Ang Kape Ni LaTtEX

The Times Higher Education Supplement recently released it’s Top 520 Universities Rankings for 2006. Included in the list are four prominent Philippine universities, namely:

• 299 University of the Philippines
• 392 De La Salle University
• 484 Ateneo de Manila University
• 500 University of Santo Tomas

I did a quick check on the top 200 universities on the list, checking out which “developing” countries had universities with good standing. Five of the top 200 are universities from India, Mexico, and Thailand.

What immediately got my attention was Jawaharlal Nehru University in India:

In the early 1970s, when JNU opened its doors to teachers and students, frontier disciplines and new perspectives on old disciplines were brought to the Indian university system. The excellent teacher-student ratio at 1:10, a mode of instruction which encouraged students to explore their own creativity instead of reproducing received knowledge,and an exclusively internal evaluation were a new experiment on the Indian academic landscape; these have stood the test of time. The very Nehruvian objectives embedded in the founding of the University, national integration, social justice, secularism, the democratic way of life, international understanding and scientific approach to the problems of society had built into it constant and energetic endeavour to renew knowledge through self-questioning. [TopUniversities.com]

What struck me was the explicit wording of traits that I have long wanted to see in a local university: exploration, creativity, internal evaluation, renewal of knowledge through self-questioning.

These are all the ingredients of rational and critical thinking individuals who are out to solve the problems of society, instead of the usual fare who seem to be trained to look for blame for their own woes. These traits are what I believe, if incorporated in our local education system, will be the key to solving our country’s problems.

I dream of the day that more local universities will adapt such an introspective and creative paradigm to education, instead of the traditional classroom lecture “cookbook” approach to education. And then maybe we will finally find the “push” we need to turn our country around, if not have more universities from our country in the top 500.