Filipino Identity

Last April 4, at the architectural marvel that is the new Instituto Cervantes beside Casino Español in Ermita, Manila, a round table discussion was held on the issue of “Filipino Identity.” Fernando “Butch” Zialcita, who had just published the book Authentic Though Not Exotic: Essays on Filipino Identity, and bestselling author Jessica Zafra were with me on the panel, ably moderated by Chaco Molina.

I must say at the outset that I thoroughly enjoyed Zialcita’s book. It has to be one of the most significant books published in recent years. Based on solid anthropological research, the book tackles several answers to the question “What is Filipino?” and shows which of them are based on reality and which are not.

My comments on the book had to do not with its merit as a book, but with its unintended lack of appreciation for the long tradition of similar books written in Filipino. I should say this because I do not want to be misunderstood as rejecting the book. In fact, I recommend the book very highly to anyone that wants to know who and what we are.

Here are excerpts from the paper I prepared for the panel:

Since Butch Zialcita’s book does not refer to any of my books in Filipino nor to those of Virgilio Almario or Soledad Reyes, and refers only to the book in English that Bienvenido Lumbera wrote when he was still a student and had not yet fully developed his ideas in his books in Filipino, and since Butch is not only a colleague but a friend – in fact, we have known each other since college days – and therefore has nothing personal against the four of us, I can only assume that he is not that familiar with the parallel efforts being made in the field of literary theory and particularly with that area of it that is written in Filipino. Though as a literary critic I must admit I feel a bit slighted by it, I do not blame him for this oversight, since he himself says that his preference for Filipino as the intellectual language to discuss issues of identity has been stifled by the need to communicate with his colleagues and since no book can be expected anyway to be exhaustive; besides, his book is really an anthology of papers written primarily for social scientists attending conferences or reading journals.

This might be an occasion, therefore, to sketch, even at the risk of oversimplification because we have only a few minutes, how literary theory written in Filipino has approached the question of Filipino identity.

Butch says, “Whenever possible, I prefer to use the vernacular because this forces me to rethink abstract concepts in a clear, concrete way. Also, there is genuine communication.” Almario, Reyes, Lumbera, and I – and others, of course – have been using Filipino in our academic work as literary critics. Although we do not form a school of thought in the sense that we share the same views or even general philosophy, we do build on each other’s research and insights.

Almario has identified what he calls a Filipino Formalism in the practice of writing and reading poetry. He has done this primarily by going back to Tagalog critical texts written during the Spanish period. He became famous because of his early book on what he named Balagtasismo, or the tradition of poetry identified with Francisco Balagtas, the Tagalog poet who wrote Florante at Laura, which is required reading for all Filipino students in secondary school. He has moved considerably away from that book, with his later books going beyond Balagtas into the earlier traditions in Tagalog poetry.

Reyes has widened the scope of literary criticism to include not just poetry, which is the core of literature, but also previously marginalized forms, such as comic books, radio plays, and serialized novels in popular magazines. She became famous for her definition of the Filipino romantic mode, a concept that she has continued to develop in several books. Recently, she has focused on women writers that have been doubly marginalized, once because they are women and second because they wrote in unheralded literary forms.

Lumbera needed to write his doctoral dissertation, which is the book on Tagalog poetry that Butch includes in his references, in order to turn his back on his miseducation. Since then, as a professional scholar rather than as a mere student, Lumbera has moved deeply into literary theory, discovering that there is a concept of nationhood imbedded in various texts, and not only literary but cinematic and other texts.

I have myself, if I may be immodest, advocated what I call the concept of the Other Other, or Bukod na Bukod, as my latest theory book is entitled. Before my retirement from De La Salle University, I spoke at various international conferences, pricking the consciences of so-called postcolonial literary critics by assuming what I suppose is a stand strange to them, namely, that the Philippines is an ancient, first-world, and Western nation.

Obviously, we cannot debate all the issues that literary critics have been debating over the last forty years, with the four of us, if I can again be immodest, at the center of the debates. There are younger literary critics, such as David Jonathan Bayot, Caroline Hau, and Roland Tolentino, that are taking the debates into areas much deeper and more exciting than the four of us elders have explored, and the good news is that they build on what we have spent our lives doing. (The Philippine Star, 20 April 2006)

It is impossible to reconcile many of our views on national identity, but oversimplistically, I could say that we all agree that, first, it is not right to be primitivist (that is, to say that we used to be Filipino but became less so when foreigners invaded our shores); second, that there is something that foreigners did not give us (there is something traceable to our ancient ethnoepics that up to now still animates our literary and popular texts); and third, that we have always been global (even before foreign forms entered the physical boundaries of the country).

Butch can easily see how literary theory in Filipino can bolster many of his arguments.

Although we can understand the dissatisfaction Butch feels when he reads social science texts that marginalize the Philippines, we literary critics feel much more confident than he does, or perhaps than all Philippine social scientists do, because international encyclopedias on literature routinely include Philippine writers. Just look at the Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, the British (now American) traveler’s series on literature, the Fitzroy Dearborn Encyclopedia of the Novel, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and other major references of that kind. Or look at the annual bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, which is the biggest association of literary scholars not just in the United States, but in the world.

Or look at the important role the Philippine Center of International PEN plays in International PEN, which is the world’s biggest and in fact the only international professional association of writers. Until it ran out of funds, the Philippine Center was deep into organizing the annual Congress in Manila. In May, the Philippine Center is, in fact, organizing the 31^st UNESCO-ITI World Congress and Theatre Olympics of the Nations, a clear recognition by the international art community of the sophistication and maturity of Philippine artists.

Of course, we literary critics deal primarily with written texts, though most of us also talk about non-written texts, especially Tolentino, who has a series of books out on skin whiteners, malls, and the like. Most relevant to the book of Butch is Tolentino’s Paghahanap ng Virtual na Identidad (Looking for Virtual Identity). Social scientists like Butch have to deal with reality, as opposed to the virtual world of literary and quasi-literary texts.

Let me cite another literary critic – Gemino Abad. I did not mention him earlier because he writes in English and is more accessible to Butch, although Abad also does not merit mention in the book. Abad says that the world is made up of words. Of course, Abad borrows this insight from the structuralists, who have a lot in common with social scientists, because the linguist Roman Jakobson, heavily influenced by the linguist Ferdinand du Saussure, himself heavily influenced the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, used by Butch in his book. If the world were indeed made up of words, then it is the literary critic that we should turn to if we want to understand the world. Now, that is surely immodest.

I have to say that I enjoyed the book. It is very well researched. It is not afraid to point out the errors of others, even big names such as O. D. Corpuz, who misreads Sinibaldo de Mas. It uses personal knowledge, though anecdotal, as a counterpoint to the impersonality of much research. It is also well written, which literary critics appreciate.

One passage particularly strikes me. Butch writes, “The eighteenth-century German aristocracy derided German and German literature. They spoke with each other in French. As a result, French words abound in German, often in their original spelling. Though Frederick the Great of Prussia warred against the French king in 1757, he was a Francophile in his readings and in his speech. He confessed that ‘since the days of my youth I have not read a German book and I speak German no better than a coachman.’”

