013 Anything Goes
Educator Magazine was an excellent venue for promoting education reform in the country. The idea was to introduce topics that would help education stakeholders, particularly those on the ground—teachers and principals—better appreciate progressive education and implement what we felt were easy to do, high impact reforms in the school and in the classroom.
As the featured columnist of the publication, I also had the opportunity to talk education policy, which, to my surprise, earned positive feedback even from teachers who I thought wouldn’t pay too much attention on these policy matters.
As a key person in the publication’s editorial board, I played a major role in defining its content. Of course, to no one’s surprise, we covered a lot of pedagogy and classroom management, as well as personal and professional development topics that aim to level up our teaching workforce. The policy topics were there to help influence education policy makers and lay the basis for the reforms we wanted to introduce in the school and the classroom.
I remember the many years of working on the publication as a fun and fulfilling time. It was, to me and to my colleagues, a labor of love.
As such, it was easy for us to come up with an issue that’s better than the previous one. It was natural for us to not settle for what we’ve been doing and instead come up with ways to improve—all the time.
One notable innovation I personally introduced to the publication was to include a regular section that has nothing to do with the field of basic education—none at all.
That proposal was met with befuddled looks from the other members of our editorial staff. They couldn’t see the value of my proposal, which if we were to do, would consume precious space from each magazine issue.
I had to explain.
My idea to present topics that are not even closely related to the teacher’s practice of basic education stems from the desire to make teachers learn how to learn for learning’s sake.
By providing them topics that are relatively irrelevant to their daily lives, I’m hoping to help teachers enjoy the process of reading and learning well enough that sooner or later, they’d adopt this positive attitude toward learning that could make them better lifelong learners.
For most Filipinos, education is just a means to an end—most likely, employment.
They fail to realize that education shouldn’t be just this. Surely, we all understand the value of having a wide range of knowledge, which going beyond what’s required of us to learn offers. But more than this, learning for learning’s sake allows us to become better at learning, which impacts on every other thing we need or want to learn (including those that do affect our employment potential).
Look around you. The heavy readers are more likely to do well in class. And these heavy readers are more likely to read—and learn—relatively non-essential if not totally non-sequitur topics.
Until such time that teachers become learners for learning’s sake, they can’t reach their true potential as lifelong learners. It’ll be unlikely that they can impart the same to their students.
Imagine the potential though—for both teacher and student—if this becomes the new standard.
As far as Educator Magazine is concerned, we did include this section—talking about photography, someone’s travel experiences and other topics totally irrelevant to basic education—and to highlight the fact that these are intended to be irrelevant to the practice of basic education, we called this section Anything Goes.