The Philippine Commission on Higher Education

Here are some things from Philippine law and the Web that may be of interest:

From Republic Act No. 7722, “An Act Creating the Commission on Higher Education,” the 1994 law that created and continues to govern CHED:

“SEC. 4. Composition of the Commission. - The Commission shall be composed of five (5) full-time members. During the transition period, which begins upon approval of this Act, the president may appoint the Secretary of Education, Culture and Sports as ex-officio chairman of the Commission for a maximum period of one (1) year. Thereafter, the President shall appoint a Chairman of the Commission and four (4) commissioners, who shall be holders of earned doctorate(s), who have been actively engaged in higher education for at least ten (10) years, and must not have been candidates for elective positions in the elections immediately preceding their appointment. They shall be academicians known for their high degree of professionalism and integrity who have distinguished themselves as authorities in their chosen fields of learning. The members of the Commission shall belong to different academic specializations.” (italics mine)

From the curriculum vitae of Romulo Neri, posted on the official website of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA):

“Academic Background: MBA, Graduate School of Management, University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), Major in Finance and International Management (1977-1979); BSBA, Major in Marketing, University of the Philippines (1966-1970).” No mention of an earned doctorate.

From a 2004 report on the website of the World Bank:

“The Estrada administration formally established the National Coordinating Council on Education (NCCE) through Executive Order No. 273, immediately following the PCER launching in 2000. The NCCE was supposed to fill up the policy vacuum resulting from the trifocalization of the education sector and was designed to coordinate and harmonize the cross-cutting education issues, formulate sectoral policies and priorities, and decide on the rational allocation of resources across different parts of the education system. To date, however, the NCCE remains inoperative. The formal convening of the body and constitution of its high-powered Technical Secretariat was not considered a priority of its first rotating Chair. Most of the actual coordination among education sub-sectors have occurred informally. No formal decisions binding on the whole education sector are made and issues are resolved by consensus or compromise, often independently of considerations of existing policy.

“Funding for the NCCE was supposed to be sourced from the General Appropriations Act but because of its non-operationalization, funding in subsequent years was not pursued. Consequently, the planning of the entire sector continues to be fragmented and the conduct of initiatives and resolution of issues that cut across the three levels are not undertaken efficiently. The determination of the growth rates of the appropriation for each level over a time period remains contentious because of the lack of agreed developmental bases for subsectoral allocation. As originally envisioned, one of the tasks of the NCCE was to convene the first National Congress on the State of Philippine Education by 2001 to assess the fulfillment of all program and policy recommendations of the EDCOM and PCER.

“The Professional Regulation Commission, which administers and enforces the regulatory policies of the national government, including the maintenance of professional standards, has not been modified or improved. Little progress has been made in terms of the accreditation system, given the complexity of the task due to the huge number and variety of existing higher education programs and institutions. Equivalency, as a cross-cutting issue, requires the participation of different agencies. So far, there is only one agreement for accreditation criteria and guidelines for technical training on industrial skills (except for information and communication technology). Thus, the goal of establishing mechanisms and regulations to facilitate the move from post-basic education and training to university education is far from complete.

“The establishment of the National Education Evaluation and Testing Service (NEETS), as recommended in the PESS and PCER reports, has not progressed in view of the non-operationalization of the NCCE. Considerable technical work has been undertaken on the planning for improved student assessment systems.”

From the website of CHED, we learn that, currently, CHED has a Board of Advisers, with the DepEd Secretary as Chair and the NEDA Director-General as Co-Chair. In other words, Neri has been advising CHED all these years anyway and need not be illegally appointed to chair it.

Now comes Executive Order 632, abolishing the NCCE and providing for the appointment of an “Education Czar.”

And you thought the Harry Potter saga was the ultimate in the incredible! (The Philippine Star, 2 August 2007)

The question going around the heads of all Philippine educators nowadays is this: how could she do it?

How could President Gloria Arroyo break the law so blatantly? How could she appoint, contrary to RA 7722, a non-doctorate holder to head CHED?

RA 7722 says, clearly and unequivocally, that the CHED commissioners should be “holders of earned doctorate(s), who have been actively engaged in higher education for at least ten (10) years, and … shall be academicians known for their high degree of professionalism and integrity who have distinguished themselves as authorities in their chosen fields of learning.”

