Caring, not conforming, is what schools need now
DURING this time of a pandemic, the idea that education needs to continue has frustrated many people. This is reasonable because, for a long while now, education has become equivalent to an enslaving burden.
Even before the virus outbreak, teachers have not only taught students. For work, they continuously revised modules, checked papers, encoded grades, created reports for accreditations and even organized events. Some also endured the long and tedious process of research and publication. Deadlines were but a part of their daily life.
Meanwhile, students have been made to comply with requirements and get good grades. When they do, they get rewarded. Thus, their learning is reduced to being a byproduct of laboring for incentives.
The education sector has tolerated this kind of system, as it has kowtowed to the illusion that everything can be objectively measured. Ironically though, this obsession for objectivity also reveals its own prejudice. Its paradigm is brutally frank: you adjust to the requirement. It will not adjust for you regardless of anything, including the pandemic. The requirement appears to have a life of its own.
Imagine yourself or someone in your household contracting the virus. Yet you are obliged to comply with submissions and deadlines, and failure to do so will be taken against you. Can you not ask for objectivity? If objectivity is certitude in reality, then why are hardships overlooked in the education sector? Are we still in denial of the effects of the pandemic? To be true, the worst has reached academic institutions. A number of students, members of the faculty and academic staff have been infected with the virus. Some did not make it.
We now see people taking a break from social media because their newsfeed has transformed into obituaries. Daily news does not help either. Just when we thought we were about to see the end of the tunnel, the virus mutated to become more infectious and life-threatening. Such a reality tears even the toughest among us.
Education does not have to stop. But it has to change from being a high-maintenance repository of combustible papers back to its original form of being a noble vehicle of learning and caring. There is a lot to learn, and relearn, at this time.
One advantage in the education sector is its being a community. No one has to be alone in suffering physically, emotionally and psychologically. This is the second nature of educational institutions that we throw away when we busy ourselves with too many deadlines. Indeed, schools must relearn to become caring communities.
In his book, Building Community in Schools, Thomas Sergiovanni writes that instead of imposing compliance and conformity, schools should become a community. By being a community, one fosters healthy and inspiring student-teacher relationships and provides a nurturing environment for its members. Note that the environment is not limited to the physical campus. It also refers to the various relationships among the stakeholders of schools.
“Relationships in communities are characterized by the kinds of emotions — personalization, authenticity, caring and unconditional acceptance — found in families, extended families, neighborhoods and other social organizations,” Sergiovanni writes. The crisis brought about by the pandemic behooves us that as learning institutions we are to be proactive in becoming real communities taking good care of our members, just like the real members of the family. Empathy is a much-needed trait now to prove our humanity.
It is not my aim to enumerate the ways how to care for members of academic communities. But I am sure that real caring is more than a duration, like a one-week academic break or an academic freeze. Schools can do more to have each-others’ presence felt in a nurturing and helpful way.
As a school administrator, whenever I meet my co-educators for the first time, I would always tell them that my role is to take good care of my teachers. In turn, I hope the teachers will pass it forward and take good care of the students, too.
In light of the pandemic, however, I would like to revise that: Let us take good care of anyone whenever we get the chance.
Jesus Jay Miranda, OP is the secretarygeneral of the University of Santo Tomas. He holds a doctorate in Educational Leadership and Management (ELM) and teaches at the Graduate School of UST and the ELM Department of the Bro. Andrew Gonzalez, FSC-College of Education of De La Salle University-Manila. Contact him at jaymiranda.op@ust.edu.ph.