For most people, education and politics are like water and oil: they do not mix up. The former is about the exalted pursuit of learning and knowledge, while the latter is the worldly chase for power. They are enterprises so radically removed from each other, so much so that the teacher is romanticized as practicing the “noblest profession” while the politician is eyed with suspicion as one putting on public advocacy but out to promote ambitious self-interest. They are a world apart such that the educational institution is placed atop an ivory tower while the halls of power are consigned to the guts of the earth.
Such state of affairs could not be truer than in Catanduanes. For the Catandunganons, both education and politics loom large in their lives, and are indeed defining aspects of the Catandunganon experience. But they are carried out in mutual exclusion, kept in separate cabinets in one’s imagination, like sex and matters of the spirit. Education is held in high esteem like a star in the heavens that brings bright hope. For the ordinary folk, it is not merely the noble quest for knowledge but is the very passport for a better life: education is the escape route out of poverty available to all. For the typical Catanduanganon parent bereft of material assets that can be passed on to children, the diploma is the only pamana they can bequeath. The noblest parental sacrifice is ikanap ang pagpa-eskwela ning aki not only ta dapat igwang inadalan, bakong mangmang, but more so nganing maka-arisadsad sa buhay.
Education’s exalted nature is symbolically enacted in the pageantry of the academic graduation rites. Parents get a lump in their throats as they watch their graduating children donned in academic gowns, walk up the stage to the grandiose tune of the Aida march and claim their coveted diplomas. Later, they listen to the graduation speaker orate on the virtues of knowledge, on the prime role of education in the imperatives of progress, etcetera, etcetera.
In stark contrast, politics is performed in the vulgar revelry of elections. In Catanduanes, politics is equated with the conduct of elections. Every after three years, the happy island becomes happiest as it descends into the orgiastic excesses of electoral campaigns. It has become a provincial pastime, truly engaging with so much noise, color and gore. As the handful of the ambitious lot compete intensely for the vote, the hapless masses derive indulgent gratification. People eagerly partake of the propaganda and hoopla generated: over-the-top promises, bloated claims of merits, cruel character assassination, juicy intrigues, fake news. But the most awaited culmination is the distribution of material offerings in the form of vote-buying dole-outs.
Education and politics are therefore bipolarities of powerful interests lodged into the hearts of Catandunganons. The gross gap between them is that of a people’s virtues and vices that somehow simultaneously thrive in a modus vivendi so long as they are shut off from each other, in what sociologists call a strategy of “compartmentalization.”
So it becomes truly disconcerting when these two get entangled. To be sure, such crossing of lines are not exactly rare; might actually be a regular matter. But they happen in the shadows and lurk in the undercurrents. We hear of them, experience them, but deny them recognition as part of official and legitimate reality. They are necessary – and indeed normalized – anomalies that must remain “invisible.”
So it has become quite disturbing of late that a most inappropriate mix-up between education and politics appears to have developed in the happy island’s premiere institution of higher learning involving the very Chief Mentor himself. While there has been no open declaration of intent (that would be against the law), all the tell-tale signs of an early electoral campaign are in place under the official auspices of the University: tarps hanging behind tricycles, kitschy jingle blaring at every opportunity, sorties to communities to distribute dole-outs, thinly-veiled propagandistic speeches. To complete the strategic package, social media had become rife with troll-like exchanges of dirty tirades.
The University has never been free of incursions by electoral politics in the past: it has always been battleground of political vested interests. But this present phenomenon isyet unprecedented, its brazenness never seen before in the University of our singular pride. It is profoundly tipping the psychic balance of the academe as its halls and hallways, nooks and crannies, have become dense with discussions and speculations on the matter. It is being talked about not anymore in whispers but in the open, albeit in informal circles. What more, the issue had permeated the entire provincial community. And why not? The Catandunganons are keen afficionados on this matter; the feel it on their skin the slightest hint of political ambition.
But this occasion is good opportunity for soul-searching. We need to take sober taking-stock of this situation so that we arrive at some critical understanding of it. In this series we attempt at an “academic” multi-faceted threshing out of the various aspects of the issue at hand. Doing so, we hope to get to know better Sisay Kita?
“Everything is political”
To start, let us hear from scholarly social theorizing. In contemporary social thought, it has become a truism that “everything is political.” Politics is not merely about government but more so of governance. Politics is the use of power in decision-making. So when two or three people gather to make things happen, power dynamics comes into play. In this sense, all types of relationships are political in nature, be it between lovers, family members, friends, employees, cohorts, gangs, even between people who happen to be using the same toilet. Politics is the most mundane and commonplace thing.
But then it cannot be helped that the word political creates anxiety in most people, power having been associated with abuse, it being a tool for exploitation that brings discord, injustice and suffering. Power is something both terrible and attractive, it makes people shudder with both fear and excitement. It can make things happen both positively and negatively, like gasoline or a sharp knife.
What makes the use of power truly problematic is the fact that it creates conflict among people. Society is no homogeneous entity: it is a conglomeration of individuals, groups, classes and sectors of diverse and opposing goals. Politics is about the forging of temporary unity among parties with permanent vested interests.
As for the educational enterprise, it is too much of a good thing – the advancement and acquisition of knowledge – so much so that it is assumed to be the one true and desirable goal that everybody can only agree on and therefore must be immune from vested interests. So people want to shield it from politics and maintain its innocence from the corrupting effects of power play.
But can such fiction be sustained? Education, like anything else in the world, is political. In the first place, education’s mandate has to be undertaken through a social organization that cannot operate without the use of power. So any educational institution at the least has an internal politics to it: roles and responsibilities are dispensed with through the application of influence and pressure. Operations are carried out by strategic maneuvers and manipulations both subtle and blatant. The school is a bundle of power circuitry like any other establishment. Through numerous turn-over of incumbencies at the Happy Island University, we always heard of less-than-inspiring bickerings and struggles for favors and entitlements, of petty influence-peddling, of power cliques competing for dominance, indeed of helpings into public funds. All hardly compatible with the noble mandate of mentoring the youth.
In the second place, the broader social context presents even more expansive politicization. Education is just one of a number of other institutions constituting society-at-large that must relate with each other. For one thing, the question of what and how to teach is never left to the educational “experts” but is a matter for determination by the main dispenser of power and authority, the government. Content of the educational offering becomes a matter for legislation and policy-making. At the end of the day, education has to serve the status quo, which is any government’s vested interest. This is true even in the case of higher learning institutions, which are supposed to be enjoying “academic freedom.” In this regard, government control is the more acute in a state-owned university.
But what pulls down education from its ivory tower to the ground is its economic imperatives. A school operates at the mercy of economic forces. Any school is an economic unit that uses material resources even as it, too, generates them. For private schools, they dance to the tune of the market. For those government-owned, they are dependent on public funds, which are always fair game for power play. In the case of a regional/local state university, its immediate operating context and clientele is the locality. It must therefore deal with the local political stakeholders led by the local government.
In the enterprise of governance, the adverse, corrupting effects of power is supposed to be corrected by certain principles and values such as democratic decision-making, transparency and accountability. There is no deficit of policy and guidelines along this line, especially in a society that professes commitment to democracy and justice. But all these nice precepts are undermined and subordinated to a more fundamental framework entrenched into the social psyche, the political culture. In the Happy Island, the political way-of-seeing-and-doing, culture that is, is best characterized as patronage politics.
In Part 2 of this series, we elaborate on patronage politics in Catanduanes and particularize it to the framework of the University’s ideal engagement with society.