Let’s change the word German to Filipino and French to English and change the setting to the Philippines today. The passage would read: “Today’s Filipino leaders deride the Filipino language and literature in Filipino. They speak with each other in English. As a result, English words abound in Filipino or Taglish, often in their original spelling. Though Filipino political and industry leaders claim to have been independent since 1946, they are Americans in their readings and in their speech. Some, maybe most of them can truly confess that, since the days of their youth they have not read a book in Filipino and they speak Filipino no better than their drivers.”

Since literary theorists like to debunk earlier theories, I love the way Butch debunks these ideas: that Americans introduced public education, that Filipinos have a bayanihan spirit, that corruption is the main problem with our government, that Marx advocated communal property, that the elite betrayed the Philippine Revolution, that we practice a split-level Christianity, that we suffer from cultural schizophrenia, and that there is such thing as Asia.

To all my readers: get a copy of the book and find out why we are what we are. (The Philippine Star, 27 April 2006)

UNESCO-ITI World Congress

March 27 was World Theater Day. The day has been celebrated all over the world since 1962 by a hundred countries, members of the International Theatre Institute (ITI), an NGO associated with UNESCO.

The Philippines celebrated World Theater Day by staging a sneak preview of the New York-bound sarswela Something to Crow About, by Philippine Star columnist and National Artist Alejandro Roces, featuring the University of Santo Tomas Conservatory of Music and the Earthsavers DREAMS Ensemble, at the Emilio Aguinaldo College Auditorium, under the direction of Cecile Guidote Alvarez.

In May, the 31^st UNESCO-ITI World Congress and Theatre Olympics of the Nations will be held in the Philippines, sponsored by several government agencies and private organizations, led by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the Philippine Center of International PEN.

UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura leads a roster of distinguished world leaders and international theater artists (which include current and former heads of state, royalty, and Nobel laureates) who are invited to attend the Congress. Some 26 shows (most of them involving foreign performers) are scheduled for the last week of May at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

The event includes several components, among them a World Congress, a Leaders Forum, a World Festival of Drama Schools, colloquia or symposia, theatre shows, an indigenous people’s showcase, a cinema fest, committee and project group meetings, and exhibits.

The entire event has for its theme “Ancestral Roots to New Routes of Artistic Expression: Mobilizing Cultural Diversity to Achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals.”

Plenary and small group discussions will be held at the Manila Hotel. Shows will be held primarily at the CCP, with various Philippine theater companies staging shows in their own venues for the benefit of the visiting foreign artists and media. Drama schools around the country are hosting foreign performers for workshops and cooperative productions.

This is the first time the ITI event will be held in the Philippines. The performances are open to the public, but since seats are limited, interested parties should buy tickets at the CCP (or from the various theater groups) as soon as possible.

Here is a partial list of professional theater shows scheduled on the last week of May at CCP: Acteal (Mexico), Antigone (Lithuania), Binodini (Bangladesh), Circular Ruins (ITI), The First Man (Romania), Last Night (Lithuania), Last Night (Morocco), Los Maloleñas (RP), No Return (Finland), Panakayon sa Panalublion (RP), Panata sa Kalayaan (RP), Paris and Alexander (Greece, RP), Peregrinasyon (Australia, RP), Pilak (RP), Prison (Greece), Realizing Rama (ASEAN), The Saga of Gudridur (Iceland), The Second Will (Armenia), Shooting the Boys (RP), Tagore (Bangladesh), Taya (RP), Three Sisters in Distress (Burkina Faso), Unicornios (Peru), Unravel Noh (Japan, RP), and The Voyage Project (Hungary, Israel, Poland, Romania, Serbia, USA). (The Philippine Star, 30 March 2006)

On May 25, as part of the UNESCO-ITI Theatre Olympics of the Nations, The Voyage Project will be staged at the CCP. The show features professional performers from Hungary, Israel, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and the United States.

Here is a portion of Peter Goldfarb’s notes on the production:

“The theme of Voyage or Journey is perhaps the most central and abiding of all dramatic and literary motifs; its meanings and definitions myriad, vast, nearly infinite. The theme is embraced by all the seminal works of the Eastern and Western worlds – the Odyssey, the Holy Grail, the Ramayana, the Arabian Nights, and countless others. What these stories have in common is that they all reflect aspects of the human condition and embody aspirations, triumphs, and sufferings that are universally recognized.

"Certainly they have changed and diversified over the centuries as each age has seized on them and restated the themes for their particular time. But whatever the temporal and cultural permutations may have been, the essential metaphor has remained unchanged – that of the journey through life with its confrontations and overcoming of obstacles, its triumphs and its transformations. Thus was born the idea of bringing together a group of young actors, each from a country which has undergone significant political or cultural changes.

"Rooted in their personal life experience and working through songs, stories, poems, and dreams, we would then go in search of the collective and/or individual stories for our time. Geographically our voyage took us first in June of 2001 to the International Theatre Festival in Sibiu, Romania. After a month hiatus, we met again in Cividale, the ancient mediaeval town in Northern Italy.

“As the actors recounted the legends and personal stories I had asked them to gather and as the shapes and contours and rhythms of the piece began to emerge, I experienced a powerful confirmation of the intuition that had guided me to undertake The Voyage Project in the first place: that our personal stories contain within them the seeds of transformation both for the teller and the listener and that if, together with the old stories, we can simply learn to listen, then perhaps we will not continue to make the same mistakes over and over again throughout history.

“We met again the following year in Sibiu but, this time, to give our first full performance in an ancient fortress in the hills above the town. In the ensuing time, 9/11 had occurred and a young American actor joined the ensemble to recount his first hand experience of this harrowing event. Due in part to our success in Sibiu, we were subsequently invited to perform in 2003 for the entire period of the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. This time the continued escalation of the situation in the Middle East prompted me to add yet another participant, an Israeli who speaks of his experience in the Army during the first Intifada.

“The message carried by the young voices of The Voyage Project has become all the more relevant and all the more poignant. Over the tragic din of conflict, they resonate as youthful testimonies of compassion which, in their intensely unique and personal way, pay homage to the human spirit and shine a beacon of hope on the essential wonder and value of being alive.” (The Philippine Star, 6 April 2006)

On May 26, as part of the Theatre Olympics of the Nations, the Viirus theatre company of Finland will present its highly acclaimed production of No Return, a play loosely based on Kafka. Here are excerpts from a review by Kirsikka Moring of the October 2005 production of the play:

“Viirus’s No Return is a splendid actor’s performance, which trusts in the ability of the spectator to imagine. All are invited – to the stage of death. Viirus’s No Return exploits all aspects of the theatre of death, but the colors are not black, nor does the music follow the score of a funerary procession. The Lithuanian composer Martynas Bialobzekis has created a musical world to the show which revels in light and joy! What an ecstatic happiness the train passengers radiate, as they travel through the pink side-scene. After all, they do not know their terminus, as we in the stands do. The performers bring to mind the dramatic troupes of the concentration camps and Stalin’s prison camps. As long as you perform you survive. And they just continue, continue.

“The Lithuanian director Cezaris has chosen themes from Amerika and Kafka’s short story A Fratricide. During the rehearsal process the final dramatization has been born out of the improvisations of the performers, resulting in a drama which repeats and alters the themes. On an empty stage, with an upliftingly light and expressively rich pantomime they tell the story of the actors. The divine music of the angelic bassoons beckons higher and higher, and for the sake of being an artist they run up the spiral staircase to the heights, always running and running. Hurrying to the train. The fine ensemble of Viirus – Robert Enckell, Dick Idman, Marika Parkkomäki, Jerry Wahlfors, Joanna Wingren and Tobias Zilliacus – exploit their journey to the full. They attune us to an intense game of theatre, in which imagining takes central stage. By the dramaturgy they repeat each other’s phrases as their own, inspired by a common experience; and as true actors they compete audaciously for the attention of the public.

