Notes From The End Of The World As We Know It 11: Education at the End of Life as we Know It

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

The other night, my children were having the most delightful and intelligent conversation. My son had not seen his sister in a while and he was so excited to be sitting at the table with her again. And, as usual, when he is excited or happy, the words flowed at a torrential rate. He was telling her about his latest favorite thing, which was to be read Greek myths to. As he was sharing various points of interest, he blurted out: “And you know, ate, how silly this Pygmalion was? He fell in love with his own statue. His own statue that he made! How ridiculous is that?” This was my just turned six year old son who, later on, with similar explicatives, explained how sad it was that Prometheus had to be punished for stealing fire for the people. With this, my son and his 20 year old ate engaged each other in a conversation on the tragic and ethical issues explored by these myths. In truth, that conversation wasn’t as profound as I’m making it sound. Most of it sounded more like: “I know! That’s so sad right?” and “Why would anyone open the box? That’s so dumb!” But the reason I thought that this conversation was so intelligent was not because my son knew his mythology. That’s not a sign of intelligence but of exposure to a certain culture because of one’s class. Rather, the reason I thought that this conversation was so smart, was because my six year old was able to pick up on and analyze the elements of high tragedy in the myths and comment on them from his own perspective.


I am starting with this story because my son is not so manifestly smart in school. You see he goes to a traditional pre-school where they are made to sit on a desk and follow a rather fixed curriculum. It’s a wonderful curriculum, mind you. But it is a very traditional one and pushes all the children to learn standard things according to a standard plan and does not really allow them to explore learning with their various intelligences. This is why my son, who can discuss Greek mythology and argue against the necessity of hell if God is a loving God, is not one of the smartest kids in school. For the longest time, they were even reporting that he did not complete sentences when at home he would be using words like “ridiculous” correctly and as part of complex sentences. Thus, my son hated school even if he loves seeing his teacher and classmates.

I remember when I was in school how I too was not very happy. More so than my son because, in the old days, teachers thought that threats and fear were their best tools to coax learning. So I always felt like a dunce because, despite the threats and the fear, I could never get the lessons as quickly or as rightly as the other kids. I was always in the middle, insignificant and never feeling particularly bright or capable. The kids on top had tutors, driven parents who either drilled their students constantly and/or brought food to school for the teachers on an almost daily basis. I was there to passively get knowledge drilled into my head. My happiest time in school was play time or, later, illicit smoking breaks. I don’t think traditional school suited me because one was either one of the herd who was asked simply to receive information and skills, or one excelled because one was driven and tutored to empty excellence. In the end it was never about discovery.

When I got to the university, all of a sudden, learning was so much fun and was so wonderful. It was so because, by this time, I had learned not to care about grades. I never actually did care about grades when I was in primary and secondary school because grades only made me feel mediocre and worthless. But when I reached college and started studying literature and philosophy, I was allowed to forget about grades. The less I cared about grades, the more I learned to learn and the higher my performance was evaluated—a fact that seems ironic to most, but not for people who know what learning is genuinely about.

I remember how it felt when I first discovered learning. It was when my literature and philosophy teachers first started talking about literary and philosophical works as living works to think about, to engage with, and build upon. Parmenides’ poem was a living testament that invited you to immerse in the first articulation of Being. Brilliantes offered a world of symbols and feelings that allowed you to explore your own. Later, my history teacher taught me that the pasyon was a framework for a whole revolution, and we could sift through the thought of Bonifacio and Jacinto for its traces. For the first time, we were invited to think and not to repeat. For the first time, dead people stopped being dead and we could see with them, feel with them, love and hate with them, imagine new worlds with them, and then we were invited to think our own thoughts in response. How wonderful was that? If study time in my youth was spent crying over homework that didn’t mean anything to me, this time I could not get enough of reading assigned texts in college. I believe that my daughter experienced the same kind of liberation when, from a traditional school, she was allowed to experience creative learning in a UN high school and later in the university where I teach. Learning, all of a sudden, was exhilarating because it was discovery and liberation. I was truly led out of the cave and I was basking in the living light. Certainly, this was not all the time because we had our share of uninspired teachers. But when the teachers were good, we soared.

Because of my own experience of liberation, I want to tell my son when he comes home from the school where he is not so smart not to worry. “
High school and grade school are meant to be like that—a cave of dark learning. There’s no other way to learn the basics but to sit and memorize and give back what your teachers want you to learn. Ate had to go through that and now she’s learning better things in college.” But then, I am beginning to hear about progressive schools. They say that in these schools, there are no grades and children are taught in a way that does not put a premium on what they can memorize but on how they can discover knowledge on their own. They are not stuffed into large classrooms where they are anonymous and uniform, but each one is encouraged to discover and realize their own special talents. In these schools, their learning rhythms are respected.

