MVP-Ateneo Rift: The Politicization of Education

In reaction to Mogul and PNoy favorite Manny Pangilinan’s severance of ties with his alma mater due to political differences somewhere I read a paraphrased comment that out of MVP's actions

Children should be spared of politics

Putting the blame on MVP alone is an example of misreading effects as the cause. The reason for the sensational split in the relationship is because the heated political divergences hasn’t just been between MVP and Ateneo, but instead this involves Ateneo official’s moral and political stand to inculcate into their professors and students.

I am NOT here to defend any political position by both camps, but to underscore the point of the vicious politicization of education, which in this case, has been through the imposition of political preferences by school authorities and church leaders on members of the academe and students. 

Essentially this controversial schism validates my views on why elite schools have been inclined towards statism.

To highlight the point of the dictatorial tendencies of the church-school cabal is the recent threat to purge by excommunication 159 Ateneo professors who sided with Philippine government’s RH Bill.

[As a side note, I am against any coercive imposition of “values” on the family: This means I am against the RH Bill and am equally against church strictures aimed at the interdiction of their moral stand on their constituents.]

Church influence on politics has had nasty social outcomes, as the great Professor Murray Rothbard wrote, (bold emphasis mine)

Historically, the union of church and state has been in many instances a mutually reinforcing coalition for tyranny. The state used the church to sanctify and preach obedience to its supposedly divinely sanctioned rule; the church used the state to gain income and privilege.

The Anabaptists collectivized and tyrannized Münster in the name of the Christian religion.

And, closer to our century, Christian socialism and the social gospel have played a major role in the drive toward statism, and the apologetic role of the Orthodox Church in Soviet Russia has been all too clear. Some Catholic bishops in Latin America have even proclaimed that the only route to the kingdom of heaven is through Marxism, and if I wished to be nasty, I could point out that the Reverend Jim Jones, in addition to being a Leninist, also proclaimed himself the reincarnation of Jesus.

Moreover, now that socialism has manifestly failed, politically and economically, socialists have fallen back on the "moral" and the "spiritual" as the final argument for their cause.

For the mainstream, coercion, as along as it is committed by the state, is seen as moral. Thus, the desperate attempts by competing interests (represented by diverse power blocs, church, schools, environmentalists, and others) to influence policymaking which thereby results to the attendant social frictions.

Yet education must be free of politics and of government interventions, as Professor Tibor Machan argues (bold emphasis mine)

When a country tries to combine freedom of thought and speech with government-administered education, there will be irresolvable conflict. In a system of private education competition among schools would take care of philosophical correctness. In some schools certain books will be featured in the library, in others they will not, and students and their parents will be able to select which they want to be exposed to. Biology will be taught as creationists wish or as Darwinians do.  No official doctrine will be imposed, period.

But when government delivers a coercive system of "education"--actually mostly indoctrination, since no alternative is available to the bulk of us who have to pay for and use such a system--any selection of books, magazines, films shown in classes and so forth will amount to censorship of the materials not chosen. They will be deemed as having been banned--whereas in a private system selection by the administrators of some schools, library officials, or teachers will not preclude exclusion by others. It is government's nearly one-size-fits-all approach to education that stands in the way of free inquiry.

Unfortunately, in many societies people want to mix elements of liberty with elements of coercion, as if that were something trouble free—health food with some poison! It isn't--the courts will struggle forever with trying to square that circle and politicians will engage in varieties of demagoguery to gain the power over the “educational” turf.

Only by getting government out of education can that matter be made consistent with the principles of a free society and fit for human beings whose minds must forever be free to think.

The MVP-Ateneo rift only confirms the symptoms of irresolvable social conflict brought upon by the politicization of education and of government interventions.

Updated to add: Because I was in a hurry and had something things to do, I was unable to edit this post at the time of the publication. Thus I made belated grammatical changes on the first three sentences about 4 hours after.