“The theatre is locked. We have all been confined into a common room to experience the same. The troupe captures us, their spectators, into an experience in which the transcendental drama of bliss and joy is transformed into ultimate horror, increasing by the moment. The second act of the performance makes death tangible. With an increasing pace the murder of the clerk Wese is told, as the circumstances are described and the details of the event are disputed. The actors argue, experiment, run to their stations in different emotions. Time and time again they repeat the events to assure the correct description of them, to stay alive.” (The Philippine Star, 13 April 2006)

On May 23, as part of the Theatre Olympics of the Nations at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Armenia will present The Second Will. Here is the description of the play sent by the director:

“Here are two sisters, two illogically opposite characters. One of them has given herself to men and pleasure, and the other is forever isolated.

“Ten years have passed since the day they separated, when the elder sister left the motherland, swearing never to be back. She did not even go to their mother’s funeral. Their mother died in silence, without saying a word about the elder sister’s spiritual dereliction and indifference. The mother was sure that her younger daughter would just organize the funeral and nothing more, with no feelings.

“Suddenly, seven years after her death, the mother’s second will appears. It changes everything, and even for a very short time and with some mystery, it makes the elder sister return to her motherland.

“The memories are unavoidable. The sisters relive their story, turning their lives into a living hell. Only the mother’s second will makes them reconsider their past and future.” (The Philippine Star, 27 April 2006)

Critical Practice in the Language Classroom

This is my keynote speech at the 35^th Bi-annual Conference of the Ateneo Center for English Language Teaching (ACELT) on 11 February 2006:

Sometime in the second half of the last century, critical theory came and went, was born and died, flourished and became passé, all within a generation. Hardly anyone teaching the English language in the Philippines noticed. Had theory been nothing else but a passing fancy, we would not be the worse for not noticing. Unfortunately for English teachers, theory rocked the very foundation of language teaching. We proceed with teaching English in our own century at great risk, if we do not step back a couple of decades and check out what exactly critical theory, sometimes called critical practice, had to say about the language that we teach.

Today, allow me to provoke you into thinking about certain aspects of the English language itself and of the way we teach the English language that have become extremely problematic – that’s the critical theorist’s way of saying that we have a problem.

Let us begin with former Ateneo professor Bienvenido Lumbera’s advocacy of vernacular languages against the English language. Lumbera is the leading critical theorist of the last half of the last century. He taught practically every other critical theorist of any importance in our country. Basically, Lumbera, taking his cue from Renato Constantino, preached (I use the past tense because we are talking of the last century) that the English language was an instrument of American colonial oppression, rammed down our throats by the American invaders at the turn of the last century in order to make us, first, forget that we are Filipinos, and second, dream of becoming Americans. To counteract what African critics would later call the colonization of the mind, Lumbera proposed that we focus our research efforts on writings done in various vernacular languages, those spoken by more than 99% of our population, and ignore, if not forever then at least temporarily, those written in the English language.

After the death of theory and the birth of what critics call “internal brain drain,” referring to the phenomenon of our best students prostituting their minds and their tongues in call centers, we are less emotional than Lumbera about the English language, but we still should not forget the harm that the English language can actually do to us. If we use only English as the language of the classroom, for example, our elementary-grade children will forget that there are different types of rice (since English has only one word for rice, while any Philippine language has at least a dozen), the real nature of the rice terraces (which has a word in Cordillera languages), and the way we should relate to our brothers and sisters (since English calls everybody simply brother or sister or sibling, unlike our vernacular languages, which take the borrowed Chinese words for such relationships very, very seriously).

I shall, after mentioning each critical idea, immediately turn to the classroom to see if we can put our teaching tools where our minds are.

In the case of our miseducation due to the use of English in the classroom, we need not abandon the language while we are in the English period or subject (although, as many of you know, I have championed and will continue to champion the abandonment of English in non-English subjects). While teaching English, however, we should try very hard not to store cultural baggage in the minds of our students. How do we do this? Principally by using Philippine English. We have a dictionary of Philippine English, brought out by Anvil Publishing (sorry for the plug). Use this dictionary rather than some American dictionary. By making our children grow up knowing that hundreds of vernacular words are actually included in Standard International English, we will help them dissociate the language from the kind of American English forced on us by our once colonizers and still, at least as long as George Bush remains in power, our current colonizers.

Gemino Abad, now teaching also at the Ateneo, reacting to Lumbera, did not want to abandon English nor to return to his native Cebuano. Abad, however, realizing that Lumbera was right, did not also want merely to use English instead of Cebuano. Abad had a novel idea: using poems written in English by Filipinos, he proved that Filipinos had colonized the English language. He said that our poems were not written in English, but from English. You might recall that both N.V.M. Gonzalez and Bienvenido N. Santos – two of our major novelists last century – said pretty much the same thing. Gonzalez insisted that he wrote, in his own words, “in Tagalog using English words.” Similarly, Santos also insisted that he wrote, in his own words, “in Capampangan and Bicolano using English words.”

Abad’s idea may seem weird, but it is really quite simple. He was merely saying that our poets, who are our best writers in English, did not write the way American poets wrote, but wrote in a distinctly Filipino way. You have to read Abad’s three huge anthologies of poetry to understand exactly what he wanted to say, but we can summarize the idea. Filipinos use the English language in a way different from the way Americans use it. Abad was not talking only of grammar or idioms; he was not a linguist, prescriptive or descriptive. He was talking about the way Filipinos perceive words. Seen by a Filipino poet, the words in an American English dictionary cease to be American, but become Philippine. We have to be poets to grasp Abad’s full meaning, but we can see a little bit what he meant by giving an example he did not give.

Take the word bad. One of the definitions of this word in Merriam-Webster, which is the standard American dictionary, is this: “bad, slang, good.” In the Philippines, we would never use the word bad to mean good. That’s not poetry, but just usage. If the word bad were used in poetry by a Filipino, however, the differences would be even clearer. The word, in an American poem, rhymes with mad but not with squad nor jihad, which use a different a. To a Filipino poet, however, all these words rhyme, not only because we have problems differentiating one a from another, but because madness, the military, and Islamic terrorists are all associated with, that’s right, badness, not goodness. This is a fanciful example, meant only to alert you to the interplay of sound and sense, so important in the teaching of poetry and, by extension, of words.

Foreign critics are less perceptive than Filipino critics when it comes to the nuances of language. The reason is simple: rare is the foreigner that learns more than three languages at birth, but in our country, rare is the Filipino that knows only one language. At the very least, a Filipino knows Tagalog and English. A Filipino living outside the Tagalog region, however, knows a number of languages from childhood: Fookien Chinese and Mandarin Chinese (if she or he has Chinese blood), the language of the region (such as Capampangan or Tausug), the lingua franca of the region (namely, Cebuano, Ilocano, or Tagalog), the national language Filipino, English, and if we are talking of the southern side of Mindanao with its thriving trade with Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesia and perhaps even Bahasa Melayu.