Just last month, my wife and I visited the open house of one such school. And we were so surprised to meet the children there. They seemed like such nerds. Not the annoying kind who were in your face because they needed to let you know what they knew so that you would think they were special, but the kind of children who were so obviously smart because they had learning and were excited by it. The kids did presentations on things they discovered in school and as they did, they spoke like a different breed from the children herded into traditional schools. They had knowledge that they genuinely understood—knowledge that empowered them because they knew how they got to it and why it matters. They seemed like products of a system that respected their creativity and capacity to participate in their own education. Because the school does not run according to competitiveness and the measure of grades, the students seemed to be into learning for the sake of wanting to know and to understand. They were independent learners that early. They obviously came to knowing because it was fun or it was important to them or it fascinated them and, therefore, they could and wanted to share it. There on the tables and floors of the school were eager children able to explain why ocean currents run the way they do, how plants depend on their roots for sustenance, and how proportions can be derived from a circle. A friend whose son studies in that school told me how her grade five son and his friends once obsessed about explaining the Euclid’s theorem and ended up spending some nights and days working on it.

I am excited for my son to study in a school like this after three years of dwelling in the cave. I can’t wait for his mind to be set free not just at home but also at school. I can’t wait for his independent, inquisitive, brave and adventurous mind to be affirmed by someone other than philosophy professors and his family. But more than this, I am excited for my son to be in a school where he will learn to be a leader in the age of the end of life as we know it.
As we come to the end of life as we know it, we will have to re-imagine civilization. Things we took for granted will no longer be the same. How we eat, how we manufacture, how we plant, how we are sheltered, and how we earn our living will have to change. We will have to rethink the meaning of development, of success, of the good life, of comfort, and of affluence. Who will lead us in this dreaming, this recreating? Will it be the children of the cave who were taught that learning is pleasing and conforming? Or will it be the children of the light who were taught to explore the wider world according to their passion and imagination? Will the children who had to be driven by competition, pressure, and the need for affirmation lead us? Or will it be the children who were empowered to discover, taught to cooperate in birthing knowledge, and inspired to challenge themselves to break boundaries?

My friends say that traditional schools are good for some children because strict structures make them flourish and progressive schools for others. I believe that. I am just glad that there are alternatives that will nourish the other children whose minds are dying to be set free because they will be facing a time when the structures we know will break down and better worlds will need to be built.

Notes from the end of life as we know it 10: Solidarity Economics or Spending for a Better Worldl

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez, Ph.D.

One of the most economically stagnant and impoverished sectors of the Philippine economy, and even of the world economy as a collective, is the agricultural sector. Here we always find the worst poverty. Often, the rural poor are in a world of economic stagnation where there are no roads leading to a life of stability: to a life where people are able to provide for their most basic needs. If you live in the areas where farming is the main source of income, it is most likely that you have no access to affordable credit. Most probably you are in debt with local traders or informal lenders and that every planting season you sink deeper into debt because the prices of input continue to rise up to three fold and the prices of your produce continue to fall up to one half of their value. Most probably you live in areas where fields flood when it rains and they dry up completely when it doesn’t. Surely you do not have crop insurance so that, when the crop fails, you dig yourself even deeper into the debt trap. You may not have access to electricity and you may need to spend much time and energy to access potable water. When you need to plant, you have to pawn your harvest in advance to a trader who will dictate the price of your produce aside from exacting a steep interest rate, and when you harvest, income is never enough for household expenses and food for the whole year. Thus, your children whose schools are far away, have difficulties completing primary school—not to mention the higher levels. The life of the farmer isn’t a joke as the old song says. It may not even be sustainable. For someone who is outside the reality of their lives, it is almost impossible to imagine how they navigate from day to day. But they persist despite the odds stacked against them by a world that has deprived them of opportunities for building a good human life.


The people of the soil are neglected by our economic support systems and yet it is from them that we derive our sustenance. They are also the keepers of our deepest traditions and the bearers of the wisdom of a life bound to the earth. It is in our interest to ensure that they flourish. However, governments do not fund them enough to respond to their needs and businesses are too short sighted to relate to them beyond exploitative and extractive relations. In order to genuinely help the farmers develop, they need to be assisted in ways that aim to reform the exploitative systems that keep them poor. We have to have relationships with these farmers that can give them a sustainable and livable income and provide them opportunities for them to build a good life. We have to be able to engage them in a way that restores justice and dignity to them. This is not because we want to be charitable in the usual condescending sense of the term. Rather because we want to do right by them who are providers of essential goods and services. If they are providers of the food that keeps us alive, we should want to ensure that they flourish. To ensure this, we will have to pay them a fair and sustainable price for their produce. We want to do right by them because as human beings, it is difficult for us to rest knowing that our lives are purchased at their expense. And it is true that our lives are purchased at their expense. We have food because they continue to plant for us even if they don’t earn a livable income from this. Because we want our food to be cheap, we overlook the fact that we don’t pay the full cost of production, i.e. that we don’t shoulder the cost of a living income for the farmer because they are too powerless to make us. The farmer bears the brunt of rising costs of fuels and fertilizers and the unpredictable weather because we insist on cheap food and the traders insist on keeping profit at a level that serves them. If we can stand in solidarity with farmers and do right by them, they can begin to build better lives. And when their lives improve, our lives improve because when the income of the poor improves, all other industries and services grow. It is in the interest of our flourishing as human beings and as economic actors that we stand in solidarity with the poor.

