Public shaming – does it work?

The allegations that the present Pope knew about the sex abuses committed by some members of the Roman Catholic clergy and didn’t do anything about them have created a sense of outrage and moral panic among Catholic believers. It does not give the Church any consolation by continuing to choose between protecting the victims of sex abuse and protecting the Church. In the end, there is only one moral and sensible choice here: to protect both the victims and the Church.

Covering up sexual abuses by the clergy and paying off the victims and their families with hush money will not make the problem go away. Or even prosecuting the offending priests in the courts of law. The Church needs to rethink beyond the issues of crime and punishment, and implement a whole new approach, even if this requires some radical changes in church doctrine and practice.

But what is more distressing than this Church scandal or say, the Tiger Woods’ liaisons with a number of women outside his marriage, is the carnival-like attitude of society to hang in public those who have lost control of their erectile impulses. History is replete with men in high offices who were known for consorting with women other than their wives and nobody in that list was required to make a public admission of his sin. It took an evangelical and good old Christian Jimmy Carter to admit he had looked on a lot of women with lust. During an interview with Playboy, President Carter said, “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”

This is not to say that it’s ethical and moral, save for the members of the clergy, to allow men to enjoy the company and comfort of women as if they were fruits of victory. As a public act of contrition, perhaps Jimmy Carter best summed up for all men about how difficult it was to struggle evading the snares laid by the Devil.

My point here is why we do not demand such humiliating public show of remorse from men who have done worse. Like George Bush, for his criminal invasion of Iraq. Or, Tony Blair for his collusion with Bush in an illegal war of aggression against Iraq in 2003. Many learned and independent scholars of international law have accused both men of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Regardless of the issue of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, Blair admitted to the BBC and the Chilcot Inquiry that he would have gone to topple Saddam Hussein anyway.

Spain’s celebrated judge Baltazar Garzon, who indicted former Chilean dictator and president Augusto Pinochet, has called for Bush, Blair and former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar to be prosecuted for the illegal invasion of Iraq. Garzon has condemned Iraq’s invasion as “one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history.”

How about Wall Street banks for looting their clients, their deposits and the U.S. Treasury? The U.S. government bailed out Wall Street by pumping stimulus money to their coffers, money that was eventually used by these financial institutions to pay bonuses to their managers who were responsible for the economic crisis.

What took it so long for the Securities and Exchange Commission to sue Goldman Sachs? As everyone now knows, the SEC has charged the giant Wall street firm with deliberately misleading investors who participated in mortgage securities trade that was designed to fail.

Or how about chemical companies for poisoning our air and water? Or, pharmaceutical companies for the distribution of drugs inducing the diseases they supposedly prevent?

Perhaps, as human beings, it is easier for us to recycle gossips than to gather the facts. We would rather relish the public hanging of the Pope or Tiger Woods than suffer boredom and monotony in appreciating the clarity of the arguments for the prosecution of Bush and Blair for their war crimes and crimes against humanity. Instead of accepting women as subjects rather than objects the way they are treated in the tabloid press, we salivate in the manner they are regarded like exotic spoils for the victorious and the mighty.

No wonder our society appears upside down.

One of Latin America’s distinguished writers, Eduardo Galeano, wrote:

“The upside-down world rewards in reverse: it scorns honesty, punishes work, prizes lack of scruples, and feeds cannibalism. Its professors slander nature: injustice, they say, is a law of nature. Milton Friedman teaches as about the ‘natural rate of unemployment.’ Studying Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, we learn that blacks remain on the lowest rungs of the social ladder by ‘natural’ law. From John D. Rockefeller’s lectures, we know his success was due to the fact that ‘nature’ rewards the fittest and punishes the useless: more than a century later, the owners of the world continue to believe Charles Darwin wrote his books in their honour.”

The golfing gods have a reason to smile during the recent Masters golf tournament. Tiger was back and is still the king of his sport, despite finishing fourth, a difficult feat considering his absence from competition for quite some time. What really matters to the organizers is that the ratings are higher.

What does Tiger’s public shaming say about us?

To some it would seem refreshing that something as simple as shame could drive the world’s greatest athlete into hiding. Tiger Woods was embarrassed by his behaviour off the golf course, and entering a counselling program didn’t make him a changed man. Only time and how many more majors Tiger finally wins will tell if his public shaming turned out into a good thing.

At a time when many cultural critics have started to pillory America as a modern-day Rome decaying into moral rot, shame has claimed many other big names in American politics recently. Former Senator John Edwards, once a Democratic vice-presidential nominee, was run out of politics by cheating on his wife. Same with South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford who fell from grace after his affair was exposed. And there’s former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and Idaho Senator Larry Craig, both shamed out of office.

Is it any solace to us that the concept of shame still matters? Yet, we don’t apply shame’s sharp edge on high crimes and public misdemeanours, such as those committed by leaders of states. Nor are we ever close to taking penance for the predatory nature of capitalist greed that is exemplified by Wall Street.

Public shaming may matter but only in a transitory sense. As a society, we easily forget the trespasses of those we look up to, like superstar athletes or big celebrities. It is also the Church’s tradition of forgiveness that has led itself in sheltering its errant priests through the promise of effective therapy and treatment, and later to reassignment to other parishes. Unfortunately, this often resulted in a whole new group of victims being abused.

The ultimate value of education

Every year, college graduates in the Philippines face the grim reality that only three of ten graduates have a real chance of landing a job. This means that seven out of ten new graduates would end up jobless.

In absolute figures, the numbers of unemployed college graduates are staggering. The Philippines Commission on Higher Education estimates that 542,000 college students will graduate this year, and 60 per cent or 325,000 of these graduates would be looking for jobs. Add them to the 523,000 unemployed graduates as of January 2010, and there would be 848,000 new and old college graduates competing for available jobs.

