Kyle Angelo Walsh M.

Atega
2014-50986
On Educating Children
To be honest, I have been trying really hard to postpone writing this reflection
paper. Actually, I have been trying really hard to avoid reflecting in general about the
movie I Am Sam (2001). At first, I didn’t understand why I was so hesitant to get
anything done. It is 5 am as I write this. I’m on an FX from Bacoor to Alabang Town
Center, where I’ll catch the 5:30 P2P bus to Greenbelt 1. It’s my weekly Monday
morning commute that still makes me late for my 8am bowling class at Ever.
I was forced by the panic monster (the monster that appears and forces me to
work whenever I procrastinate too much) to reflect on the film, as well as the source of
my apprehension towards writing this paper. I now realize how deeply intertwined my
viewing of this movie was to my childhood experiences.
When I was a toddler, between the ages of two and five, my parents had very
little time outside of work. They had just bought a house together in 1997, after years of
saving. My parents used the rest of their savings to fund my father through law school.
Most nights, I would fall asleep to law books as my bedtime stories and explanations of
jurisprudence as my lullabies. When he passed the bar, he went into private practice at
an Alabang law firm two hours away from our house. Law books were replaced by Harry
Potter, except I was reading them by myself. Tatay usually got home at around 9:30 pm
to 10 pm and I was almost always asleep at the couch.
My mother was a dentist who offered very low rates compared to most other
dental clinics in the area. This was a result of her previous experience in dental school
when she frequently got selected for dental missions. Free tooth extractions. She didn’t
think that dental services should be something difficult to access. She would get dozens
of patients a day, a lot of them would pay her in food, whatever they could spare,
instead of money. Sometimes, she would get home carrying combs of unripe bananas.
Because she was always tired from work, she would watch CSI for an episode or two
then fall asleep. She didn’t tell me bedtime stories or sing me lullabies, she always fell
asleep before I did. Many times, my Tatay told me that while he was off at work, I would
be the man of the house. My only job was to tuck my mother to sleep.
 My parents were always away at work, even on weekends. Those first few years,
we were still at that stage where saving money was the top priority. So instead of paying
for a household helper, they chose to have my grandmother, Mama Lucy, raise me
whenever they were gone. She is a kind old lady. She smelled like magazines and glue
because her favorite hobby was to make arts and crafts. The house was full of large
paper swans and paper mache chickens that she sold to her friends. She used to be a
swimmer. Her room had shelves full of trophies. She was one of the first who taught me
how to swim. Before she left for America to get remarried, she gave me a white turtle
necklace, which I call Pawi (short for “Pawikan”).
She was the one who taught me that you don't need to use words in order to say
things that are meaningful. She taught me this because she was deaf and mute,
communicated only with sign language. I used to be fluent in it before she left- after that
I forgot most of it. Which is why I found myself intensely uncomfortable about writing a
reflection paper about I Am Sam- because there were many times when, in hindsight, I
might have been a bit too much to bear with but she did anyway.
My whole family, to this day, often reminisce about how “makulit” I was as a child.
They would look away for a few seconds and by the time their gaze went back on me I
had already escaped my crib and climbing the windows. They told me that I never
learned how to walk, I just stood up one day and ran as fast as I could. Out the door.
Across the street. I crossed the road for the first time when I was four years old. I
remember this because when I got to the other side, I looked back and all the fear that
four year olds should have had about crossing the road rushed in all at once. Like a
punch in the gut, the fear made me unable to move. I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe,
and I cried until Mama Lucy came to get me. I think now that she must have been just
as scared or even more scared than I was. For the same reasons that many PWD’s all
around the world are scared of raising children. Yet, Mama Lucy took care of me just
like she took care of her three kids.
I learned the lesson of I Am Sam, that love is always enough and that it will
always empower you as a guardian, at age four. It is love that makes you find ways to
make it work. Roger Ebert did not give a positive review for I Am Sam, saying that the
antagonists were making more sense. After all, it is true that Lucy would not be able to
learn much mathematics from her dad after she turns eight. Mr. Ebert misses the
substantial part of the film dedicated to the construction of support systems that would
help Sam take care of Lucy when she is older. Free tutoring, support from Annie, the
foster mother Randy, etcetera. The argument that the movie is trying to make is that
these support systems would never work in the absence of Sam’s love.
These are the reasons why most of my friends tell me I might believe in love too
much. I usually laugh and tell them they might be right, but I’ll keep believing anyway.
It’s why I can’t bring myself to study anything if I don’t convince myself first that I love
the topic. It’s why I end up loving so many different ideas and subjects. The notion that
love empowers you to work hard for something is a simple one I learned a long time
ago. But it snowballed into something so large that you can find it in every corner of me.
That was just a sliver of the ways that childhood shaped me. I cram all of my
work as a grown person because my parents always made me do my homework under
time pressure. I became a wide(ish) reader because my father rewarded me ten
minutes of computer time for every chapter I finish and somewhere along the way
reading became its own reward. I’m afraid of chickens because when I was five a
chicken pecked me in an area I don’t want to talk about. Discovery Channel
documentaries I watched with my parents and a small visual encyclopedia I received
when I was seven made sure I was interested in science. That visual encyclopedia was
the reason why I knew about the fourth state of matter in second grade. Everybody in
my family always answered my questions- the “why” game that annoys almost every
single person on Earth somehow did not annoy my family. That’s why I was awarded
“most inquisitive student” in first grade (I didn’t know at the time that it was a
euphemism for “most annoying”). That’s why I asked my second grade teacher if she
was lying when she said there were only three states of matter.
