the industry. The state defaulted to guarantee the rights of every citizen to education while giving way to the onslaught of the private corporations to manage our educational system, to manage our future. 

Many local business tycoons donated sums of money to big universities just to venerate themselves as champions in nation building. There’s Henry Sy, who donated  money for the construction of a University of the Philippines graduate program building in his honor at the Bonifacio Global City. Cesar Virata, a former crony of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was also venerated by naming the UP College of Business after him –  after he donated a big amount of money to the college. A business college at the  Ateneo de Manila was also named John Gokongwei for his philantrophic donation to the university. The most celebrated and famous (or infamous) tobacco tycoon, Lucio Tan, is now the owner of the University of the East, while Henry Sy is operating the National Uuniversity.

Education is supposed to be the only opportunity for the downtrodden to get out of poverty, as well as to enlighten one’s self from social reality or harness one’s ability in pursuing one’s belief or advocacy in life. It should not be for money alone. – Rappler.com 

Leonilo Doloricon teaches at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, where he served as dean. He is a recipient of the Thirteen Artists Award of the Cultural Center of the Philippines and of Manila’s Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan Award. He is secretary-general of the Concerned Artists of the Philippines.