Social enterprises aim to rectify this exploitative relationship with the marginalized by realizing fair and just practices in their enterprises. Some practice fair trade which ensures that their trade with the poor assures these people of a fair price for their produce. There are enterprises that allow for capital from the mainstream economy to fund businesses that empower communities at the margins of the mainstream economy. One such economic enterprise is the Good Food Company.

This business was started by young Christians who belonged to a prayer community and felt the need to translate their faith into concrete acts of social responsibility. They decided that they should engage in a social enterprise that both supports the farmers in their quest for a good, human life and to support the organic farming movement—the latter for economic and environmental reasons. This they would do by providing the farmers access to capital, organic farming technology, and a sympathetic, enlightened market. They would help the organic farming movement along by adding to its adherents. They would also serve their supporters in this endeavor by creating an enlightened market composed of people who do not just consume but understand where their food is coming from and who are producing their food. Their subscribers would be introduced to the health benefits of organically produced vegetables and they will be given the opportunity to support environmentally responsible food production systems. Not only the farmer will gain from this arrangement by the consumer as well, because through this system they will be transformed from consumers who unwittingly exploit farmers. The enterprise will liberate their subscribers from being supporters of unjust economic and environmentally destructive practices and will allow them to become active participants in the building of an economic order that this ecologically sound and just.

How they do this is simple. A partner must subscribe to their vegetable delivery service for 12 weeks. For Php 400 a week one gets 3.5 kilos of vegetables that are organically grown. One is also invited to community events where one can meet the farmers, listen to their stories, and see how the farms are run. The partners of Good Food are also asked to make certain sacrifices. For instance, one has to pick up the produce every Saturday at certain pick up points. They have to temper their desire for shinny , extra leafy chemically treated vegetables and accept that organic and healthier vegetables look skinnier, duller and less crisp looking. Also, they must be used to getting the vegetables in season. Usually, one gets the same vegetables on a regular basis and one cannot dictate what one gets. The reason for this is because, if you follow the rhythms of nature, and do not pump the land and water systems with artificial fertilizers and pesticides, you cannot force off season vegetables to grow pretty and shinny. But in this way, one is able to become a more just consumer who can rectify one’s relationship to the earth and to one’s fellow human person.

It is without a doubt more difficult to be a just, earth friendly consumer. This is because the existing systems are set up to be unjust to the producer and to treat the consumer as an unthinking cog in the consumption machinery—a machinery that destroys our shared home and our capacity to engage each other as caring beings. But actually, companies like Good Food Co. should make it a little easier. The enterprise is already set up in such a way that it makes the consumer a person who can be just and responsible to the earth and to one’s fellow persons. The only sacrifice is having to pick up your vegetables, to be ready to eat less pretty vegetables and less variety of vegetables, to pay a higher, but fairer, price and to sometimes bear the costs of natural disasters by not receiving vegetables. A small price to pay for being allowed to take part in the rectification of unjust systems and improving lives—the farmers’ and one’s own.

So far, this enterprise has been sustainable but barely so. It is a struggle for them to get a sizeable number, something like 60, of subscribers per 8 week run. I though it would be easier for them because this group belongs to a nationwide Catholic movement which claims to espouse the values of justice and environmental responsibility. However, there are not getting substantial support from this community and are still relying on friends and family to commit to supporting their good work. People still prioritize what is convenient even if it means maintaining systems of injustice and destruction.

We are facing some of the gravest crises that our species has ever brought upon itself. Massive poverty and inequality do not only cause untimely deaths and unnecessary suffering, but also worldwide violence and instability. The environmental catastrophes we are facing are going to cause massive shifts in where we live, how we live, and how well we live. The work of social entrepreneurs like the Good Food Co. give us feasible alternatives to our exploitative and destructive economic systems. They also offer us alternative systems of production and distribution that not only preserve the earth but also build community. If we are to emerge whole from the end of the life as we know it, the more enterprising among us should explore even more ways to justly, environmentally, and creatively produce our needs. As for the rest of us, we should support these enterprises so that our spending and consumption becomes a means of rebuilding civilizations and rediscovering our better selves.