Knowledge, Values and Life

There are three major tasks that a teacher needs to accomplish before he can say for himself that he is a good educator. He must be able to teach KNOWLEDGE, VALUES, and LIFE to his students. If he fails to do so, he himself is a complete failure. These three components are the most significant learning that a student should be able to acquire during his schooling. Without which, his whole education will be regarded as nonsense because these three are the fundamental things that a person needs in order to live a good life.

Knowledge

As humans, we are innately insatiable especially in the search of knowledge and learning. The students, even if sometimes it is not visible, are always thirsty of knowledge, of learning. As the cliché adage goes, "Knowledge is power. Knowledge is the image of existence." According to Sir Francis Bacon, the man who brought essay to the world, knowledge must not be denied to the children because knowledge and learning is always given, and thus it deserves to be known and imparted to the next generation. The responsibility of the teacher here is to deliver the lessons well. He must be equipped with the optimal strategies that he could come up with so that the students will be able to absorb every learning experience.

Knowledge has been the long-term goal of education. And knowledge has been misinterpreted many times. Many people took it as the ability to memorize the A, B, Cs and 1, 2, 3s. Many believed that when you can tell time or read the clock, that is already enough. Many assumed that when you can read, write and count, you are knowledgeable enough to survive in this world. Many equated knowledge to intelligence. So what happens in our school is that they fill our minds with complicated equations and highfalutin words, because when you can use all of these you are intelligent. Therefore, you have the knowledge, and the power. However, in its deeper sense, knowledge is not just merely memorizing the alphabet nor the numbers and time. Knowledge is not just reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. Knowledge is more than intelligence. Knowledge is more than that. Few people only realize this that is why we never reached the "quality education" all of us had been hoping for a long time. That could probably be the reason why we fared poorly in the TIMSS.

Now the question arises. How do we define quality education? What is quality? Does it only mean the kind of teaching an educator gives to his students? Or is it the only thing that matters? Would instruction answer all the dilemmas we have in school? In the community? Of all the problems a student experience, would instruction suffice all of them? I used to dwell on the belief that to simply provide good instruction is already what we call quality education. Boy, I was wrong.

But how is knowledge connected to quality education anyway? Our education is dictated by a certain curriculum. If we have ineffective curriculum, we also have an ineffective education, and eventually ineffective teachers and students -- students who cannot even understand what is taught to them. When I was in high school, I always look at this vision-mission of ours. I loved it primarily because it shouts intelligence at each word, at each sentence. The words and their construction were so complex that I thought it was the best vision-mission I have ever read. I thought that a good statement is a statement with highfalutin morphemes that only a school like ours can understand. That was my belief before. But now, my belief is different. An excellent vision-mission statement is a statement that aims for the betterment of its students. It does not depend whether the words are complicated or not but what is important is that the school is able to provide the students what they indicated and what they promised to that vision-mission statement. That what makes quality education. A good curriculum and a good school is an institution that puts the learners at the forefront. Their continuous need for knowledge is addressed not only by instruction, but through the means of implementing it as well.

Values

Bob Ong asked why that character is given less portion of a student's grade, and sadly now it is no more included in the new grading system, when character is actually the very thing that molds us into persons, that hones our personality?

I very well remember my teacher saying that "Attitude" should NOT be included in the computation of one's grade because the grade represents the academic retention and performance of a student. "What does Attitude have to do with it?" he adds. This may be partly true - if your motive is to measure only his academic performance. But that I deem as measuring only a single area of the student's learning. I believe that when your main objective is to measure a student's improvement holistically, Attitude has a great participation in it.

I have read once from Ralph Waldo Emerson that, "We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with bellyful of words and do not know a thing." This sends us the message that in our education, intelligence should not be the only focus in school. What happens nowadays is pure acquisition; less application. We should always incorporate values and practicality because a person cannot put to use any intelligence if does not know how to use it. Incorporating does not mean teaching directly to them values. Their learning becomes more meaningful if teachers let them see and realize for themselves the essentiality of the whole matter.

They say that the school poses a great influence to the students because they stay more hours in school more than they stay in their own homes. If in school they are never taught of good values, what happens to them now? Values are a very important part of out personality. If, as teachers, we fail to let the students see the value of what is being taught to them, everything is useless. When they go out of school, instead of acting as educated proper persons of the community, they may become criminals since they learn nothing from the institution that could have saved them from becoming one. The world we live in is filled with a lot of things that could influence our rationality, if the school itself fails to gain that influence to the students, the result would be dreadful.

Life

Some might find it highly absurd to teach life when in fact our world is very much unpredictable, and that life continues even after our schooling. On a much deeper note, we talk about lie as something we find significant and significance in. A good teacher should be able to let his students realize the importance of what they are learning from his instruction. The teacher's role is helping establish the connection between what he is giving to the students, and the reality outside the four corners of the room. A lesson will be rendered futile if the student himself does not know how top use what he has stored in his brain. It is the nature of humans to throw away things that he finds no practical use in. That could also happen to the knowledge that is acquired, and yet it could never be used. It is like a perishable good; it gets stocked in the mind and will soon rot when not used immediately. A teacher can say that he teaches life when his students are able to see the world in just a simple lesson.

So what now?

What do these things imply to us now?

John Dewey said in Experience and Education that, "What we want and need is education pure and simple, and we shall make surer and faster progress when we devote ourselves to finding out just what education is and what conditions have to be satisfied in order that education may be a reality and not a name or a slogan."

The Philippines is still a long way into finding out what education is. However, it is never too late. The country is like a moon child, trying to find his place in the pack. Even if it takes a long time and a lot of efforts to reach the goal of educational excellence, there is always an opportunity for the country to reach that goal. But people say that before we try to reach a big goal, try to resolve first the littlest details and problems you have inside. And that is, before trying to revise our education, try to find out first the reasons and causes why the system is not effective. So maybe, we could start our mission in trying to find out what is wrong with the students, and what do they really need. Since the children are the ones who experience the direct consequence of every process, we should put them as our priorities.

References:
Bob Ong, "ABNKKBSNPLAKo"
John Dewey, "Experience and Education" , Sophia Study Editions
Sir Francis Bacon, "Quotations by Author", The Quotations Page