Last of a series

LIBERAL education has always been the cornerstone for the existence of the academic community. It is a celebration of free inquiry and respect for diversity. It exists as the antidote to the conservative tendency to fix and prescribe, and instead allow choices, free thinking and exploration. It doesn’t shy away from controversial inquiries and positions. It is a celebration of rational criticism and critical thinking, and not of outright condemnation of inconvenient and bold new ideas and perspectives.

It is this tradition that is now facing the risk of being torched by a post-election academia whose dominant voices are reeling from a catastrophic electoral loss. These defeated voices appear to be doubling down on their defense of their own convenient narratives. Triggered by the impending ascent of the heir and bearer of the narrative they loathe to the presidency, they have announced a vigorous defense against what they presume to be an intensification of historical revisionism. Adding to their fear is the appointment by presumptive president Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of presumptive vice president Sara Duterte-Carpio as Education secretary. Thus, to them, the evil trifecta composed of historical revisionism, militarization and red-tagging is on the horizon and should be resisted.

While one can understand the fear of what authoritarianism can bring and the havoc it can wreak on liberal education, it is ironic that the drive to resist and the path that is being taken subsist more on a heavy dose of prejudice and presumption, which incidentally is the very antithesis of liberalism, and are the cornerstone constructs of conservatism. There is nothing liberal about opposing things out of prejudiced views and of biased presumptions.

Most glaring is the manner these academics have declared war on historical revisionism, as if history is an unassailable ark of the covenant, a holy grail that cannot be corrupted or altered by any new interpretations. This is a most conservative perspective of history that would run afoul of postmodern, feminist, queer and postcolonial historians, not to mention Braudel’s Annales School of historiography.

The reality is that despite the demonization by liberal academics of Marcos, he was rewarded with a substantial majority, the first since the country adopted the multi-party system and had multiple presidential candidates. What epistemologically liberal scholars should do is not to vigorously defend the convenient narratives they have written about Marcos, but to begin a vigorous effort to inquire into the root causes of what to them is an inconvenient electoral outcome. Instead of dismissing a second Marcos presidency as a mere effect of fake news and disinformation, academics should leave their ivory towers and desk research and descend into the bowels of the ordinary and everyday and begin understanding the people, instead of dismissing them as mindless fanatics. They should do actual empirical work, immersing themselves with the people, talking to them not with the goal of educating them, but to hear from them as people with their own moral and ethical judgments.

Thus, instead of fighting revisionism, academics should own it and use it as an opportunity to fully understand the people. At the same time, this can provide them the opportunity to present a fairer, more balanced and more complete history of our country.

It is likewise a challenge to transcend the fear of militarization of the educational system, and the rage against red-tagging of educators, scholars and students. At the outset, it is correct to resist these.

However, it is also fair to reflect on the proper role that academia should play in the honing of critical thinking, and how to direct students to translate the critical social and political theories they learn in the university into acts that will not lead to political violence but to meaningful social reform. Academic institutions cannot ignore the fact that while they have a right to nurture critical thinking among their students, they also have a duty to protect the Republic from harm. The challenge is how to ensure that we produce Marxist economists and engineers, and not Marxist rebels.

Red-tagging is an exercise of selfprotection by the state against its perceived enemy. Academia has to impress on the state that there is a big difference between critical theories and rebellion. The challenge is to make state actors understand that one can adhere to critical and even revolutionary theories, without becoming enemies of the state. But in order to do this, they also have to admit the instances when armed rebels who want to take down government recruit among students who have been radicalized by the theories that their teachers have taught them.

Thus, while red-tagging should be resisted, liberal academics should also take cognizance of the role they can play in ensuring that critical thinking is harnessed to be a resource in critically collaborating and engaging state actors, instead of taking up arms. This is most pronounced in state universities and colleges where the resources used are from people’s taxes, and where the clamor to address rebel recruitment in school campuses is actually coming from taxpayers themselves. Ignoring their calls would amount to another evidence of how detached academe is from the people.

Universities, schools and colleges can no longer continue to play dead to the potential destructive effects of some of what is being taught to the young minds in our country. They also cannot continue to assume that only one side needs to be educated.

Actually, the failure to educate is less about not teaching enough about martial law. It is more about not teaching a complete and balanced history. What we have right now are angry, irrational and misinformed people on all sides. There are those who are angry at the Marcoses and anything/anyone who sides with them. And then we also have those who are angry at the “Dilawan” brand. The first was educated only to hate without giving the martial law period a fair reading, while the latter felt that their stories were muted and silenced, even dismissed as false consciousness and forms of disinformation by the elites.