Michel Foucault, for instance, who thought only in French, simplistically declared that “language is power.” This is true, if we take a simple example. Let’s say that I go to one of you right now, any one of you, someone I have never met before, and say, “I love you.” What will happen? When that person goes out of this room, everybody will suddenly pay attention to her or him. When I walk out of this room, that person will avoid me, for sure. I have, in other words, merely through the words “I love you,” which of course I do not mean, affected the behavior of one person, and of the rest of you when you meet that person. Language, in itself, divorced from the intentions of the one using the language, is power.

Why is Foucault’s idea important in the classroom? Obviously, because anything we say as teachers can be held against us. We have to be extra careful when we use English, because we are supposed to be the models of language use. Feminism (I mean that second phase of it that focused on what feminists call “man-made language,” that is, language of men that was made by men and for men), called our attention to the way language has disempowered women, one half of the world’s population. If we consistently use male pronouns or nouns to exclude females, we are drumming into our students’ heads that men are more important than women.

Today, we call this “political correctness” or “non-exclusive language”; we used to call it simply “sexist language.” For example, if you say “woman poet,” you imply that poets are supposed to be male, and poets that are female are only exceptions to the rule. If you say chairman, you imply that chairs should be male; changing chairman to chairperson merely calls attention to the change in gender, thereby reinforcing what you mean to downplay. The word chair is sufficient, because it is an old word, used in Congress when someone stands up to say, “May I address the chair?”

Foucault’s contemporary Jacques Derrida has been unjustly ridiculed by linguists for his infamous statement that “writing precedes speech.” Like all forms of ridicule, this one is based on a complete misunderstanding. Derrida did not mean that babies learn to write before they speak; that would be stupid, and while he was clearly crazy, Derrida was far from stupid. Of course, babies speak before they write, if only because their fingers develop later than their tongues, but the language that babies speak is not considered language unless it is written down. Try writing down the sound that all newborn babies utter when they get slapped by the doctor or midwife: waaaahhhh. That is not a word, but what does the doctor or midwife say about what happens: “The baby cried.” The words the, baby, and cried are in the dictionary, printed, written down. Language, said Derrida, is what you find in a dictionary, which is writing. Outside the dictionary, there is nothing.

Was there ever a time in history when people spoke but did not write? If there was, we certainly will never be able to prove it. This is a variant of the classic question: if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Philosophers have written volumes about this question, but the answer is very simple: who cares? We certainly don’t care because we are not in those woods. The tree doesn’t care. The woods don’t care. In fact, as Albert Einstein so cleverly showed at the beginning of the last century, we should not even care if the earth were standing still or running at incredible speed, because the laws of physics would all still hold. Derrida’s point was simple: if we base our conclusions only on what we know, not on, as O. D. Corpuz likes to say, the facts that we invent (he says, “these are the conclusions upon which I base my facts”), all we have of language are written examples of it, etchings on stone or bamboo, not to mention the testimony of the Old Testament, a written document.

We don’t have a problem with Derrida’s insight in the Philippines, because Filipinos speak the way they write. This is a feature of Philippine English identified by Andrew Gonzalez. For example, we would never answer the question “How are you?” the way an American would, that is, with “I’m good.” We would say, “I’m fine, thank you,” because we would never ungrammatically use an adjective where an adverb should be. On second thought, we do have a problem with this, because anywhere else in the world, nobody speaks the way they write. Nobody says things like, “The president lies, cheats, and steals,” not only because their presidents most likely do not lie, cheat, nor steal, but because oral English is not so grammatical. At most, Winston Churchill said, “blood, sweat, and tears,” but he said that so that he would be quoted by all the newspapers of the time; every politician knows what is meant by the phrase “sound bite,” spelled either b-i-t-e or b-y-t-e.

We might have a problem with Derrida’s other great insight, which is that all language is self-contradictory. Every word or phrase, said Derrida, appears to mean something but actually means something else, most likely the opposite. The manifest meaning of a sentence hides its latent meaning. We must, he said, realize that a sentence is merely constructed and therefore, can be deconstructed.

Take the simple word English as in “English language.” English is defined simply as “the speech of England.” That seems simple enough, until we look back at the time the term was invented by Alfred the Great as a catch-all term for the different languages of the Germanic invaders, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. At that time, he called it Englisc, with a c instead of an h, and pronounced en rather than in. Here we see immediately what Derrida meant: the English language does not really exist by itself, but is a mere label for languages existing before it. It is a classification, a group, rather than one thing. It is like labelling as Bisayan any and all the languages of the Visayas, such as Cebuano, Ilonggo, Kinaray-a, and so on. We can already see a contradiction: if English is merely a conglomeration of distinct languages, how can English have its own identity? How can it impose its own rules?

The manifest meaning of the word English, in other words, is that it is a distinct language. Its hidden meaning, found through etymology, is that it is only a convenient label for a group of languages. There is a contradiction there that cannot be explained away, especially when, in the classroom, the teacher is faced with the need to correct the grammar of a student.

We can imagine a similar situation when the Philippines becomes federal. How can there be a Philippines if Bangsa Moro will use Arabic as its medium of instruction, the Diliman Republic will declare as persona non grata anyone defending Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and Cebu will ban the use of Cebuano in all its schools? How can English teachers impose any kind of grammatical uniformity if each student will say, with reason, that the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, not to mention Americans, British, Australians, Singaporeans, and of course Filipinos, have their own ways of using the English language and, therefore, that there is not and cannot be one correct way of using the language?

In literary theory, there is a similar misreading of hermeneutics or reader-response theory. Some teachers, intimidated by the dropping of Western names (and I mean droppings in its pigeon sense), give in to students that claim that any interpretation of a poem is as valid as any other interpretation because, after all, all readers are created equal. Deconstruction, as Abad once admitted, makes agnostics of us all; to regain our faith, we must deconstruct our own deconstructions.

We could deconstruct the word English in another way, if we are fans of pool or, as we say in Philippine English, billiards. One meaning of the word in any standard dictionary since 1860 is “spin imparted to a ball.” This meaning comes from the French word anglé, meaning “angled” or, as we say every day we see a pronouncement from Malacañang, “spin.” The word English carries within itself the latent meaning of “lying, cheating, and stealing,” which is the Philippine English way of saying spin. We can see all kinds of implications in the insistence by Gloria Macapagal Arroyo that we use English as our sole medium of instruction in all our public schools.

How does this translate into everyday practice in the classroom? Very simply, we as teachers must constantly be aware that we are living contradictions. I mean that positively, although it sounds negative. In reality, if we were to adopt Derrida’s theories, we would find no difference between positives and negatives, which are mere interchangeable poles on a binary stick. Let me cite just a few of the contradictions we display inside our classrooms.

We ask them to write all kinds of paragraphs that we ourselves would not be able to write. We ask our students to write a term paper, but we do not write a term paper with them. We ask our students to do book reports, but how many new books have we actually read in the past term? We ask students to pronounce English properly, but can we pass a test at a call center? We ask students to write a poem or a short story, but can we write one in the time we allow them? I have said again and again, ad nauseam, that we cannot give what we do not have, we cannot ask our students to do what we ourselves cannot do. If there is one thing you will get out of this keynote speech, I hope it is this: that all of you, without exception, will not ask any student to write anything that you yourself cannot or will not write. If you ask them to write a term paper, for heaven’s sake, please write a term paper yourself. If you ask your students to read a new novel every term, please read a new novel yourself every term. In fact, if you are a real English teacher, you should be reading a new novel every week. And please, please, do not ask your students to write poems or short stories if you cannot write a poem or a short story yourself. There is one classroom practice that I strongly suggest you do, and it derives from Derrida’s deconstructive theory: at the end of a class session where you ask students to write, say, a haiku, read to them the haiku that you wrote while waiting for them to finish.