Most people would say that it’s a cliche to say that one is the sum of his/her
experiences. I say it’s not a cliche, it’s a classic. As a thinker, I am defined by my
experiences the most. The way I think is a product of who I am, and nobody can think
the same way I do. I am “educated” in a way that nobody else can claim for themselves.
I put quotations on “educated” because I think that I’ve always had a different view on
education.
 First, I think there’s a reason why children come out of school remembering first
and foremost experiences and not necessarily classroom lessons. This is because as a
source of information, nothing can beat first person experience. There is a gap of
understanding between you and the pages of your textbook. There is no such gap
between your experiences and the way you learn from and interpret those experiences.
In the same way, the learning process is in itself a first person experience. The main
driver of learning, to me, is to make sure that the learning process is a positive
experience that encourages as much freedom as possible. Too often is schoolwork
considered a chore rather than something to seek out. This is because the creation of
the experience of schoolwork is centered around a detached, impersonal view of
schooling. It’s there for you to learn facts, not for you to learn yourself, and this is why
the experience of education is rarely a positive one for children.
Second, the goal of education is very unclear. What we know for sure is that the
goal of education is to make educated children. But what is an educated child anyway?
The way modern education frames it, it seems that a child is educated when it fulfills a
particular curriculum. But what of children who skip grades, children who are
homeschooled without a set curriculum, and children who started but did not finish the
curriculum? Are they intrinsically less educated than ones who have completed their
curricula? It’s easy to imagine a homeschooled child who could be smarter than one
who is not homeschooled. If “educated” means “smart,” then we know for a fact that
since following the curriculum is not a necessary condition for intellect, it cannot be the
goal of education. I think it is clear that even if educatedness presupposes a certain
level of intellect, years of schooling is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to
consider a child educated.
Furthermore assuming but not conceding that a curriculum bestows
educatedness when fulfilled, it does not make distinctions between types of
educatedness. If there are multiple ways to conceive of intelligence, as is certainly the
case with children, then any curriculum is inherently limiting and makes value judgments
on what kind of educatedness and intelligence should be prioritized.This is again
problematic because this would only prove that modern educational institutions care
less about the uniqueness of the child and more about imposing a set of value
judgments on which skills are more important than others. This makes the problem of
an impersonal education even worse.
Third, intellect is seen as a means to a job rather than as something that’s good
in itself. Education as it is mostly seen today places a lot of emphasis on grades and
obedience to teachers.This is because educational institutions as they exist today are
remnants of the industrial revolution where obedience is key for a thriving factory.
Coupled with the fact that grades are economic indicators that signal a certain level of
productivity to potential employers, you end up with a view of education that is output
centric rather than input centric. The problem with this is that it excludes a variety of
information that looks impractical at the moment from the learning children get in school.
I say at the moment because there are a lot of pieces of information that only seem
impractical at first but end up becoming more important at a later time.
Things like art and music seem like useless subjects for many children because
it does not conform to the usual standard of what kind of information is worth having.
The innate curiosity that children have about a variety of things is taught to be a waste
of time, stifling their creative freedoms and impairing the search for the self. A lot of
schools now have a large focus on the arts during kindergarten and prep, but lose that
focus as time goes by. In fact, by fourth or fifth grade, children see these subjects as
breaks from the “real” classes like math and science rather than classes in themselves.
The structure of the school week reinforces this view by limiting the amount of time
children spend in these classes a week.
Education should not be limited to the productivity view. There is value in the
pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. There are two reasons why this is so.
First, too often does information that used to be worthless in the productivity
view become all too important in that view. Knowledge of microorganisms used to have
little to no practical application. If that knowledge had been lost, if people had told
students to forget about it because it had no practical application, then it would not have
been possible to create and develop the new field of microbiology. Even under the
productivity view, there is value in what we call Blue Skies research.
The second and more important reason is that economic productivity does not an
educated person make. A machine can create thousands of bottles of water a day, but
we do not consider that machine to be educated. This world of ours has managed to
create systems that develop life and stimulate its evolution, but we do not consider the
plaent to be sentier nor educated. A man can spend his entire life assembling bombs
but not know why and how those bombs work. He might be considered educated in the
sense that he knows where pieces of the bomb go, but he still might not know why
those pieces go where theyre supposed to be. Education must have focus on the “why”
question because answering whys lead to more why questions, making education a
constant process.
So what should education be exactly? It should be a learning process that
functions as positive experiences that aims not to create smart or productive people, but
people interested in understanding the way the world works. This view of education
treats knowledge and educatedness as a subjective experiences rather than universal
objective standards. The subjective view requires the creation of positive emotional
attachments with the process of learning. In other words, what children truly need in an
educational system is the ability to love what they’re studying as extensions of
themselves. This, of course, can only be learned from guardians like parents and
teachers.
So in a sense, what a child truly needs in order to be educated is a support
system that encourages exploration into multiple fields of the child’s choice. The IQ of
the guardian is irrelevant. A child will almost always surpass its parents in terms of how
much the child knows, but it doesn’t mean that the guardians are less qualified to be
there.
Philosophy for children is something that directly addresses all of these
concerns. By focusing on the importance of questioning and understanding and
encouraging its use, the moderator allows the child to explore concerns that are
important to it, allowing the child to better situate itself within the context of the world
around it and the self. At the end of the day, childhood is a time of self definition, and
what better tool is there to facilitate the conceptual clarification of the self than
philosophy?

PS: I saw your new DP. Congratulations Ma’am!