Whether one is called a commissioner or an officer-in-charge is irrelevant. One cannot be in CHED without a doctorate, ten years’ experience, and international stature in a field of learning.

Far be it from me to take it upon myself to defend Arroyo, since she has plenty of media people to explain her actions to the citizens. In this particular case, however, it is pretty clear that she did not intend to break the law.

Arroyo thought that Romulo Neri had a doctorate!

To his credit, Neri himself has never pretended to have a doctorate. He has been in academe long enough to know that a doctorate is the minimum qualification for being an academician. (That word, by the way, is not a synonym of academic, since the latter refers to anyone teaching at the university level.) No one is questioning his ability to cut through the many problems of higher education. That is not the issue.

The issue is whether we are still a country of laws or not. The law is the law. If there is anyone that should be upholding the law, it should be the President of the Republic of the Philippines.

A doctorate holder herself, Arroyo fortunately has a way out of this mess. She can now claim that she honestly did not know that Neri is not qualified by law to be in CHED. As COCOPEA has recently stated, she should now choose someone else to be her point person in CHED.

COORDINATING DEPED, CHED, AND TESDA: Executive Order 632, entitled “Amending Executive Order No. 273 (series of 2000) and Mandating a Presidential Assistant to Assess, Plan and Monitor the Entire Educational System,” gives former CHED Commissioner Dr. Mona Dumlao-Valisno the following functions formerly assigned to the National Coordinating Council for Education: “to serve as the [point person] for trans-subsectoral consultations on cross-cutting policies and programs; to harmonize goals and objectives for the entire education system and to dovetail them to national development plans; to review existing and proposed programs and projects for tighter inter-subsector coordination; to set priorities for the education system and recommend corresponding financial requirements; to pursue and monitor implementation of the reforms proposed by the PCER; to establish, oversee and monitor the implementation of the National Educational Evaluation and Testing System and its operations; to designate and provide guidelines for Philippine representatives in international and national conferences/meetings with cross-cutting themes or concerns in education; and to convene a biennial National Congress on Education for the purpose of assessing, updating/upgrading and strengthening of the educational system and its components.”

I wish her well in this new challenge. She will need all her experience in the Department of Education and CHED to fulfil this mandate. As she herself requested me to do, I will write on each of the crucial tasks given to her. (The Philippine Star, 16 August 2007)

The reason the EDCOM-created National Coordinating Council for Education (NCCE) never got off the ground is something all managers know: if everyone is in charge, nobody is in charge. By making CHED, DepEd, and TESDA equal partners in education, the NCCE failed to take into account the hierarchical (some say, dictatorial) nature of Philippine government entities. Government people always look to the boss for directions.

For instance, when he was DepEd Secretary, Raul Roco convened a large group of school principals and told them pointblank, “I am now empowering you. You can decide on your own about matters that have to do with your teachers and your school buildings.” The principals then asked him in return, “Sir, can you put that down in a memo?”

Roco then went on to tell one of his favorite stories about the prisoner who had been in handcuffs while being taken to court. In court, the judge commanded the guards to remove the handcuffs. Even without the handcuffs, the prisoner kept his hands together, as though they were still in handcuffs.

The first function given to Presidential Assistant Mona Dumlao-Valisno by Executive Order 632 is “to serve as the [point person] for trans-subsectoral consultations on cross-cutting policies and programs.” Although management theorists might question how a staff function can have line authority, the order from President Arroyo is clear: Valisno can now, with Arroyo’s blessing, order CHED, DepEd, and TESDA around.

That is the only way to ensure that the three government bodies get their act together. Someone has to be on top, and since the President herself has no time to look personally into education, she has delegated her power to her Presidential Assistant for Education. (That, by the way, neatly solves the management issue of staff and line functions.)

Remember the title of Executive Order 632: “Mandating a Presidential Assistant to Assess, Plan and Monitor the Entire Educational System.” The executive order is the first step towards returning to the good old days when only one person was on top of the educational system. Since it is about time anyway to review EDCOM, Congress must now take the cue and see if trifocalization (as it is called in Philippine English), which seemed like a good idea at the time, has outlived its usefulness. (The Philippine Star, 23 August 2007)

To think that there is a quick fix to our educational problems is sheer insanity. The problems are so enormous that six years, let alone six months, will not be enough to put things in order.

