I spent the weekend in Bacolod City giving a talk on transformative education. I got back in Manila on Monday and presided over a meeting with the agenda of going over the chronology of office events of the past five years in order to draw lessons from the period. I moved on to February 14 to have another meeting that tried to get a sense of the chronology, then spent the evening up to the wee hours drinking with alcoholics who made 'valentine's day' an excuse to drink in the middle of the week.
I just had a board meeting today and really made an effort to appear respectable, responsible, credible, and really listening while I was having the worst hangover. During the lunch break, one of our board members casually asked me about my TE seminar, and gaad, I struggled for something to say.
Transformative Education or TE is a paradigm for teachers who care to change their students into citizens who would change society into a better place. The key is the teacher - the teacher also has to transform herself into a socially aware human being who has a conscience, commitment and action. My audience in Bacolod was a mix of hardline and hardened teachers who argued on one basic thing: the doability of TE. I intervened many times in the open forum but the teachers (especially the 'doable camp') started crying and getting really emotional and I drifted in my own thoughts.
I would say the word 'commitment' is really scary - scarier than the dreaded C itself. People go at lengths to explain so many things, explore answers in unknown places, overcome fears through reason, philosophize love and revolution, but never really get close to commitment. Nothing is more dreadful than saying yes to something no matter what; declaring a belief system does not come close to saying yes - and that's what makes commitment different and scary - it is devoid of rhetoric.
And probably that is the reason for the crying bout by the 'doable camp' in my Bacolod seminar. The teachers realized that by defending the doability of TE they cannot avoid the moment of truth, i.e. when they will have to actually commit themselves to transformation. Courage, ah, courage is a decision.
