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Seeking light as pursuit of reason and not of mere information, as pursuit of wisdom and not of mere knowledge

Promotion of seeking and sharing reason and wisdom as the basic process in education;

'Reinventing' the teacher as a 'sharing and learning facilitator' and of textbooks as channels of learning instead of authoritative 'last word' on anything.

Recognition and enhancement of sources of knowledge, skills and wisdom outside the school systems

Promotion of less-structured education systems for children that would encourage and enhance intuition, aesthetic appreciation and creativity, respect for self and others, love for all life, predisposition to team play, and basic spirituality.

Critique and repudiation of current data-memorization-based, competition driven, grades-indicated, teacher-centered & commercialized educational system, programs & policies

  1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism

  2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

  3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 

  4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

  5. Civics and Democratic Governance

  6. Culture as Community Creativity

  7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

  8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony

  9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships

14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart'   

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A ‘University’ Beyond the Box

By Ed Aurelio C. Reyes

Executive Convenor, Lambat-Liwanag Network for Empowering Paradigms

This article was first published in LightShare Digest , issue No. 5, a quarterly book magazine of the SanibLakas Foundation.

PICTURE this: a book writer on successful entrepreneurship in dairy farming and the book’s foreword-writer, a well-known nationalist economist who has founded an academic institution on sustainable development, spoke at a recent book-launching and got the enthusiastic applause they fully deserved. But the speaker who got a standing ovation from the audience was a simple man who told his story, nervously but from the heart, of his slow transition from a very, very poor farmer to proud father of a now graduating nursing student, with a new motorcycle, a better home, and a seat in the barangay council – all because one day years ago, he had decided to learn well how to take care of three dairy carabaos.

We should thank Light-Share e-group member and veteran environmental broadcaster Vic Milan for sharing with us this story, but we should salute the organizers of that book-launching event for making it possible. People from various walks of life, including students and their professors in higher education institutions (HEIs), stand to get much insight and fresh knowledge, even new sparks of profound wisdom from organic intellectuals, from people who speak from their own wealth of direct and intimately-witnessed experiences. That nervous farmer speaker has at least as much useful knowledge to share with them as degree-holding “walking libraries” who can instantly quote a hundred authors from across the continents and across the centuries on any subject one can bring up.

And he doesn’t have to be a nervous speaker for long. With more speaking engagements coming his way, with or without the affirmation that a standing ovation unmistakably is, he will get used to speaking before large crowds and even before academic audiences in university classrooms.

Further on, he can even be writing his own books and obliging autograph-seekers at the end of book-launching affairs like the one he nervously addressed. And he would be just one in a fast-growing set of “organic intellectuals,” discovered and assisted to provide invaluable knowledge inputs for various sections of Philippine society, including its Academe. And the latter shall have found it prudent to mobilize them in big numbers as real sources of profound and practical knowledge to augment what has hitherto been limited to books and researches.

‘University of Real Life’

This happy scenario can become widespread reality as early as within this decade if a new project of the Lambat-Liwanag Task Force on Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education makes a headway sometime soon.

Lambat-Liwanag, the mainly academe-based network convened by SanibLakas Foundation to develop and promote the empowering paradigms, recently soft-launched this ambitious project to be handled by its paradigm-specific task force on education (Empowering Paradigm No. 7). The task force has been revived more than two years after the sudden death of its head, then Lambat-Liwanag Chairperson Enrique D. Torres.

This was done during the Fifth Anniversary Conference of the network held last February 14 at the University of Sto. Tomas. Also on that occasion, the network elected a new chairperson, Dr. Ernesto R. Gonzales, who was for five years its founding secretary-general.

The revived task force immediately came out with a draft concept paper for the project, dubbed ”Pamantasan ng Tunay na Buhay” or “University of Real Life.” It aims to discover and further develop organic intellectuals as effective light-sharers to expand “well beyond the box” the sources of knowledge for our education system. It seeks to do this by mainstreaming direct and intimately-witnessed learnings as a significant enrichment of currently very limited sources.

The current system of education in the Philippines has been patterned after western-oriented frameworks. This system overplays the value of institutionally-recognized sources of knowledge like books and other research papers, as personified by scholars who earn institutional recognition on the basis of such research work.

It officially, formally and effectively excludes organic intellectuals who have not had real opportunities to acquire such status, thus keeping narrowly limited the sources of useful knowledge shared in the schools.

The Academe’s knowledge system is now heavily based on researches, statistics, formal rigor, and premised on current patterns of thinking and behavior. These are learnings that have been experienced very remotely, and the system is thus wasting much of the wisdom of organic intellectuals just because the latter are not developed and recognized as potential educators for our people unless they “entered the box.”

The “Pamantasan ng Tunay na Buhay” project will undertake the following efforts: (a) discovery and recruitment of organic intellectuals from various parts of the archipelago and in various fields of human endeavor; (b) assistance for them to develop the capability to synthesize their rich experiences into forms that can facilitate more effective sharing with others; (c) processes to help them develop the confidence and capabilty to clearly articulate their knowledge before audiences of various sizes and profiles; and (c) documenting such articulation in the form of books, pamphlets, videos, CDs, audio tapes, etc. that can generate much new material for participating educational institutions and also generate material resources for them and for sustainable growth of this project.