The second of eight functions recently assigned through Executive Order 632 by President Arroyo to Presidential Assistant Mona Dumlao-Valisno, for example, is this: “to harmonize goals and objectives for the entire education system and to dovetail them to national development plans.”

Let us take just one area that needs harmonization – the curriculum. When DepEd changed the Basic Education Curriculum (BEC) in 2001, CHED went into denial.

Take just one subject area for which I was responsible – literature. In 1996, when I was with CHED’s Technical Panel for Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communication, I was able, together with my colleagues Edna Zapanta-Manlapaz and Cynthia Bautista, to convince then acting CHED Chair Valisno to revise the General Education Curriculum (GEC). I wrote the syllabi for the two required literature courses (Literatures of the Philippines and Literatures of the World). At that time, the syllabi were revolutionary, because most schools were teaching the theoretically flawed Philippine Literature in English and Panitikang Pilipino.
In 2001, I became Undersecretary for Programs and Projects at DepEd. I was placed in charge of revising the BEC. After much consultation with various stakeholders, the curriculum experts at DepEd added literary theory to the high school curriculum. This was not a new idea, since as early as 1987, literary criticism (an elementary form of literary theory) had already been introduced into the high school curriculum.

The two college courses thus became misplaced, even redundant, since according to both literary theory and educational practice, survey courses should be taken before and not after literary theory. In fact, survey courses on Philippine, Afro-Asian, Anglo-American, and World literatures had been in the high school curriculum for several years before the BEC revision.

When I quit DepEd and returned to CHED’s Technical Panel in 2002, I tried to convince CHED to revise the GEC to upgrade or reconceptualize the two literature courses, because they were mere repetitions of the high school subjects. CHED stonewalled. Although I was placed in charge of getting the heads of different Technical Panels together to revise the GEC, nothing came out of our meetings, not because we disagreed with each other, but because CHED’s ridiculous bureaucracy worked and still works against rational change.

That is just literature. Think of algebra. High school students take two years of algebra (sometimes three, if they take Advanced Algebra as an elective in Fourth Year). College students today are treated as though they never took algebra before in their lives. In many cases, the college course is even more elementary than the ones in high school!

Aside from the curriculum, there are the thorny issues of the medium of instruction, the distinction between education and training (are we preparing Filipinos to be telephone operators or entrepreneurs?), the role of the humanities in a technology-driven global economy, the role of human teachers in the increasingly digital classroom, the nature of ladderized courses, aptitude streaming, and of course, the mismatch between what employers demand and what schools supply.

Valisno will have her hands full just getting CHED to admit that DepEd is doing its job well and that TESDA is just as legitimate an educational body as it is! On the other hand, to get DepEd to stop talking about CHED matters (why is DepEd doing an aptitude exam when its responsibility stops after the student graduates from high school?) and TESDA to stop telling CHED what to do (how can a non-academically-inclined body tell scholars how to design a ladderized program?) will be just as difficult a task for Valisno! Frankly, this looks like Mission Impossible or an Ocean caper, but then, those movies did not end so badly, so who knows? After all, as every literature teacher knows, life always follows art. (The Philippine Star, 30 August 2007)

I received quite a number of reactions to my column about what I called the “illegal” posting of Romulo Neri at the Commission on Higher Education (CHED).

Many readers asked me why I was insisting on someone with an earned doctorate heading CHED, whether as Officer-in-Charge or Chair. Let me clarify that I am not the one insisting on the doctorate requirement. It is R.A. 7722, the law that created CHED, that says, very clearly, that “the President shall appoint a Chairman of the Commission and four (4) commissioners, who shall be holders of earned doctorate(s) [and] who have been actively engaged in higher education for at least ten (10) years.”

There are no ifs and buts about this. Whoever heads CHED must have an earned doctorate. Neri does not have an earned doctorate. Therefore, he cannot legally head CHED, whether we call him an OIC or a Chair. Therefore, his appointment is illegal.

