CORRUPTION BY EDUCATION

We rave about corruption here and there and everywhere in our sick society. Corruption in government and private industries. Corruption in the military and in the priesthood industry. We hardly notice, however, where the seeds of corruption come from. It comes from our schools, colleges, and universities where they teach corrupt values and corrupt beliefs. We are, indeed, the products of a corrupt system of education. It’s the easiest thing to corrupt people. Take normal boys and girls during formative years in school and teach them to believe the following: . To believe that we are all guilty of sin until we have no more pride, dignity, and self-respect. . To believe that faith is always better than reason and that daily prayer is the daily solution to daily problems. . To believe that the saints of God are more worthy of emulation than to spread the ideals of human brotherhood. . To believe that it is needless to improve social conditions because there is a better life to come after death with God in heaven. . To believe that it is needless to save our minds and hearts for the kingdom of man as what is crucial is to save our souls for the next life in the kingdom of God. . To believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God. . To believe that the revealed truths need not be revealed as such truths are far beyond human understanding. . To believe that to love God’s mother up there is far more precious than to love our own mother and grandmothers down here. . To believe that God will always provide for those who are good, even if they were good for nothing. . To believe that pain, suffering, misery, poverty, and squalor are paths toward eternal happiness up there. Never mind the importance of the growth and maturity of our nation down here. . To believe that success in life can only be measured in terms of money. Never mind where the money comes from as long as we have plenty of it. . To believe finally, that no matter what sin or crime we commit, as long as we continue to believe and have faith, there will always be available from God at any time the forgiveness of sin and crime. Do this to millions of children in school and we have the ideal Christians. We also have criminals. A person who longer respects himself can no longer respect anything. One who does not love himself, cannot love anything. If he hates himself, he hates the world. It is in our system of education where we learn our sense of worthlessness and our unspeakable burden of sin; where the stage is set for corruption as a way of life. Indeed, the real cause of corruption in our sick society is not due to lack of discipline. On the contrary, it is discipline based upon sick values and sick beliefs. Owing to our system of education, we learned to have no faith in the best of the Filipino capacity to think. We do not love our country nor do we love fellow-Filipinos. We only love what makes for the Filipino incapacity especially as inspired by silly divinity always in cahoots with deviltry. We certainly live under a culture of corruption. The worst of it is the corruption of human intelligence. Corruption by education is certainly keeping the Filipino poor spiritually as a people and keeping the Philippines bankrupt morally as a nation. Poch Suzara