No country for smart men.
Back in the days when the Spaniards reigned supreme in the islands, it is only the aristocrats, on the account of their immense wealth, who are able to send their children to colleges. Once graduated, those people would make use of their education to earn money. Their profession would impress anyone in their community, especially the lower classes who could barely afford getting the means of buying food. Those wealthy intelligentsia are called ilustrados, i.e. erudites, by the locality.
Now, Philippine colleges back then are also run by the Spaniards, via the friars and the Catholic orders. Due to the policy of the Spanish to divide the classes between distinct ethnicity and wealth based classes, from peninsulares, insulares to indios, and rule over them with a brutal fist and a discriminatory eye and mouth, as natives struggled to survive by currying favors from the colonial authorities even at the expense of others, it helped create a low trust society that Philippines eventually became. As it turned out, being a graduate of an institution run by the colonizers is also being seen with envy, jealousy, disdain, distrust and suspicion. Therefore, many natives also shun the ilustrados aside from the reason that these people also came from the principalia aristocracy.
That mentality carried on through the American colonial rule and the independent era till today. Much of the people are intentionally kept poor by the feudal cliques who rule the provinces so that they could prove to be useful idiots at their own bidding, resulting to the country’s have-nots being forever jealous of the rich, and therefore their education which could only be acquired through monetary muscle. It didn’t help that aside from being malnourished and nutrient-deficient due to poverty, being a hot tropical country and being near near the equator literally fries their brain to the point that to this day they registered the lowest intelligence quotient of any Southeast Asian nation. The Spaniards have created an institutionalized inequality intended to remind the natives of their place in society, so powerful that it remained in place to this day, forever maintained by the country’s feudal political dynasties who more or less have mestizo origins. It also didn’t help that with the currently neoliberal educational system in place, where even now still only the wealthy could afford going to tertiary institutions many of which are now run by private for-profit entities, let alone finishing basic education, has prevented the lower classes from truly accessing and going through full education.
That gives the very existence of the Philippines as the biggest anti-intellectual movement in the history of the world. Being educated is tantamount of being part of the nation’s elite, and being smart is tantamount to being a rich person worthy of mugging and loathed for their perceived oppression and taking advantage of the country’s lower classes. What’s more, intellectual discourse, for them, is not of any use for a country whose people still struggles on what to eat today and the next day. It is therefore politically and socially correct in the Philippines to shun and shame the smart ones.
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