Let’s return to Lumbera, Abad, Foucault, and Derrida. There is a way to put together all of their ideas into one word: english, spelled not with a capital E but with a small initial letter e.

Lumbera was one of the first, if not the first, critics in the whole world to do what today is known as Postcolonial Theory. Lumbera did not know at the time he did his now classic speeches (theorists like to call them “interventions,” if you want to use a bigger word) that he was a postcolonial theorist; in fact, at that time, which was the late 1960s, the word “postcolonial” was not yet fashionable. It even referred to the end of the series “pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial,” meaning the last or most recent of developments in time. Postcolonial now refers to the first taste of colonization; in our case, we became postcolonial in 1521. Postcoloniality is, thus, the condition of being under a colonial master, whether in cannon or stone in the sense that we found ourselves on the wrong end of the barrel of a Spanish rifle. Lumbera said pretty much the same thing as the foreign idols of the end of the last century when he said that our literature either accepted or rejected colonial influences.

The postcolonial theorists of Australia eventually caught up with Lumbera and started to call the English language english (with the small letter e), to foreground (foreground is the word theorists use to mean call attention to) the undeniable reality that, first, the English language is the world’s lingua franca or international medium of communication, and second, that every country has a different way of using the language. Linguists like to call this phenomenon Englishes, or less concisely, varieties of English. Theorists liked to use the small letter to distinguish the language that Australians and other postcolonials use from that used in Britain.

We can immediately see that Abad’s “poetry from English” runs along the same idea: the English as used by Filipino poets is different from the English as used by Hong Kong poets, Nigerian poets, South African poets, Native American poets, and so on, not to mention British or American poets. Foucault’s implied advocacy that users of language should use the language of the oppressors itself to subvert the power of colonizers, men, politicians, and the like finds practical application in the way the small letter e was harnessed as a weapon by postcolonial critics to ensure, as the Australians put it, plagiarizing from Salman Rushdie, that “the Empire writes back.” Derrida’s demand that writing precede speech is clearly satisfied by uncapitalizing the letter e. In order to understand what the postcolonial critics were talking about, we have to read the word english [uncapitalized], not just listen to it. Writing clearly takes precedence over speech.

What are we teaching in the classroom, then, capitalized or non-capitalized E/english? (If you read my speech, you will see that I spell that word capital E slash small letter e. The slash was the favorite punctuation mark of theorists, because it is unpronounceable.) What should we teach? The answer should by now be obvious: we should be teaching [uncapitalized] english. We should be teaching the language as it is used by Filipinos, not as it is used by Americans or Brits or Australians or whoever else. Do we have the tools to teach our english and not those of others? Yes, we do. And to show you that, now that I am a senior citizen, I am claiming the right not to be modest anymore, I shall recommend to you my own book, which I did with the leading authority on Philippine English, Maria Lourdes Bautista; the book was published by Anvil, is available at all National Bookstores, and is entitled A Dictionary of Philippine English. In that book, which by the way is a joke book, the word yes is defined as “maybe,” and word maybe is defined as “no.”

The moment of critical theory has gone, and we are the better for it, but to deny that there once was a Camelot of critical theory is to return to the dark ages before we were forced to reexamine our assumptions, our practices, our lives. Exactly as Socrates predicted, the unexamined life is not worth living. The uncritical class is not worth teaching. The untheoretical teacher is not worth hiring. It is one thing to say that we should no longer be teaching theory; it is quite another thing to say that we should teach language as though there had never been theory.

Let me give an analogy. Some of us, maybe many of us, have had a love affair that went sour. To say now, after the traumatic event, that we never loved the person anyway is to deny ourselves the pleasure of memory that Alfred Lord Tennyson, plagiarizing from St. Augustine, immortalized in the lines “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.” We loved theory when it was around, but now that theory has left us, we should not deny the intensity of our love. We were mesmerized by the words theory invented to capture our minds, the convoluted sentences that gave us – after we deciphered them – the joy of discovery that Aristotle already identified, the names we dropped to make our students open their mouths in awe. Let us not deny that critical theory has outlived its usefulness, but it was useful. It made us realize that, both in our taste as readers and our behavior as teachers, we were sleepwalking, unaware of the damage we were doing to our students because of our inability to see ourselves for what we really were, and perhaps still are.

The conference today will focus on critical practices in the language classroom, on teaching students to think. You will have a chance to study the power relations in a classroom, the issues of class and gender as they relate to various texts, the practice itself of criticism, the hidden assumptions of arguments, and several other topics that relate critical theory to classroom practice. Do not lose sight of the woods because of the trees. We may not have snowy evenings in the Philippines, but we do stop to watch the trees fill up if not with snow then with rain.

It is much too easy to do two things: first, to get so enamored of critical theory that we start teaching theory rather than literary or linguistic texts themselves, pretty much like going to a museum and reading only the labels and signs or the tourist guidebook, but not looking at the artifacts; second, to get so annoyed by critical theory that we start teaching as though theory never mattered, which it did, or that it does not matter now, which it does. Students do know how to think, as Socrates knew a long time ago; it is only a matter of helping them think. But we teachers cannot help our students to think if we do not think first. We exist because we think. (serialized in The Philippine Star, 16 February - 23 March 2006)

Brother Andrew (1940-2006)

Brother Andrew Gonzalez, FSC (The Philippine Star, 2 February 2006)

His death last Sunday (29 January 2006) came as a shock because it was expected. Lying in a hospital bed for the last two months of his life, Brother Andrew Gonzalez, FSC, had kept the hopes of his friends alive by looking like he would soon stand up and do what he had always done – look into the future and see what could be done.

Beyond any doubt, Brother Andrew was one of the greatest Filipinos who ever lived. He was an inspiration to everyone he met, and he met just about everyone.

His achievements, listed even in small print, fill up dozens of pages. He was, for example, internationally recognized for his scholarly work on linguistics. As Secretary of Education, he introduced reforms in our public education system that, until today, are changing the way millions of schoolchildren are learning.

His greatest achievement, of course, was De La Salle University. I am currently writing the history of DLSU after 1972, and it has become clearer and clearer to me that it is no exaggeration to say that, for the last thirty years, DLSU was Brother Andrew. He built it to become what it is now – a huge, multi-campus university recognized internationally as one of only a handful of Philippine universities that matter.

During the launch at DLSU in 2002 of his book An Unfinished Symphony: 934 Days at DECS, I delivered the following remarks, part of which I reprint as a way to honor him in death as I honored him in life:

It is my pleasure to welcome you to this hall, this campus, this university, a university that grew primarily because of the vision of Brother Andrew when he was its president and continues to grow academically and into a research university under his care as Vice-President for Academics and Research.

Today we close a chapter in the continuing epic novel that is the life of Brother Andrew. It is a life full of exciting chapters, and the chapter documented in the book clearly ranks among the most exciting of them. If we were to use the metaphor he uses to structure the book we are launching today, we can also say that, today, we finish listening to his playing of a short but complex musical piece in his inexhaustible repertoire of masterpieces.

