How Going to College Becomes a Process of Unlearning

How Going to College Becomes a Process of Unlearning Nga-nga.
This was my reaction after reading Jorge Bacobo’s college uneducation. How can you ever imagine that going to college becomes a process of unlearning? Just look at this scenario. For all of your life, you have dreamed of entering college and you have spent a total of 10 years in elementary and high school to prepare yourself and only to find out that once you stepped in this institution, it becomes a different world all of a sudden. The ideal bubble that pops out of your mind suddenly bursts and you came to realize that after reading a selection in your GE class, all of your efforts have become useless.
You, yes you unknowingly is a victim of college uneducation. How ironic, right? How could you ever waste your time memorizing the book and all the principles of sciences only to find out that after an exam is finished, you tend to forget everything? How come you have forgotten your existence here on earth and disregarded the most important thing of the world called life because you are preoccupied of all the assignments, thesis, lab reports, quizzes and exams? How did education evolved to memorization and book worship? How come you cannot answer a simple question without relying on Google or your Encyclopedia? How come you have become a slave of technology instead of you using it? I repeat, how ironic this is.
It is a slap in the face because it is the truth. Now, do you call yourself educated? So this is college uneducation – a word unrecognized by Microsoft Word, a newly-discovered term by an author through his observations of what have become of the college students nowadays.
Book worship. This is a very rampant activity of the students nowadays. When you ask someone a question, one answers like a robot controlled by the book he has read. This starts the death of critical thinking and sound mind reasoning. Our professor in our Genetics class even worsens this scenario. It is understood that everything we learn in our major subjects must have a reference and everything we speak in the class should be quoted from an author. However, how can we become educated when everything seems to be a copy paste of the things we ourselves have not experienced? The book answers it all. Then if you become unstoppable saying your answer, confident of what you are saying, the professors says, “From where did you get that? Who is the author of that?” So this is how books became the students’ gods, worshipping them overnight and forgetting them everything all at once?
Professional philistinism. For me, this is like programming the students of what they are to become – specialists in their own fields resulting to narrowing their entire lives to overspecialization. Maybe our professors can be blamed for this since instead of inflicting to us the core values of our existence in this planet, such as realizing how to achieve higher thinking and deep feeling, and appreciating the aesthetic refinement and intellectual pursuits, we are being confined to set our hearts in becoming specialists. As a Fisheries student, we focus on all the areas of the fish beginning from its genetic constitution until how it behaves in migration so that it can be caught by the fish farmers to lay the fish on our plates for food. Our professors keep on saying that one day, one of us will become an expert of this and that and so we have to really study hard on our field. As a result, we end up being slaves of our profession and remain ignorant on the artistic and cultural values around us.
Jading dullness of modern life. Unlike the old education, the new generation education does not anymore cultivate the heart. We cannot control the release of the new iPhone or iPad in the market so as we cannot control how the new education brought about by modernity evolves into a way in which forgets how beautiful this world is. Everyone is addicted to Facebook posting their selfies, hashtagging, tweeting on Twitter, uploading a video in Instragram and the like. All assignments can be done by copy-pasting, and getting information from the cannot-be-trusted Wikipedia; and just by one single click, you thought you already have found what you have been looking for. All the formula, equations, scientific names and essays appear on screen which your brain refuses to digest. How easy. How convenient. How fast it is do what you call research. However, can your laptop release nectar which invites the colorful butterflies to come around? How can’t anyone appreciate the rainforests of Miagao and the rich culture it has? You have to ask yourself: when was the last time you jogged in the campus, breathing in the freshest of the air, taking in the singing silence of the salty air of the OWL waters, or ran barefoot on the grasses of fishbukid? This should have been what education is also all about but now it seems that everyone is a failure.
Misguided zeal. Our passion has shifted into a direction that beclouds our vision of the broader perspectives of life as a result of continually pushing ourselves to highly specialized training. How can we be effective in demonstrating the life formulas after we graduate if even now when we are still in college, we have not fully crossed the advanced line of human thinking? Our professor in our Statistics class always allows us to open our notes on the formulas during exams since according to him, if we will be working, reality is that we will still look at our books as a basis. However, there are no books for life formulas just like statistics. Life is not all about standardizing the solutions but rather mastering ourselves alone because no one knows us that well except ourselves.
The author’s ideal college student is the wise individual who has unveiled the mysteries of his life, the one who is happy of his existence, has a sense of patriotism, is simple but knows how to defend his virtues without relying on the complexities of rules. On the other hand, honestly, my ideal vision of an Iskolar ng Bayan is someone who is a critical thinker. An Isko also knows how to interpret graphs and charts in literatures when he is told to do so. He envisions his future landing a job to help his fellowmen. Finally, an ideal Iskolar ng Bayan has an overwhelming love for his country. Maybe it is not too late to add Bacobo’s ideal college student to my list.
A well-rounded education does not only deal with the truths and facts the books and our teachers offer. Art and philosophy is also important because only in art do we find the values of beauty which enables us to appreciate life and human existence as a whole. Philosophy should never be taken for granted since even if we are asked of any question, at least we are able to defend ourselves and prove that we really are educated. In the end, it is not about what we learn or how much we learn, but it is always about the process of how we learn and apply it to real life scenarios because common sense is not always common anymore.
Honestly, I dominantly agree with the author for the reason that college students are nowadays really uneducated according to the context he presented. However, there are still a few individuals who do not possess such kind of thinking. And of course, I would not want to allow myself to be called UNEDUCATED. #