Filipino parents send their children to college hoping that a college degree would lead them to a stable job, thus provide them with a better future. However, this seems to be a false hope in these modern and hard times: a college degree is no guarantee anymore.

This is a serious challenge for each one of the candidates for president this coming election in May. As usual, every candidate will promise to make job generation a priority when elected. But for all those graduates who end up jobless, their future is in working abroad, even in jobs beneath their qualifications. Canada can therefore expect more applicants for live-in caregivers and foreign temporary workers from the Philippines. The source of cheap labour to exploit is not about to dry up soon.

The country’s dismal economy is mainly responsible for the lack of employment opportunities. Of course, government leaders also share the brunt of the blame for failing to stimulate the economy and provide jobs for new college graduates. They would rather encourage college graduates and other jobseekers to work overseas and help the local economy afloat with their money remittances. However, over the long haul, this is not an effective and lasting solution. The government cannot forever rely on foreign earnings of Filipino overseas workers.

Good and honest government and sensible structural changes in the economy are badly needed if we want our college graduates to stay home instead of waste their education in slave labour abroad. In sending our graduates overseas, the Philippine government also squanders its investment in education, and in part, subsidizes the education programs of the countries where these graduates end up working. Developed countries do not have to spend so much in educating their young because it is much easier and less expensive to poach the skilled and trained labour surplus of poorer countries. Employers from rich countries usually end up paying rock-bottom wages to these workers, while their governments also save the additional cost of providing protections and other services by either ignoring or paying lip service to the appalling working conditions that these foreign workers find themselves in.

The Philippines and other like countries have become a huge source of labour surplus, an army of skilled workers who would remain unemployed if they decide to stay home. Their governments continue to invest millions of money in educating their population, ironically not for their benefit but for the benefit of already-rich countries.

Education is essential in preparing for one’s future, especially in a society that values higher education. There is no denying that any modern economy requires skilled and motivated workers, thus education plays an important function in ensuring a steady flow of these workers. But the problem with education today is that this connection has become too direct. We now educate ourselves simply to get a job. This distorts the true purpose of schooling. Instead of aiming at the development of individuals as an end in itself, college graduates have become mere instruments in the economic process.

The contemporary view is that earning and learning go hand in hand. One who has more years of schooling is less likely to be unemployed, and salary-wise, more likely to earn a higher income. People with a bachelor’s degree are expected to earn more than the average high school graduate. They are assumed to enjoy middleclass living after college, a lifestyle that includes owning one’s own home and raising a family comfortably. Thus, if one goes to college, he or she would probably earn more money and enjoy work at the same time.

What’s wrong with this belief?

The reality is that a college degree is not a guarantee at all. We see this truism in the Philippines where college graduates end up unemployed or work as modern-day slaves somewhere in a foreign country.

Besides, income also depends on one’s occupation. Some people may decide to pursue careers that pay less but are rewarding in other ways. Teachers, social workers, religious ministers, and librarians, for example, don’t make as much as other college graduates, but they often find great satisfaction in giving something back to the community.

The benefits of higher education can’t be measured just in terms of money. Yet, a United Nations task force on higher education insists that while higher education is no longer a luxury, “it is essential to national social and economic development.” This kind of pronouncement has the effect of marginalizing higher education as seen in the tendency toward market-driven education, which some criticize us the corporatization of the academe. Public schools of higher learning or state-run universities, everywhere in the world, now compete against each other in order to survive with their reduced budgets. Even international rankings of universities have induced piracy of the best talents, both faculty and students.

The Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University in the U.K. has lamented that students are now being treated as “a source of income, not an investment in the future.” A professor at Oxford once posed the following question: “Can, we in Europe, have social justice in higher education and world-class research universities?” To which the Cambridge Vice Chancellor replied that it is wrong to look upon universities as “engines for promoting social justice.”

This reminds me of an anecdote shared by a professor at the University of the Philippines during her centennial lecture in 2008 which went as follows:

“Whenever I cringe at my students’ essays, whether written in Filipino or English, they tell me that one reason they did not learn to write in UP is that when their papers or exams are returned, all they see is a number. No indication whatsoever is written about what the number actually means, about which part of the essay is poorly argued or badly written and why. So they repeat the same mistakes—because they passed those courses anyway—until they get to me. I tell them that at the senior level it is a little too late for me to undo what they have internalized, even as I apply the weapon of fear followed by horrifying grief upon reading their first draft.”

Is this probably due to a student’s ability to express himself or herself in writing, which is insignificant from the student’s point of view when considered against the inability to secure a job upon graduation? Or, is it because the student will pass the course, no matter what? Which suggests to us there are fundamental problems in the manner we educate our young today.

It is vital that we distinguish between education and training, and to recognize that people require both. However, we need not be ashamed of what is involved in training versus real education. Young children must know their multiplication tables, be able to read, spell and write correctly, in the same way an athlete trains the body for competition. After learning and building confidence from repetitive practice, children will be able to profit from the next level, which is education proper. It is at this level that a student learns to think and discern how to find and use information when needed. This is after all what education must be: to be able to refine our capacities for judgment and evaluation.

According to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, learning is only a means to acquire understanding, and understanding, the ultimate value of education. Plato considered education as “the bringing out” of an idea that we have known since time immemorial.

This belief has been modified over the course of centuries, perhaps in more sensible directions by later thinkers. They saw education as a tool by which the individual can learn how to develop his or her inborn talents and capabilities, rather than innate knowledge. In a sense, this is good and much closer to the true objective of education. We continue to believe that given the opportunities, education can help our human gifts to flourish.