COLUMN!

‘Jobs maketh man’

By: Angelique Aquino

“Humanities? Anong matututunan mo dun?” “AB? Sus, madali lang ‘yan. Wala naman kayong Board exam e.” “Anong
makukuha mong trabaho diyan?” Honestly, if I were given a hundred pesos for every time someone gave these remarks,
I’d probably have enough money to buy all the hard-bound law books I could use to slap their faces.

In recent years, public and private education systems have begun shifting their focus from the humanities to STEM and
ABM, neglecting disciplines rooted in the arts, socio-political ideas, and the celebration of human cultural achievement.
You might misunderstand; this isn’t written to be taken as another attack against the two aforementioned strands. Take
this, perhaps, as yet another desperate attempt to defend the humanities and liberal arts—and yes, I am desperate.
Because by the end of this column (or whatever you may call it) I want you to understand that the end goal of education
is not just “getting a high paying job”; the end goal of education is education itself.

Of course, we’re not about to set aside the fact that in a developing country, the statement “welders make more money
than philosophers” would make more sense; In a place where education is being treated as more of a privilege than it is
a right, most Filipinos hardly find enough ‘resources’ to pay for the kind of education that they want and ought to have.
So, more often than not, we are forced to resort to enrolling college degree programs that are regarded by the public as
more ‘practical’ and settle for the hope that we’d land on a job that at least meets the minimum wage.

Liberal arts, then a central aspect in academic freedom and in the life of universities, has been steadily moved to the
periphery. The study of the history of human societies and forms of human expression is now too often deemed as
frivolous, and several colleges and universities have recently announced the wholesale elimination of liberal arts
departments.

Students who major in literature, art, philosophy, history and all others working on getting an AB degree are routinely
considered unemployable in the technology and information economy, despite the fact that employers in that economy
keep on contending that liberal arts majors make great tech-sector workers precisely because they are trained to think
critically and creatively, and to adapt to unforeseen circumstances.

The system is oppressive, and we lose both our passion and ourselves in the process. It worries me still, that even the
government—who has sworn to prioritize the providing of wholesome education for the Filipino youth—has been one of
the biggest promoters of this kind of selective thinking; sponsoring only science and business inclined courses, and
slashing—or even not giving at all—funds for liberal arts.

Moreover, educational priorities should not be determined by future income alone. Such a figure is inherently
speculative and fails to take into account how the job market will evolve in the next ten to fifteen years and beyond.
Demand for jobs and skills inevitably changes, and exclusive focus on one set of disciplines suggests the quixotic
conclusion that our economic and cultural landscape will remain static.

Nurturing a range of disciplines in which the humanities continue to have equal billing is the only model that can
adequately anticipate the challenges of the future. Even from an economic standpoint, a holistic approach emphasizing
the notion of “education for education’s sake” is, I believe, the most rational choice in the long term.

But, conforming to the statement of the Harvard Crimson, the consequences of slashed funds for the humanities are not
limited to effects in the distant future. Our neglect for the humanities also intimately affects the continued sustainability
of this nation’s democratic ideals. In order to prevent a crisis that will ultimately leave citizens ill-equipped to engage in
the self-reflection and self-criticism that is fundamental to any democratic system, we must avoid one failure, i.e., failure
to sustain a holistic intellectual and cultural education—one that includes the study of the past and of ideas.

People on all sides of the political spectrum would agree that one root of our country's current struggles is a failure on
appreciating the intellectual and cultural ideals that should guide our policies. A humanities education is essential for
ensuring that the voters of tomorrow are able to engage in open, insightful, and—perhaps most crucially—empathetic
intellectual discourse about the fundamental issues underlying the political process.

Sciences and business strategies are and will remain vital, but they must be anchored in an educational system that also
values the rigorous study of human culture in all its manifestations. Besides, the very idea of the university as a place to
further ‘bourgeois careerism’ is a product of only the last century, thanks to the pragmatic reformers who were driven
by the vision of an emerging urban, technological, and mechanistic society as the brave, new world we were destined
for, and who thought education should reflect this new reality. But on a side note to history, universities were first
created in medieval Europe as places to study the arts and humanities…

In the eyes of the original mission of universities and their founders, to study humanities was to make one a better
human. And in the kind of society that we are living today, it is—as you know it—what we need the most.