Education as Life-long Process of Human Liberation and Development

The pre-school education of the child is a process which naturally starts with his parents at home, and by his parents’ choice, his education may be continued and enhanced in a day care school.
There are several propositions as to when the child’s pre- school education should begin and as to when it should end. These propositions are from the extreme to the moderate, which might be summed up in three propositions: (1) “pre-education begins at conception and ends at resurrection (2) “pre-education begins at the womb and ends at the tomb; and from (3) “pre-education begins at the cradle and ends at the grave” Note that the three propositions suggest that the pre-school education of the child should start at the earliest time possible, even before his birth, and should continue during his lifetime, even beyond his life time. In brief, the propositions suggest their grave concern for the role of education in the life of the human being.
With what does the child’s pre-education begin? One existing assumption that is widely accepted is that “a child is born with an empty mind” (a mind that is ‘tabula rasa’ or ‘blank board’). Pre-education begins with the child’s empty mind. At this stage, child’s mind is delicately malleable; thus the child needs a teacher as educator to mold his malleable mind. His parents undertake the initial and delicate task to educe the potentials of his very tender mind. To pre-educate, in brief, is to mold the mind of the child.
But, what is the end of the child’s pre-education? The end that is also widely accepted is that his pre-education is eventually for “complete living”. But, “complete living” is pursued hierarchically. Thus, specific goals of complete living could be identified within the hierarchy of human needs and wants. Accordingly, the first specific goal of education is self-preservation, the satisfaction of physiological needs and wants; the second is satisfaction of security needs and wants; the third is the satisfaction love needs and wants; the forth, the satisfaction of esteem needs and wants; and finally, the satisfaction of self-actualization or the ‘total human liberation and development’ of the pupil.
Self-actualization, however, is not absolute but relative. Whoever is absolutely self-actualized or self-fulfilled with what he does, has reached his culminating point – he will progress no more. Man’s destiny in life is not to be dissatisfied but forever unsatisfied. Therefore, one’s pursuit of total human liberation and development is not achievable in his lifetime. This may suggest the speculation that education goes beyond this life, that there is still human life after human life.
Assuming that the starting point of child’s pre-education is the “child’ empty mind” and its end is “the child’s eventual complete living”: What should be the task of the Barangay Day Care teacher as educator? The first task should be “to replace the child’s empty mind with an open one.” The critical role of the teacher as educator is to teach and educate the child to keep his mind discriminately open to various, and even opposing, ideas, values, and practices which he had learned from his elders. The negative and positive values and/or practices of his society would affect his actual choices and decisions in the pursuit of complete living.
Explained differently, “education is an activity or endeavor in which the more mature (e.g. teacher as educator) in society deals with the less mature (child), in order to achieve greater maturity in them and contribute thereby to the improvement of human life”.
Outside the home, the day care center is an informal institution where the pre-school children should be taught and educated “to learn to unlearn” and/or “to unlearn to learn” their values and practices learned and/or acquired at home or elsewhere. From the realistic point of view, education is an on-going process where the child ‘is what he is not, and he is not what he is”. Identity-wise, “who the child is” is permanent. The identity of the child at one year old remains the same identity even in his older years, “I was that child”. Personality-wise, “what the child is” at three years old is distinct from “what he is” at 20 years later, though his identity remains the same.
Education has no bearing to the identity of the pupil, but to his personality. “Personality” comes from the merging of “person”“quality”, where “person” means “per se ens” in Latin, meaning “being in itself, thus existing permanently by itself” and “quality” which modifies the person, thus it cannot exist by itself independent of the person, hence, transitory. Personality-wise, education is a life-time process of liberating and developing the child from “what he is” to “what he is not”, and from “what he is not” to “what he is”. The child’s transformation involves his “learning and unlearning” and activities. Here the teacher/educator plays a very crucial role.