If anyone wants to challenge this reading of the law, go to the nearest court and file a case. I may not be a lawyer (it’s my namesake that is), but I’ll bet anything that the appointment will be declared null and void ab initio. I will go further than this and say that, since the appointment is null and void, Neri is NOT the head of CHED and anything he does is not legally binding.

The issue is not whether you need a doctorate to head CHED. The law says that you do. You may not like what the law says, but it IS the law.

Some readers are alarmed at the restructuring that Neri is doing at CHED. His mandate, publicly announced by Malacañang, is merely to push the ladderized program that CHED had been rejecting, not to appoint or remove officials, especially career or CESO ones. I have unsolicited advice for those being eased out of their positions by the illegal “head.” Go to court! Since this is a question of law, only the courts can help you now.

A couple of readers asked why I am being so hard on Neri when another commissioner also has not complied with the law. Apparently, one commissioner has “not been engaged in higher education for at least ten years.” If that is true, then that commissioner should certainly be kicked out of there as fast as Neri.

One of the readers pointed out that this particular commissioner filed a curriculum vitae with CHED that did not show any experience in higher education, but subsequently obtained a certification for some university or other that she had! Now, that’s not my cup of tea, but if someone wants to be a detective, the commissioner’s curriculum vitae is a public document and can be accessed by anyone.

Several readers agreed with me that Neri should not be in CHED, but went further than I did. They said that the President has a penchant for not complying with the law. Again, that is not my cup of tea. I still believe that, in the case of Neri, she was misinformed by her staff.

In any case, Neri is not an “education czar” in charge of the entire educational system. As I have been painstakingly detailing these past few weeks, the one in charge is President Gloria Arroyo herself, and she has delegated her authority through E.O. 632 to Presidential Assistant for Education Mona Dumlao-Valisno.

Fortunately, Valisno is not alone in this gigantic task of getting everybody in education to work together. President Arroyo has just formed a Presidential Task Force on Education (consisting of the DepEd Secretary, the CHED Chair, the TESDA Chair, the Presidential Assistant for Education, and five representatives from the private sector). I say fortunately, because more heads are better than one, but on the other hand, too many cooks may spoil the broth. (This is one reason we always tell students not to use clichés; clichés tend to contradict each other!) (The Philippine Star, 6 September 2007)

Alejandro "Anding" Roces

I gave this lecture in honor of Philippine National Artist Alejandro "Anding" Roces on 2 September 2007 as part of the Pistang Panitik 2007 at the 28th Manila International Book Fair at the World Trade Center in Pasay City, Metro Manila, Philippines.

“You know you are a Filipino if,” goes a popular email posting, not to mention a bestselling book. You know you are a Filipino if, after having told a joke and everyone has laughed, you tell the joke again. And again. And again. That is the Filipino way, and that is the way I shall handle this afternoon’s lecture on a National Artist. I’ve delivered this lecture before, in various ways and on different occasions, and to some of the same listeners, but I hope that, like every Philippine joke, rumor, or truth, it bears repeating.

We might expect Alejandro Reyes Roces – who once headed the country’s Department of Education (its largest bureaucracy with the biggest share of the national budget), who has won a host of literary and diplomatic awards (such as the 1997 SEAWRITE Award from Thailand, and various decorations from China, Germany, Indonesia, Malagasy, Mexico, and Spain), who has written the definitive scholarly treatise on the unique Filipino phenomenon called the fiesta (which, by the way, will have a sequel soon), who put his life on the line as a guerrilla during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, and who ran or still runs huge business corporations – we might expect him to be so serious no smile would ever cross his face or those of his admirers. But, no, upon reading his stories, we discover that Roces is one of those rare individuals to which the immortal opening line of the novel Scaramouche applies: “He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”

Roces is one of the very few Filipino writers that have tried to inject humor into their stories. In fact, in a Roces story, humor forms the core, the raison d’etre of the story. The incredible thing is that the humor in his stories stems from real life. Where other writers might distort reality to make it less serious, Roces remains faithful to distorted reality.

Roces is undoubtedly the country’s best, some even say the only, writer of comic short stories. From the widely anthologized “My Brother’s Peculiar Chicken” to the more extended narratives in his books of short stories, Roces has found a novel way to approach the Filipino character. Full of witty lines, as well as accurate historical and ethnographic detail, particularly with regards to cockfighting, his stories paint a portrait of the Filipino as a noble person endowed with innate intelligence, patience, and compassion. In his stories, the Filipino steadfastly seeks the truth and hungers for justice.

