The first semester has ended and the second is just around the bend. It is good to give some thought to schooling and why it is a good thing to attend school. Let us start by calling trash what it is, and the proposition mouthed by the sycophants of the unschooled who seek the high positions of power and privilege by simply riding on the crest of popularity that it matters not whether a candidate is highly schooled or not is definitely unmitigated trash! If there were no difference between the schooled and the unschooled, then let us close all our schools. But do not even the humblest of families aspire after schooling for their children, and rightly so.

School is the institutionalization of society’s social and cultural reproduction. Through school, society passes on to succeeding generations the heritage of insights, discoveries, truths, norms and values by which it lives. To be sure, this takes place on other ways as well, but school enjoys preeminence in this respect. If there are, as indeed there are, newer methods of delivery that do not necessitate campus residency, that only suggests that educators must entertain novel delivery systems, not that schools are superfluous.

Lyotard, in describing the post-modern condition, astutely observes that the commodity of value in our times is information. He who possesses the information possesses the power, with the result that nations will be at loggerheads with each other over information. And by information we refer not to those silly items that constitute the fare of game shows, but to the databases by which groundbreaking decisions are made in national life, the corporate world and even in respect to the healing of a badly wounded earth! Schools are no longer filling stations for data. Students have access to databases elsewhere. What schools can equip our students with is the capacity to search out the sources, and the adroitness with which to deal with the data.

Memorizing data is redundant. Computers do a much better job at that, and so I hope that law professors desist from the lurid practice of making their students parrot provisions of the law. Thankfully many enlightened lawyers in academe have abandoned this discredited approach—but some Jurassic hold-outs will still be found even in very reputable law institutions.

In higher education today—and I hope in basic education as well—the premium should be on research: the method of formulating a workable problem, determining the appropriate method to be used, searching out data and treating them to arrive at conclusions. As to the latter, it is combinatorial skills that make it imperative that class, course and university objectives aim at higher order thinking skills. By this I mean the ability to muster data and to grasp them to arrive at fresh combinations by way of inference, by drawing analogies, by unleashing the powers of imagination and of conception.

While I understand that private institutions of higher learning are wary of the expansion of state universities and colleges, it is perverse to ask state institutions of higher learning to hold the reins on admission so that private colleges and universities maintain profitable levels of enrollment. It is the responsibility of the state to make available higher education to its citizens and its does this in considerable measure through chartered universities and colleges. Access to education means making education available—not only geographically but also economically. There is nothing shameful about expending taxpayer’s money on higher education. There is everything shameful about splurging on foreign junkets during official recesses (even in the guise of attending pointless and valueless seminars and conventions)!

Quite usefully, the law grants state institutions of higher education with autonomy in the sense that governance is vested in their governing boards—usually called boards of regents or of trustees. Under the provisions of existing law, a student representative sits as a regent of every state college or university. In this sense the administrative oversight that the Commission on Higher Education exercises over state universities and colleges is perforce circumscribed by the powers of their own governing boards. The general never derogates from the special, absent express legislative intent.

But those in the exercise of professions must also address the issue of schooling. The emergence of compulsory continuing education programs in many professions—law, medicine, accountancy, to name some—attests to the growing realization of the need for continuing professional education. But what will be found in many professions is precisely that arrogance that makes practitioners averse to the prospect of schooling.

While the Mandatory Continuing Legal Education that the Supreme Court has ordered all lawyers to comply with is most certainly a welcome development, it can do with more refinement. At the moment, all that is needed is the physical presence of the lawyer who can keep his eyes shut and his brain in a state of suspended functionality during the entire session.

I am glad that at the Graduate School of Law of San Beda College, I have been privileged with the company of some already successful practitioners and even members of the Bench who are eager about learning. I am proud of our professorial team of which retired and incumbent justices and judges and acknowledged academics are part. Of course, graduate schooling in law will hardly make sense to the practitioner who is quite content with the routine of unlawful detainer, forcible entry, reinvindicacion and collection of money that are the regular fare of practicing lawyers. Certainly,

one does not need a master’s degree in law to practice the profession, and under present rules, to teach it! But it makes sense to those who see the point to schooling. Bernard Lonergan put it with force—and wit. When a dog has nothing to do, it falls asleep. When a person is not busy with his hands, he asks questions (and I hope, even while he is busy with his hands). A graduate school of law is where serious questions are asked, so that lawyers and law professors are not only functionaries of law but its scientists as well.

It is the locus of the transformation of the concrete into the abstract—where the concrete problems of those who enter into contracts are discussed as problems relating to the bases of obligations one freely takes upon oneself, and inquiry into the freedom of the human person as well as the phenomenon of living in society with others, without which a phenomenon like contracts would not make sense at all. School should be something like home – the place you will always like to go back to.