Corruption By Education

Corruption by Education
by: Poch Suzara

We rave daily about corruption here and there and everywhere in our sick society. Corruption in government and private industries. Corruption in the military and in the priesthood industry. We hardly notice, however, where the seeds of corruption come from. Indeed, it is in our schools, colleges, and universities where we learned corrupt values and corrupt beliefs. We are all products of a corrupt system of education.
It’s the easiest thing to corrupt individuals. Take normal boys and girls in school and teach them to believe the following:
· To believe that we are all guilty of sin until we have no more pride, dignity, and self-respect.
· To believe that faith is always better than reason and that prayer rallies are the first solutions to our real problems.
· To believe that the saints of God are more worthy of emulation than the ideals of human brotherhood.
· To believe that it is needless to improve social conditions because there is a better life to come after death with God in heaven..
· To believe that it is needless to save our minds and hearts for the kingdom of man as what is crucial is to save our souls for the next life in the kingdom of God.
· To believe that the miracles from theology are far more reliable than philosophy, science and the scientific way of thinking, and technology.
· To believe that the revealed truths need not be revealed as such truths are far beyond human understanding.
· To believe that to love God’s mother up there is far more precious than to love our own mothers and grandmothers down here.
· To believe that God will always provide for those who are good, even if they are good for nothing.
· To believe that pain, suffering, misery, poverty, and squalor are paths toward eternal salvation. Never mind the growth of human civilization.
· To believe that success in life can only be measured with money. Never mind where the money comes from as long as we have plenty of it.
· To believe finally, that no matter what sin or crime we commit, as long as we continue to believe and have faith, there will always be available from God the forgiveness of sin and crime.
Do this to millions of children in school and we have then ideal Christians. We also have criminals. A person who longer respects himself can no longer respect anything. One who does not love himself, cannot love anything. If he hates himself, he hates the world.
It is in our system of education where we learn our sense of worthlessness and our unspeakable burden of sin; where the stage is set for corruption as a way of life. Indeed, the real cause of corruption in our sick society is not due to lack of discipline. On the contrary, it is discipline based upon sick values. Owing to our system of education, we learn to have no faith in the best of the Filipino capacity. We do not love our country nor do we love fellow-Filipinos. We only love what makes for the Filipino incapacity.
We certainly live under a culture of corruption, The worst of it is the corruption of human intelligence. Corruption by education is certainly keeping us spiritually poor as a people and morally bankrupt as a nation, indeed, - the Sick Man in this only Christian country in Asia.