As the school year winds up, I try to assess my perspectives on education, who it is for and whether it meets its stated goals. In its most noble sense, education is about learning. In a practical sense, it is about preparing the young so that they can become productive members of society in their adult life. And academic freedom is the right to pursue learning beyond the parameters of traditional education. Do education and learning really go together? Is academic freedom real or is it an illusion?

In the real sense, education is a series of licenses. You graduate from elementary school to acquire a license to go to high school. You graduate from high school to acquire a license to go to college. Then, in most cases, you take a licensure exam to practice the profession for which you studied in college. No wonder that the concern of most students is to get passing grades. Never mind the learning part. It is the grades that matter because it is the grades that determine whether or not they get the license to make it to the next level.

Education, therefore, as we know it and as it has become systemic in modern society, is a form of control. Government, as the highest authority in the educational system, dictates the rules, schools implement the rules and our children follow. The control is implemented on various levels. Government decides what should be included in the curricula, who can teach and what books can and cannot be used. Schools make their own additional rules. They determine which applicants they will accept and, based on compliance or non-compliance with whatever additional rules they have, they determine who can stay and who needs to find another school. We take the case of sectarian schools and the control factor becomes even more pronounced. You either comply with religious requirements or you don?t have the right to study.

Then, there are the teachers who exercise the most proximate control over the students. The teachers meet with the students every day, conduct lessons, give tests and projects and, at the end of every grading period, hands out the grades that, collectively, become the basis for the issuance or non-issuance of a license, a.k.a. diploma. Officially, those grades are merely a documentation of how the students performed. But in reality? How a student performs depends on a lot of things and not only on his ability to assimilate and retain information. To a large extent, a student?s performance depends on how well or how badly a school and its teachers did their job.

What happens when a teacher performs poorly? What happens when a school fails to provide an environment that is conducive to learning? We?ve heard about brain drain too often. A lot of today?s parents lament the lack of really good teachers because most have left the country (some to work as domestic helpers) because teaching does not pay well in the Philippines. In a situation where really good and qualified teachers have become rare, what happens to the students? Do the controls remain effective and realistic at all when those remaining to enforce them are clueless about what they?re supposed to do?

And just what do education and all its controls seek to achieve? Control seeks conformity. That is its purpose. If we combine that with the supposed goal of education to create productive adults out of the youth, then we have to ask: Is being productive a result of the ability to conform? You know, control means conformity, and conformity?because it means obedience to rules?means productivity.

And that really bothers me. Because if that is the case, then let?s make no bones any longer about education being about learning and exploring and letting the mind soar. It is just one power trip after another so designed for the perpetration of existing norms.

Schools?and the educational system in general?are factories churning out skilled labor. And the skills are not really based on the strengths and talents of the individual student, but, rather on whether they will fit in the even bigger factory called real life?the fitness shown by the series of diplomas which are the collective result of various forms and level of controls. I mean, if individual talents were the basis for education, then every curriculum would be flexible. But that?s not the case. It is the student that is made to conform to the curricula rather than the curricula being created to fit the uniqueness of the student.

How can academic freedom be real when education itself is a system of controls? Academic freedom does exist but only beyond the confines of the educational system. In any system, in any hierarchy of authority, all freedoms are relative. Academic freedom in its absolute and real sense cannot be curtailed because it is exercised where systemic controls do not exist. And it is the individual exercise of academic freedom, when we dare question beyond what we have been taught in schools, that we really learn to prepare for ?real life?? what it means, what it takes to succeed and where education has failed us. It is academic freedom?not education?that leads to real learning.

The author blogs at http://houseonahill.net, http://pinoycook.net and http://www.sassylawyer.com