Readers of his stories should not be lulled into a false sense of “I can write this, too!” The reason that there are hundreds of Filipino writers that are, as the current uncomplimentary words put it, “grim and determined” and hardly any that try to make their readers smile and laugh is that it is very, very difficult to write a humorous story. After all, it takes a lot more effort to crack a joke than to rage against the dying of the democratic, patriotic, gender, or linguistic light. In fact, it can be said that small minds take everything seriously, but great minds think everything is a joke. Only the intelligent can appreciate humor. Even among those that smile, the ordinary laugh at others, but the truly gifted laugh at themselves.

Comedy is such a serious business that the highly intelligent Aristotle, who could dash off an entire treatise on tragedy in no time flat, could not even finish a short essay on comedy. His followers give the lame excuse that his treatise on comedy has been lost, even if all the rest of his writings have been found. The truth is that even one of the most brilliant philosophers of all time found comedy much too profound to understand. Aristotle could understand everything that existed during his time, but not comedy.

We should not read Roces’s stories, therefore, only in order to have a good time, although that would already be a major accomplishment, considering the seriousness of our country’s situation yesterday, today, and most probably tomorrow. We should read his stories also in order to understand what Filipinos are really like.

For example, we should be able to see ourselves in the ever-optimistic Kiko, who will not allow reality to come between himself and his dream of winning. Or we might see ourselves in his brother Andres, who keeps failing to see that his search for truth has indeed uncovered (shall we say created?) the truth. Or we might be able to recognize many of the big people in small roles, that in a musical would merely form part of the chorus or, as T. S. Eliot might put it, would not be Prince Hamlet.

Speaking of musicals, most of Roces’s stories, taken as a whole, form a continuous plot with discernible themes; in other words, his stories seem naturally to beg to be written into a musical play. And indeed a number of them have been woven together for the musical Something to Crow About, which was successfully premiered to an international audience during the 31st UNESCO-International Theatre Institute’s Theatre Olympics of the Nations in May 2006 and which played to enthusiastic and appreciative audiences in June 2007 in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In New York, it played at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, which as most of you know, started what is now known as off-off-Broadway; through La MaMa America got introduced to such playwrights as Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard; such directors as Peter Brook; such actors as Billy Crystal, Robert de Niro, Bette Midler, Nick Nolte, and Al Pacino; and to such plays as Godspell, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, and most recently, Something to Crow About. Whatever the usual crabby suspects say about Roces and his musical, the fact remains that his name and his musical now appear on the same list as those of these famous artists and works.

Hovering between modesty about himself and pride in his work, Roces himself says, with a pronounced gleam in his eyes, when he talks about his stories onstage, that his musical and his stories “make every Filipino one inch taller.” Modesty is one of his virtues as a writer. He himself, in fact, likes to say that, when he was young, his biggest failing was that he was not humble, but when he was finally able to conquer his tendency to boast, he says, in his own words, “Now that I am humble, I am perfect.”

Let us take a moment to talk about the musical. Roces’s stories have effortlessly leaped from the page to the stage. In particular, transformed into the musical are these stories: “My Brother’s Peculiar Chicken,” “Of Cocks and Choreographers,” “The King of Roosters,” “Kiko and the Priest,” and “Kiko Goes to Court.” Roces calls Something to Crow About a sarsuwela rather than a Broadway musical. Although theater purists might argue about that distinction, Roces’s intention is clear: he does not want to be coopted by the Americans by using their language to describe his work. He wants the American audience to say the word sarsuwela, to make them borrow a word from our language. In fact, as those that have seen the American production knows, the musical is very, very Filipino, complete with a fiesta, a love story between a poor boy and a rich girl, in fact, two love stories, since the married couple, despite their familiar Filipino sparring, are also deeply in love, a Flores de Mayo and a Santacruzan, all kinds of folk dances, lots of singing and dancing, and of course, cockfights.