Three honorary chairpersons have been chosen posthumously for the Pamantasan ng Tunay na Buhay. First is Gat Andres Bonifacio who led the Katipunan undertaking to bring moral and ethical education to the people right in their own homes and based on their own experiences. The second is Apo Macli-ing Dulag, the Kalinga tribal leader who dared defy the Marcos dictatorship upon the profound wisdom that men could never validly claim to own land that would definitely outlast them. And the third one is Mr. “Titser ng Bayan” himself, Prof. Eric Torres, who was the multifaceted leader of the country’s educators.

‘Alternative Education’

About a couple of years before he succumbed to a sudden heart attack, Eric had completed the main guiding article, a comprehensive one for this empowering paradigm on education.

As main speaker at the Lambat-Liwanag Conference on Light-Seeking, Light-Sharing Education held at Philippine Normal University in June 2002, Prof. Torres presented that paper which was carried in the book, A Gathering of Light for Empowerment, published by SanibLakas Foundation and UST Social Research Center, and also in Human Rights Forum, the semi-annual journal of the Philippine Human Rights Information Center (PhilRights). Under the heading “Recognition and Enhancement of Sources of Knowledge, Skills and Learning Outside the School System,” Torres wrote:

“Alternative education defines itself as a process in which the people are able to name the reality that oppresses them, analyze this reality, and collectively work for the interest of the whole society rather than the interest of the individual. As such, alternative education is education for humanization of the people and the system. It is education for liberation.

“It is a response to the people’s quest for a participatory process of acquiring and using knowledge. It seeks to bring to the communities descriptive knowledge and normative processes aimed at making people contribute to the effort for full development of individuals, communities and society.”

He enumerated the following points:

(1) Alternative education proceeds from the understanding that knowledge is the result of people’s experiences or practices reflected upon. These experiences range from dealing with the forces and laws of nature, other persons, with the family, community and the broader society. These experiences may be deformed in their interpretation of the cultural system if the powerful are made to do the naming of the reality. And with such deformed and distorted view of experiences, knowledge is thus warped and prevents the people’s critical intervention into the reality. Therefore, it is of primary importance in any educational process that people themselves identify and name the reality according to common actual experiences.

(2) Alternative education enhances critical thinking and encourages particular and specific phenomena to be viewed in the context of general, broad and historic realities. Alternative education is liberating because it enables people to grasp history from their standpoint, to learn lessons and to be critical of the myths taken as truths; and to rediscover truths on the basis of the people’s experiences.

(3) Alternative education is opposed to the alienating education of the dominant system that is irrelevant to the actual experiences of the people. It is problem-solving because it addresses the day-to-day concerns of the majority of the people.

(4) Alternative education must be popular and made accessible to people with minimal money, time and resources. Community-based education considers the whole setting of the people, the area, their economic cycles or schedules - contrasted to the commercialized education in the urban setting owned by private school-owners.

(5) Alterntive education must inculcate nationalism as a core value but integrated with internationalist humanism because we opposed bland and chauvinist nationalism and xenophobia. We should discover and rediscover the rich traditions of the people before they were distorted by the colonizers.

(6) Lastly, alternative education should lead to collective action for liberation and development. Education is not only a process of knowing reality but of changing it.

Beyond Equivalency

Some HEIs, like the University of the Philippines (UP) and Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP), have initiated schemes to enable highly experienced but unschooled Filipinos to acquire diplomas equivalent to what these schools award to their regular students. These laudable schemes have been known by a variety of names such as “open university” and “equivalency.”

By these systems, the schools involved officially recognize the value and efficacy of learning from direct and actual experience.

The Pamantasan ng Tunay na Buhay project seeks to maximize on the praxis of these schemes and to go beyond them by developing organic intellectuals into effective educators, not just diploma-carrying practitioners, in their own respective fields of expertise.

We dare predict that quite soon, a growing number of professors currently in the faculties of various schools would be eager to learn from these organic intellectuals who, like that nervous farmer in Vic Milan’s sharing above, would be speaking with rightful conviction and passion from the heart and not only from the mind.

On the basis of out-of-the-box thinking that led to their equivalency schemes, we have reason to expect UP, PUP and other schools with equivalency to welcome and support the intentions of our Pamantasan ng Tunay na Buhay.

Beyond Lambat-Liwanag

The Pamantasan ng Tunay na Buhay projects will spur efforts to enrich the education sector with many organic intellectuals, turning the unschooled into greatly appreciated professors and doctors of experience (pantas ng karanasan or “P.K.”).

This falls right within the focal mandate of the SanibLakas-convened Lambat-Liwanag Network for Empowering Paradigms or, more specifically, within that of its Task Force for Paradigm 7.

But the project deserves, and would definitely receive, the active support of the entire SanibLakas community.

With the entire Pamayanang SanibLakas currently pursuing a local-communities-based thrust, its member-organizations and their individual synergizers would surely discover many organic intellectuals in their own fields of work and help the ‘Pamantasan’ in its recruitment and development mechanisms to turn them into excellent experience-based educators.

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