By putting down in black and white his memories of and his insights into the 934 days he spent as Secretary of the largest agency of government, Brother Andrew has put a closure to this part of his life. He can now go on with the rest of his life, which, if inertia of movement applies, if the wave that defines his life continues to move across the seas of academe and of the country, should be as hectic and vigorous as these 934 days.

Allow me to hum to you a few bars from the unfinished symphony that, except for Brother Andrew’s humility, should really be called a finished one, since he finished, in 934 days, many more than 934 things.

Just like any other symphony, this one has low notes and high notes. First, the low notes. The book goes through the ones we all remember – the stormy confirmation hearings at the Commission on Appointments, the ugly episode involving Celia Ejercito de Castro, and the notorious purchase of the Expedition. It also goes through the less public ones, such as the reassignment of Superintendents upon pressure from politicians. I understand that several lawyers went through the manuscript to remove from it all libelous material. Clearly, the unexpurgated edition would have painted the events more accurately, if more dangerously.

Let us focus on the high notes, the ones that challenge composers and musicians, and, if this were an opera, sopranos. Come to think of it, perhaps an opera would be a better metaphor than a symphony, because the twists and turns of the plot of these 934 days would do proud any opera librettist.

The high notes. The first is the price of textbooks. During his term, Brother Andrew was able to cut down the price of textbooks by as much as 35% in 1999 and a further 30% of the remaining 65% in 2000 for World Bank purchases.

The second is the clothing allowance. Before Brother Andrew, corrupt suppliers would corner the clothing allowances of teachers, since all uniforms were purchased in bulk and it was thus easy to talk to and bribe only a couple of people. Brother Andrew distributed the clothing allowance to each of the almost half-a-million teachers, making it unprofitable, not to mention impossible, to bribe one’s way to a uniform supply contract.

The third high note is the number of schoolrooms Brother Andrew constructed during his term. In 1999, using both government money and money from private sector donors, he was able to build more than 7,000 new classrooms. In 2000, he built another 7,000 new classrooms.

The fourth high note is the revision of the curriculum. Brother Andrew, being an educator all his life, knew that, in all the studies of our educational system, the issue of the overcrowded curriculum has been raised. In fact, all previous secretaries of education tried their hand at solving the problem of the overcrowded, and therefore, ineffective curriculum. Brother Andrew had a novel solution to the problem: he ordered that textbooks be bought only for five core subjects, namely, Filipino, English, Araling Panlipunan, Mathematics, and Science. Although he did not abolish the other subjects, he, in effect, marginalized them by not giving them textbooks.

There’s a lot more in this book than I have given you as a teaser. There are, for instance, explanations of Brother Andrew’s stand on the loan deductions and the corresponding service fees, his close encounters with the rich and famous who unfortunately became rich and famous by corrupting some people at DECS, and not least of all, his reasons for not resigning early from Erap’s cabinet contra mundum.

Rest in peace, Brother Andrew! Although I am not the pope and cannot declare you a saint, I am sure that you are now in heaven with the Lord you devoted your life to.

Creative Solutions to Philippine Education Problems

Fashionable these days is thinking outside the box, which is another way of describing creative thinking. Many people are surprised when I say that there are always more than two ways to look at anything. Most people are conditioned to accept two-value logic or thinking only in terms of dualisms (such as black or white, right or wrong, male or female, true or false).

Take the classic illustration of the difference between pessimism and optimism: the pessimist sees a glass as half-empty, the optimist as half-full. A creative person, however, knows that there are more than two ways to describe such a glass of water.

I can say, for example, that the glass is in the process of being completely full, because I am pouring water into it. I can say that the glass is in the process of being completely empty, because the glass is tilted towards my thirsty mouth. I can say that the glass only appears to be half-filled because light hits the glass in such a way that I squint and make a mistake calculating the amount of liquid. I can say that the glass only appears to have water in it because the water is actually painted on the glass itself; in reality, there may not be water inside the glass. I can say that the glass is really completely full of liquid, except that half the liquid is invisible because the glass is painted in such a way that half of it matches the color of the liquid. And so on.

I can even start looking at the glass from the points of view of various specialists. A physicist or an engineer will not be satisfied with the adjectives “half-full” and “half-empty,” but will want to weigh the water and the glass, calculate the volumes involved, and formulate an equation that will make the relationship between liquid and glass applicable to similar situations. A chemist will want to see if that is really H2O in that glass. A medical doctor will check if the water is potable. A painter will tilt the glass this way and that way until the light hits it in an especially beautiful way. A poet will barely see the glass and will focus only on the symbolic aspects of the water. And a child will just simply drink the water.

The point is that creative thinking offers solutions even to problems that seem absolutely hopeless or insoluble.

Let us take a practical application of creative thinking.

The Philippine public educational system always baffles the minds of non-creative educators, legislators, and government officials. Creative people look at our education problems and realize that they can be solved.

The figures are well-known. (I take my data from the excellent state-of-the-art paper entitled “Beating the Odds: A Nation Responding to the Crisis in Education” prepared recently by the Department of Education.)

For the year 2006, we need 10,549 new classrooms, 1.22 million additional seats, 67.03 million new textbooks, and 12,131 more teachers. In terms of pesos, that means another P11.30 billion added to the education budget. Because the government does not have P11B to spare, the problem appears impossible to solve. That is the pessimistic view.

The optimistic way of looking at the problem makes us feel better, and this is how the DepEd paper puts it: things could have been worse had DepEd not done what it has done. Without the initiatives started by Brother Andrew Gonzalez, FSC, and continued by Raul Roco, Edilberto de Jesus, Florencio Abad, and OIC Fe Hidalgo, we would need even more money.

DepEd estimates that for 2006, without its creative intervention, we would have needed 45,775 classrooms, 3.17M seats, 67.03M textbooks, and 20,517 teachers, with a total cost of P28.74B. That means that government programs have saved the Filipino people P17.44B.

DepEd mentions such interventions as the new curriculum, education service contracting, multi-shift classroom policy, library hubs, early childhood education, madrasah education, inclusive education, alternative learning system, school feeding, Every Child a Reader Program (ECARP), competency-based teacher assessment standards, computerization, Schools First, Brigada Eskwela, Sagip Eskwela, Adopt-a-School, Oplan Balik Eskwela, and the Basic Education Sector Reform Agenda (BESRA).

The DepEd paper cannot, because of space limitations, mention all the programs undertaken by the government since Gonzalez’s time (actually, much earlier, at least as far back as Lourdes Quisumbing’s stint, from my own memory). A glance at the voluminous reports submitted every month by various regional directors during Management Committee meetings would show how innovative teachers and administrators have been in solving our educational problems.

One way of looking at the P11B, then, is to say that we should be thankful it is only P11B and not P28B. There are even other ways of looking at the P11B.

The national government need not shell out the entire P11B. If families and businesses help out, that amount can be considerably reduced. Examples come readily to mind. Private foundations put in more than P1B last year into the public school system, in cold cash, school buildings, and books. (My own foundation, Books for Philippine Schools Foundation, facilitated the donation of more than P10 million in new books and millions more in used books to DepEd in 2005.) Parent and community associations contributed millions in terms of school grounds improvement and volunteer teaching. Local governments poured in a huge, undetermined amount of money into the public school system for salaries of teachers, as well as for classrooms and textbooks. (The Philippine Star, 22 December 2005)

Creative thinking offers a way out of despair over the monstrous problems facing public education today.