In his stories, his numerous public speeches, and in his innumerable newspaper columns, Roces has always focused on the neglected aspects of the Filipino’s cultural heritage. Ever the champion of Filipino culture, even against the globalizing influence of Broadway and Hollywood, Roces brought to public attention the aesthetics of the country’s fiestas. He was instrumental in popularizing several local fiestas, notably the Moriones and the Ati-Atihan. He personally led the campaign to change the country’s Independence Day from July 4 to June 12. He caused the change of language from English to Filipino in the country’s stamps, currency, and passports. He recovered Jose Rizal’s manuscripts when they were stolen from the National Archives.

His unflinching love of country led him to become a guerrilla during the Second World War, to defy martial law, and to found the major opposition party under the dictatorship. Many people have forgotten that he founded the Laban party that fielded the imprisoned Ninoy Aquino in a doomed senatorial election. Young people who know only Garci should research a little bit to realize that elections in this country have long been a joke, though many of us like to think that, with the elections of February 1986, we changed all that. During the campaign for Ninoy, it was Roces that the crowd waited for, because he cracked jokes all night, all at the expense, of course, of Ferdinand Marcos. Although he imprisoned and killed people that did not like him, Marcos could not imprison and kill Roces, because no one kills the jester, even if, in times of crisis, it is only the jester that tells the truth.

At some point in my life, when I had not yet retired and therefore had much less work than I have now, I planned to write a biography of Roces. I sent my research assistant, Carmencita Pascual, to interview him. Since I am now completely swamped with work, I most likely will never get to write that biography. I want to share with you now passages from Anding that would have been and should be in that biography.

These are Roces’s words:

The house that Rizal describes in the opening chapter of Noli Me Tangere, the house of Kapitan Tiago, is the house of my great grand uncle, Balvino Mauricio. He was implicated in the Cavite Mutiny, along with Gomez, Burgos and Zamora. Gomez, Burgos and Zamora were condemned to death. Balvino Mauricio, along with Pardo de Tavera, the two Basa cousins, and Antonio Regidor were deported to Guam. The house was on a street called Anloague, now called Juan Luna Street. I think they should have retained the old name, but you know how we are here. We don’t respect history, I’m sorry to say.

During liberation, Manila was full of bodies. A doctor would say “Ito, patay na.” Once in a while he would find someone wounded and say, “Ito, ambulansiya.” There was one the doctor listed as “Ito, patay na,” but the man shouted, “Buhay pa ko, buhay pa ko.” The doctor’s aide said, “Ito, marunong pa sa duktor.” I learned a lesson from that. When the doctor tells me I’m already dead, I won’t argue. I will accept it.

During the war I was a teenager. It made me grow up fast. Now I appreciate the war. I’m happy that Manila was the second most destroyed city in the world. That’s when Intramuros was destroyed and that erased a lot of my past.

I still hope to write the Filipino Christmas story. I hope to write great stories on Filipino fiestas, but what I’m trying to finish now is four more stories of my collection, a little series of stories that revolve around cockfighting. [Let me interject here that Roces finished one of those stories for the 1997 edition of his stories, the story entitled “Nine-Nine” (for siyam-siyam). Back to Roces.]

I’m happy because I could not ask anything more from the Lord and I mean that seriously. If I were to die today, I would still be way, way, way ahead, because God has been extremely kind to me. People have betrayed me, but God has never betrayed me. I cannot complain about life and I don’t know how to repay it.

That is why I’m obsessed with the street children. I want to be able to repay that by helping street children. I’ve always done what I could for street children. I work with Father Ben Beltran of Smokey Mountain, a very, very fine person. He could have been the president of the University of San Carlos because of his qualifications, but he chose to be the parish priest of Smokey Mountain and I admire that. Once I saw him say mass on Smokey Mountain and I got the idea like a flash for a poem: “An altar infested with flies / Lord accept this sacrifice.” [Roces is not a poet, but he has written a couple of these short rhyming verses. He has even written his own epitaph. If I can recall it accurately, it goes this way: “Lord, do unto me what I would do unto you, if I were the God of Moses and you were Alejandro Roces.” Back to Roces.]

