School 'System'

We live our life unsystematically. Yes, we do have habits and patterns of actions that keep our day to day experience sheltered from the chaos of the too many unknown and unpredictable things that surround us. Nevertheless, we do not treat our life as a “system” in the strict sense of the term. For something to be a ‘system’, it must follow some discernible, process-like actions that are intended to bring forth a specific, nameable purpose. A system is any network of activities arranged as such in order to perform a certain function. A system cannot be understood outside the notion of functionality. So yes, our lives are – however predictable – unsystematic.

It would depend on how you take it, but this fact about our lives presupposes that which you might find hard to believe, that life is meaningless. When I say that, I mean it in the existentialist sense. “Life as meaningless” means that there is no pre-given motive or purpose for our existence. We came into this world without knowing what we are doing here. We have to figure that out by ourselves, through the help of our culture of course. Meaning is post-natal, so to speak, so that the dreams and goals in life are actually created rather than discovered. Of course, religiously speaking, we may earnestly believe that we are destined for something, that we have a mission to fulfill and that is why we were created. But the fact that nobody in this world could tell us what we were like before we were born, before we were alive, already puts a seed of doubt  about whether, in fact, what we think about life’s purpose is something that our culture (including our religion), rather nature, has given us. We were not yet defined before we began to live. Essence does not precede existence.

This point is important. It only means that we are not machines, built for some specific purpose. If you love God, just relax because such insight is non-threatening. It only affirms that God has made us as genuinely free beings, that we were not programmed, and that we have the freedom to choose what kind of life we would want to have. So living is more like a trial and error, a groping in the dark, or a leap of faith experience. We do not have clue as to what we really want, how do we achieve what we really want, or where do we really go. There are no exact formulas, step-by-step processes, or defined pathways. Yes there are guides, and there are even clues – but the rest of it is out of our own improvisation.  Living is not a systematic body of knowledge. It is not a science. Rather, it is an art; we create or recreate almost constantly the direction of our existence. And even if we have indeed settled once and for all where is that specific point in time and space where we intend to go, it does not mean that we therefore make  some sort of system where our actions are all so arranged at that angle, at that order, to bring us to that certain direction. Yes, there are established activities and to some extent without them a day might appear incomplete or a waste. However, despite this, every day is still a new day. There is always something new, no matter how monastic we become, because that point – that specific space-time dimension which we would like to go – is always a future event. It is something we look forward to. We do not look at it, we look forward to it. For if we were already looking at it, then why we would we even continue struggling with existence? The direction, the goal, the dream, the happiness or contentment or meaningfulness we have been looking and striving for, belongs the future, hence to the realm of the unknown. No matter how convinced and certain we are of ourselves, life still offers - surely until death - some wondrous, yet frightening surprises.

We are therefore always unsure, unsystematic, creative, free, and anxious. We are always in the process of discovering or recreating, of finding the not yet. That is why life is always about learning, and learning is always for life.

This intimate, personal truth is in dire contrast with what society is like and what society makes us. Society is a system. We have various societal activities that are intended to address some specific societal problems. We have the problem of food, shelter, and other basic needs: we have the economy. We have the problem about meaning and spiritual fulfillment: we have religion. We have the problem of conflicting interests amongst various social classes and social groups: we have politics. We have the problem about almost everything: we have the government. What I have just enumerated are activities that are quite unpredictable, but it doesn’t mean that they are unsystematic. In fact, their unpredictability may be due to their being a system, for social variables are, unlike the facts of nature, eternally multiplying. Our economy might collapse today, but two or more years from now, it could return to stability. So predictability or constancy is not necessarily a character of social systems. Their fulfilling of specific functions are complex and complicated.

I think that part of the reason for the complexity of our social world is that the individuals living in it are stubborn beings who do not exactly know why they are doing what they are doing or who do not even know what they would like to do in the first place. People wage wars that they would later painfully regret. People endorse ideologies that they would later shamefully abhor. People do things for different sorts of reasons many of which are unsure, unsystematic, creative, free, and anxious. Individual life is naturally unsystematic, and it is society, for better or for worse, that balances such chaos with order through its systems.

Certainty, harmony, exactness is the character of our social world. In the strict sense of the term, ‘learning’ is not part of what society does. Society does not learn; it is individuals who learn. When such learning is crystallized, finalized, made official, it is transformed into policies, laws, edicts, rules, codified and prescribed procedures that all assume the character of exactness, imposed rather than discovered. Society does not ‘educate’ individuals. It trains them. Socialization, strictly speaking, is not exactly the same as education. The purpose of socialization (hence, school) is to form individuals in such a way that he or she could fit in the established, though full-of-tension, social order.

This I think is how we could look properly at the school. The school is part of society. It is plays a specific function, a very important one, which is that of socialization. Hence, school is a system. It is a training ground for future useful members of our society.

At first I felt it like a betrayal, a shameful realization, that by working in school I am partaking in the system of engineering individuals. I was not actually helping them ‘learn.’ I was actually making them know what society requires them to know. Yes, I still believe that are left-overs in this knowledge factory: those moments when students truly ‘learn.’ However, they are just in the sidelines, an exception rather than the rule. It is no wonder then why it is difficult, if not impossible, for schools to do away with grading system, for just as factories need to sort out their products in order to determine their price in the market, so too does the school need to sort out its graduates in order to determine their place in the social fabric. I know however when my students truly learn; it is when I could not find to the appropriate number to rate them with. The school has only given me the sort of numbers to measure how a student fair in the standards of society in the same way that it provides me chalk, projector, and record sheets. It does not give me the values with which I could teach the standards of life, because it cannot. I have to figure that out by myself. I, too, had to learn.

Perhaps, the greatest paradox of my being a teacher in a school is that I had to stop teaching (in the way prescribed in my job description) in order to truly teach.