Take the matter of classrooms. The government estimates that we need at least 10,549 new classrooms in 2006, mostly for public elementary schools.

Non-creative persons, who think only within two-value logic, say things like these: Either we get new classrooms or we don’t. Either the number needed is 10,549 or it is not. Either we build new classrooms or our schoolchildren will not have classrooms to use.

The trouble with such non-creative thinking is that it is futile. There is no way we can build that number of classrooms, even if we had the money (which we definitely don’t) nor the political will (which we probably don’t).

Do simple arithmetic. Divide the number by the number of days in the year. Assume, for the sake of argument, that people will work 24 hours every day, even Sundays and holidays. Assume that it takes only 10 days to construct one classroom (just to make the computations easy). How many classrooms should we finish per day? How many per hour? Add now factors found in the real world, such as the time it takes to find land, buy or beg for it, arrange for all sorts of permits, do all the paperwork in order to get the cash, take materials to the sites (remember that classrooms are needed not mainly in developed areas but precisely in hard-to-reach places), and hours when people do not work (nights, holidays, weekends, and so on). How many classrooms can we actually finish per day? For the whole year?

In short, there is no way we can build 10,549 classrooms. Non-creative persons will just give up when faced by such impossibility. But creative thinkers know better.

The first thing to be creative about is the nature of the classroom itself. Why, in this age of cellphones, computers, and television, do we need to have classrooms at all? Obviously, because being with a flesh-and-blood teacher and interacting with flesh-and-blood classmates is good for children. That is undeniable, but we can be creative about the length of time children have to be inside a classroom.

We are so used to the chalk-and-blackboard or speak-and-listen type of teaching, that we find it difficult to understand that students need not go to a school campus in order to learn. We have enough educational theories and even practical experience to know that it is entirely possible for children living in the 21^st century to learn without being always inside a school building.

Already, in higher education, we have numerous examples of learning outside classrooms. The entire distance learning phenomenon (pioneered locally by De La Salle University and the UP Open University), the numerous experiments run by individual teachers in several schools (I taught an entire graduate course last term, for example, without ever meeting the students in a classroom), and the innovations done by DepEd in many schools (such as a fisheries high school I once visited where the students attended classes around fishponds) all point to the real possibility of minimizing the time students have to be inside classrooms.

What I am saying is that we do not need new classrooms at all, but need only to maximize the use of the ones we already have.

Take a look at a typical class. A lesson usually involves working with a textbook of some kind. Why does the student have to be in a classroom to read a textbook? Why can’t a textbook be written in such a way that the exercises in them can be done at home?

How much of class time is actually spent learning? There are so many things done within the classroom that simply waste time. For example, teachers check attendance, return papers, erase the blackboard, form lines, read aloud or write on the board what is already in the textbook, rearrange chairs for group work, and (in rare rich places) fiddle around with electric cords. Let us not even mention the parades, holiday preparations, and other non-essential activities public school children cannot seem to avoid.

Why not restrict classroom time to real learning time? That will cut down the time needed to be in school.

Let us assume that half of our actual classroom time now is useful for real learning. (This is a very generous estimate.) That means that students can spend the same number of hours a day in school, but need to come only half the number of school days. We immediately double the number of students that can use our existing classrooms.

If we factor in policies that DepEd is already implementing, such as multiple shifts and longer campus hours, we can see that there is no need for additional classrooms.

The problem of classrooms has disappeared. More precisely, we have shifted the problem from the building of classrooms to the rebuilding of the curriculum.

In order to maximize classroom time with minimal classrooms while still achieving the minimum learning competencies expected of students, we need to rethink our entire way of teaching.

We need, first of all, to start looking at home and community experiences as part of formal (not informal nor alternative) schooling. We need to get parents and community leaders to start becoming, in effect, teachers. DepEd’s Schools First program should then not be merely a way to raise funds for public schools. It should be a way to decrease the dependence of children on the school itself.

How do we do this? How do we reengineer classroom teaching? If you cannot list at least a dozen ways to make students learn outside the classroom, you are clearly not a creative thinker. (The Philippine Star, 29 December 2005)

The Department of Education estimates that we need 67.03 million new textbooks for 2006. Creative thinking may bring that number down.

First, DepEd must finally implement an order it issued several years ago to remove the silly practice of having several different textbooks being used for the same subject in the same classroom.

If you visit a typical public elementary or high school, you will almost surely find that the students use not one, but several textbooks per subject. The teacher cannot say something as simple as “Open your textbooks to page 10,” because page 10 will not necessarily refer to the same page in textbooks held by students.

This anomaly arose because of bureaucratic shortsightedness that has lasted for decades. Every year or so, the government orders the cheapest textbook available for a particular subject, say, Grade 3 English. One year, the government orders copies of an English textbook. The next bidding time, the government orders copies of another English textbook, because the price of this second textbook turns out to be less than that of the first one. The next time, the government orders copies of yet another English textbook, because this third and cheapest textbook may just have come recently into the market.

The books are distributed more or less evenly among Grade 3 classrooms. Of course, there are never enough textbooks for all students in all schools, so a typical classroom gets, say, five textbooks of the first English textbook. The next year or so, the same classroom gets five textbooks of the second one, and so on. Eventually, there are enough textbooks (say, 50) for the whole class, but these are not the same textbook, but different ones.

DepEd, realizing that this was not an ideal situation for learning, ordered that textbooks should be the same for each classroom. This could have easily been done. A school would have simply gathered all its textbooks into one big pile and redistributed them to each classroom – one title per classroom. Then, each teacher would have the same textbook as each student in a classroom. In the next classroom, of course, the textbook would be different, but everyone in that classroom would have the same title.

Once this order is fully implemented, there will be less need for additional textbooks. Why? Because it is not necessary, nor even desirable, that each student should have his or her own textbook.

We can find many arguments in educational theories against what is known as one-to-one textbook per student ratio. DepEd now uses a revised Basic Education Curriculum that is based on an interactive theory of learning, precisely the theory that argues most loudly against one-to-one.

If students are to learn interactively or cooperatively, they should not be isolated within the classroom. They should not be sitting by themselves, reading their own textbooks, and working at their own pace. They should be working with others, reading at a pace dictated not just by themselves but by their peers.

The best proof of this type of collaborative learning is the Japanese system, where the whole class waits until every single student learns, for example, how to solve a mathematics problem. Japanese students tutor their slowest classmates, in order that the class can move faster through the lesson. The consistent high scores of Japanese students in international mathematics tests prove that this system is much better than the American or our old Philippine system of each student learning by himself or herself.

If we do away with the superstition that there should be a one-to-one ratio of textbook per student, we can see immediately that we will need less than 67 million new textbooks this year. (The Philippine Star, 5 January 2006)

In the last century (the 20th, of course), textbooks were indispensable in classrooms. Rare was the teacher that came into a classroom without a textbook in hand and rarer was the teacher that never consulted a textbook. This was not always the case.

In most other fields of human endeavor, experts look at what they call Best Practices to see how things can be improved. If we look at the Best Practices of teaching across nations and over the centuries, we will come up with some insights that should be obvious.

The best teachers of all time are Jesus, Muhammad, Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, and other such outstanding individuals. Although some of these teachers wrote something to remember them by, none of them used a textbook when they taught their students.