I feel like Rizal. If I had the proper teachers in Ateneo, I would have become a Jesuit. I’m sorry to say this because I love the Ateneo: I always say that I was not a good student in the Ateneo. I never criticize the Ateneo, but I had the wrong teachers there. What happened is that in the Ateneo the teachers were Irish and they were from very, very poor Irish people who migrated to the United States. They were supposed to be sent to India, but India did not accept them, so they were sent to the Philippines. I think many of them were culture-shocked, because when they went to the Ateneo, they were told, “Your students here are students from the elite; they have maids to dress them up for school, cars to take them to school.” So they thought that all their pupils were just a bunch of spoiled brats. When I was in first year, I was looking forward to be under American Jesuits, because in grade school I had Filipino teachers. When the year began we had to get subscriptions to the Messenger of the Sacred Heart. It was a magazine published in the States. We were nine brothers in school. Obviously my father could not get nine subscriptions, so my father would get one for Hospicio de San Jose, PGH, and so on. In my case, I would ask my Ninang to get my subscription for me. I never had problems from third grade to seventh grade. I would just tell the teacher, “Today is my mother’s birthday, my godmother will come,” and she always came every year. That year I told the Irish Jesuit, “Father, today is my mother’s birthday and my godmother will come to give the subscription money.” This was interrupted by a one-hour lecture! The Irish Jesuit said, “Don’t brag about your mother’s birthday.” Now, my mother’s birthday was just attended by brothers and sisters with my godmother, who happened to be my first cousin. He said, “Don’t brag, we don’t give a damn about your mother’s luxurious birthday. Nobody gives a damn about the birthday of your mother.” After that I was turned off. After first year, you were supposed to go to second year when you began taking Latin. I was transferred to II-D with no Latin. I was in II-D, III-D, and IV-D. They would always tell us that we were placed in section D because there were no leaders in that section. My classmate was Catalino Arevalo, who is now one of the leading Jesuits. If not for that incident I probably would have followed the footsteps of Catalino Arevalo.

I came for a very dominating family. My father had interests in mining. Although I could never figure out fractions (even now), when I graduated from fourth year, my father said, “We need an engineer in the family; you will take up Mining Engineering in Arizona.” I found myself in this engineering school in Arizona. Of course I flunked all my mathematics subjects. They should have thrown me out of the school, but I won the literary contest, so they allowed me to transfer to Literature. Now, isn’t that God’s will?

I was champion boxer in high school in the Ateneo and college in Arizona. Up to now I wake up at five in the morning and walk for one hour every single morning, and I’ve been doing that for about thirty years every morning. How did I become a boxer? We lived in Oroquieta in Zurbaran when I was about six or seven years old. Every time I went out of the house, because we were the only Spanish-speaking family there, everybody would tell me, “Kayo Kastila, kayong pumatay kay Rizal.” So I got into a fight every day. Later on there was a fellow named Enriquez. He became the coach in the Olympics and he saw me. He thought I had very good reflexes so he trained me.

Those words are from Roces himself. Let me now follow his words with some words of my own. As you may already know, I wrote the lyrics of most of the songs in the sarsuwela. As happens in any musical production, lyrics are revised to suit the music and the directorial concept. But since I am speaking now and not the composer nor the director, I will now read some of the lyrics that I wrote for that musical. Some found their way into the off-off-Broadway production, but some did not. Here are some lyrics taken from his short stories. For literary critics, these are technically what are known as “found poems,” that is, poems that use words originally written by another writer. “Found poetry” is one of the many literary types under the general heading “Creative Non-Fiction” or that strange animal that has become, without anyone realizing it, the fifth genre of literature, after poetry, fiction, drama, and essay. Here are some lyrics inspired by the stories of Roces.

History of Cocking

The very first crime was that of Cain
He plotted to get his brother slain
And what was the reason for their fight
They couldn’t decide which cock was right

To Greeks ‘twas alectryomachy
Temistocles wanted victory
He told his men to copy the cocks
Who fought and fought no matter the shocks

The Athenians hailed Temistocles
Cockfights were decreed in ancient Greece
Cockfights were called winged public games
They’re one of the things Plato disclaims

Severus the Emperor of Rome
In planning Britanya’s hecatomb
Forced his soldiers to study the cocks
To learn how to avoid more deadlocks

The French call themselves the Gallic race
Abe Lincoln had such an honest face
They made him referee cock matches
Called him Honest Abe, sang his praises
 
Cockers then were Thomas Jefferson
Everybody and George Washington
When they looked for a U.S. symbol
The cock lost by one vote to the eagle.

