iskolar para sa bayan?

For a while now, the dictum iskolar para sa bayan has been recited by some student formations in their bid for campus political power. It is used as a counter-discourse to the (still) prevailing iskolar ng bayan with which the university community and Philippine society have hailed U.P. and other public educational institution students. But what this semantic shift entails is a radical disjointing of our beloved university from the rest of the people. From belonging to the nation (bayan) indicated by the preposition ng (of), the use of para (for) initially dedicates our Isko and Iska to the people. However, the change in phraseology manifests how students (and teachers?) of the university are rent asunder from the nation. Those who advocate such a call profess that we become scholars first, and then serve the people. No problem one may think as “we are students and must be scholars first” before we become leaders or whatever. This interpretation is not wrong, but lethal to the Oblation spirit. Indeed, many students, owing to reasons such as uplifting their families from poverty, social mobility, personal careerism and the plot for world domination, really struggle to become scholars. Yet we must understand the material condition of possibility of such scholarship. From the Greek word skholè meaning, “the free time, freed from the urgencies of the world, that allows a free and liberated relation to those urgencies and to the world” (Pierre Bourdieu’s Pascalian Meditations London: Polity page 1), scholarship also has come to be known as separation from the people; because, you have sufficient or perhaps excessive wealth that exempts you from engaging in matters of life-and-death that the rest of our countrymen engage with everyday, you have a strong predisposition to disengage from the world.

Iskolar para sa bayan manifests how certain people have crafted themselves in the messianic mold of salvaging the nation and saving the universe. It is as though the people cannot liberate themselves (they are actually struggling for national and social liberation!) and are lying prostrate for these creative activists to redeem them. Study hard, live the competitive spirit, capture the highest positions of power in the campus as a stepping stone for getting the highest offices in the land. Whatever is left in you, give it to the nation. I have a running hypothesis, that iskolar para sa bayan corresponds to corporate social responsibility, that is, the practice of reeking obscene profits and then allocating a minuscule amount to save the trees, feed the beggars, entertain the disabled, clothe the downtrodden and other efforts that merit more the society and lifestyle sections of the news media. Caution: cause-oriented projects exempt corporations from taxes, hence they earn more profits, and such projects project good images that hide exploitation and, thus, yield more and more profits. Who are the people who do this? They are the ones who scorn the masses, they ignore the suffering people’s own analysis of the conditions of their suffering (for they are ignorant and stupid, according to the learned); by doing so, they overlook the demise of their own privilege that is an outcome of the people’s fight to restructure society in order to have a good life. They are the ones who do duty in hospitals and hail invectives at our poor patients, whose lives depend on the whims and caprices of our iskolar para sa bayan. To me this habit of denigrating the masses does not smack of hypocrisy, but really is a rehearsal starting in one’s college life, right within the university, under the shadow of Oblê, sa lilim ng akademya, and so we anticipate its development in turgid proportions as decades after—and right now—we see our politicians doing the same.

I like to believe that we are part of the bayan first before we become scholars. We become scholars only because the people support our education. Serving the people means integrating with them, making our education relevant by studying the situation of their deprivation, knowing their poverty and oppression. Some people leave their dreams when they leave the university and join the masses in realizing change. For me, their decision is not antithetical to Oblation. Our concern for the mean time is what should happen here and now, while we are still students and educators. Iskolar ng Bayan evokes us (we, the scholars) as part of the people, fundamentally belonging to them. We become scholars of the people when we analyze the problems of Philippine society, realizing that our separation from them--gradually becoming antagonistic for the iskolar para sa bayan identifies with the ruthless rulers of society—is part of the problem, but a problem that also wants to render itself resolved by uniting with the people.

28 february 2009