The question is simple: if the best teachers of all time did not need textbooks, why do we use textbooks? The answer seems equally simple: we are not as good as these Great Teachers.

True, most teachers in the 21st century are not going to be founders of belief systems that will influence millions of people. It is also true, however, that teachers today need not influence millions of people; they need to influence only the few students that are in their classes. To be any good, teachers must learn from the best teachers of all time.

Being Christian, I am more familiar with the teaching style of Jesus than with that of the other great teachers. What can we learn from the way Jesus taught?

First of all, Jesus never carried a textbook around. He did refer constantly to what we now call the Old Testament, but he could quote from it at length from memory. Immediately, we see what great teachers in our own century should do, no matter what they are teaching: they should know their subject matter by heart.

I cannot stand literature teachers, for instance, that cannot recite poems from memory. I cannot imagine a doctor having to read a medical textbook every time some patient comes into the emergency room. I cannot trust a plumber that comes into our house, holding a wrench in one hand and a manual in the other. Although cooks do consult cookbooks, I do not think we will patronize a restaurant where we can see the chef constantly referring to a recipe book. We certainly will never ride a bus where the driver reads any kind of book while driving.

Experts are experts because they know what they know by heart. A teacher, even an elementary school teacher, is an expert. No teacher that is really good needs a textbook.

Secondly, Jesus always taught with the materials at hand. He would point at a fig tree, look up at sparrows, walk on water to prove a point, force his listeners to think by using parables rather than spoonfeeding them, focus on a few well-chosen lessons. He never pretended to know everything (even if, as most Christians believe, he knew everything because he was divine). He never lectured on blood chemistry, on computers, or even on the scientific names of the fishes in the market. He restricted himself to things his listeners knew.

There are so many things within and just outside any school in the country that can be used to teach students. Take a very simple exercise recommended for elementary school students – constructing a genealogy. Everybody has parents or at least guardians, whether they are dead or alive, living at home or elsewhere. Instead of looking up the words father, mother, aunt, uncle, and so on in a textbook, all a teacher has to do is to ask students the words they use to refer to the people in their homes or communities. Vocabulary enhancement need not involve dictionaries or textbooks; all a teacher needs is imagination. (Okay, not every teacher has imagination, but that is another issue involving training.)

When teachers teach elementary science, they need not write on the blackboard some equation that only graduate students can understand anyway. Take the concept of being nonbiodegradable. If you were a teacher, ask elementary school students outside urban centers whether they should plant plastic and they will laugh at you; they know what nonbiodegradability means. In an urban center, make them throw a piece of plastic on the floor, then ask them to imagine where that piece of plastic will eventually end up. If the principal permits, walk with the students to the place where the janitor (or more likely, you yourself) will take the piece of plastic for disposal. Let them follow the piece as far as they can, and they can imagine the rest of the journey of that little weapon of mass destruction. We do not need a textbook to teach what is crucial to the survival of the human race.

I have watched an elementary school teacher use a glass of water to teach the water cycle (“where does the water go if we pour it on the floor?”). I have watched a kindergarten teacher read a storybook (not a textbook) in class with such dramatic effect that her pupils jumped up at the end of the reading to ask questions that would floor a literary critic.

Once we start thinking of creative ways to teach without using textbooks, we can see that the lack of textbooks in our public elementary schools is exaggerated. We do not need textbooks for every subject, and in those learning areas where we need them, we do not need them every day. That means fewer, thinner, and cheaper textbooks. (The Philippine Star, 12 January 2006)

Biography sections of libraries and bookstores are full of stories about successful individuals who never owned books when they were children. Instead, they walked to public libraries and learned the wisdom of the ages through borrowed books. F. Sionil Jose and Bienvenido N. Santos – my two literary fathers – come immediately to mind.

I myself never had the money to buy books until I went to graduate school in the United States. Even in Maryland, however, I only got my own copies of books by pretending to examine them for my classes. Those were the days when publishers had not yet figured out that most examination copies never actually resulted in classroom adoptions and sales.

I built my own library of American books by going to every garage sale in the neighborhood, combing through the used books section of the university bookstore, and patronizing second-hand book stores every time I traveled out of Maryland. Those were the days when I could get a first edition of William Faulkner (the Modern Library one!) for a mere 25 cents in a flea market.

Before I went to America, I simply borrowed books from school libraries. My parents could afford only to pay my daily meals at U.P.; at that time, believe it or not, you could get a good meal for less than 30 centavos. (Well, it was some time ago!) I had to walk one kilometer to catch the bus (no point paying a jeepney driver for a walk that I needed for my health anyway). I even remember walking several times from Avenida Rizal to my home then near Santo Domingo Church in Quezon City, because I did not have enough money for the jeepney fare, Avenida being out of my parent-approved house-to-school route.

Avenida Rizal was crucial to my education. It was in the original National Book Store there that I read one or two books a day, standing up! This was long before Powerbooks and other bookstores realized that book lovers want to sit down while “browsing,” actually reading, their books. I would pretend to put back the book I was reading on the shelves when a sales attendant would come near, then pick up the book again to finish it.

Of course, when I grew up, just like Imelda Marcos who bought shoes galore to make up for her lack of shoes as a child, I bought books with a vengeance. I was able to collect several thousand volumes of books. I donated all the non-Philippine books to the De La Salle University Library. I can still say with pride, especially after the Thomas Jefferson Library American literature collection was dismantled, that my collection of American literature is the largest in the country.

I sold my Philippine books (more than six thousand volumes) for a token fee to the library of De La Salle University Dasmariñas. I originally wanted to sell the collection to a foreign buyer that would have paid me enough to last me my lifetime, but loyalty to the Brothers got the better of me.

The point of this autobiographical exercise is to point out that it is not necessary to own a book in order to learn from it. Why, then, I ask again, is it necessary for every single pupil in every single public elementary or high school to have his or her own textbook?

The arithmetic is simple: if the 50 pupils in a class (I take the number to make the arithmetic easy) each had a textbook, a school would spend 50 times the price of the textbook. If that same textbook had only, say, 10 copies in the school library, every student would have access to a copy at least once every 5 turns, a turn being defined as a chance for one student to take home one copy of the book.

If each student is given the chance to take home a copy once a week (which is 5 days or 5 turns), each student would be able to finish whatever exercises are in the textbook by the end of the week. All a teacher has to do is to schedule assignments properly, such that assignments are handed in only once a week, enough time for every student to have had a chance to take home a textbook.

In short, instead of buying 50 copies of a textbook, a school has to buy only 10. What a great way to save money for the government!

The key is to stop the practice of using a textbook inside the classroom. Textbooks should be sources of information or exercises for homework, not for seatwork. Once we realize that a teacher has a lot more to do inside a classroom than rehash information already printed in a textbook, we start looking at printed instructional materials as supplementary, rather than crucial aids to learning.

In this age of easy access to information through any corner internet café, there is no need for textbooks to include everything that is to know about any particular subject. All a textbook should really have are structured exercises aimed at helping a student learn more deeply what has already been taught inside the classroom.

There are two things I’m driving at, then: one is that teachers must start teaching without textbooks on hand inside the classroom, and the other is that schools must start having working libraries that efficiently allow students to take out textbooks (and other books, of course). (The Philippine Star, 19 January 2006)