Those lyrics did not make it to the stage. The next ones did, but after much revision. This was the original love song, based on Roces’s insisting that it is not love at first sight that is important, but love at first insight:

When I saw her that night
‘Twas not love at first sight
‘Twas not my heart took flight
‘Twas love at first insight

My mind knew it was fate
My body lost its weight
My feelings thought it great
I had found my soul mate

Can a man without a soul
Find a soulmate to extol?
Will my soulmate make me whole
If my soul I can’t control?

Before I turn to dust
To find my soul I must
Give her all of my trust
My soul to her entrust

When the music was composed, it became a duet and had a different meter. So I changed the lyrics to these, sung onstage by the two young lovers Leandro and Luningning. Forgive me if I don’t do justice to the music.

Love at First Insight

LEANDRO:

It’s love
Love not at first sight
It’s love at first insight
It’s love at first insight
You made me see the light

Make me whole
With you I found my soul
A soul that had no goal
And no control

We are one
To me you are the sun
My life has just begun
You are the one

It’s love
Love not at first sight
It’s love at first insight
It’s love at first insight
You made me see the light

LUNINGNING:

We are whole
Together just one soul
Our love at first insight
We’ve seen the light

We are one
This cannot be undone
Our lives have just begun
We both have won

LEANDRO & LUNINGNING:

It’s love
Love not at first sight
It’s love at first insight
It’s love at first insight
We now have seen the light

Here is another love song, again with Leandro, the writer that is really Roces, and Luningning, the dancer that comes from the story about choreographers.

LUNINGNING: Not richer things, Leandro, finer things. Like dancing. Like writing.

LEANDRO: When I write, you are my muse.

LUNINGNING: When I dance, you are my music.

LEANDRO:

You’re my muse when I write
You’re my heavenly light
When the words I can’t find
You enlighten my mind
When I try to create
My soul you liberate
When a poem is my goal
You’re my soul

LUNINGNING:

You’re the music I hear
You’re the one I revere
When I dance you’re the beat
Moving my hands and feet
What I see is your face
While I’m walking in space
When a dance is my goal
You’re my soul

LEANDRO:

There’s nothing more that I need
When it’s my words that you read

LUNINGNING:

It’s music you are to me

LEANDRO & LUNINGNING:

Our art makes us free

INSTRUMENTAL

LEANDRO & LUNINGNING:

You’re the one I adore
I have said this before
You’re my self you’re my goal
You’re my soul

I will shout to the world
All my self is unfurled

{ LEANDRO: When I write you’re the one
{ LUNINGNING: When I dance you’re the one

LEANDRO & LUNINGNING:

Now our lives have begun
We are soulmates my love
We are blessed from above

LEANDRO:

I feel oh so complete

LUNINGNING:

Everytime that we meet

LEANDRO & LUNINGNING:

You’re my soul that is true
I love you

Sadly for me, those lyrics did not make it to the stage, either, but the actors promised me that they would record it for a recording studio. Here is the title song, as I first wrote it:

Something to Crow About

When I wake up in the morning
And I hear the roosters crowing
I imagine they’re announcing
That my woman’s come out shining
Every morning the sun comes out
I have something to crow about

When the sun sets in the evening
I get ready to start dreaming
I imagine we are kissing
Me and she I can’t help loving
Every evening the lights go out
I have something to crow about

But there’s someone else I treasure
Also raises my temp’rature
And believe me I am cocksure
That cockfighting has its allure
As a cocker I’m out-and-out
Cocking’s something to crow about

When I watch the roosters fighting
And the people round them betting
I imagine soldiers training
Cocks can teach them ways of winning
Every morning after a bout
Cocks have something to crow about

With my cock I am a cocker
With my woman I’m a rooster
I love one as much the other
For them both there’s no one better
About this there can be no doubt
My cock’s something to crow about

You can tell we’re Filipino
From the way our souls are aglow
We all wake up with the cockcrow
Ready to work, to play, to go
With a country that’s green throughout
We’ve got something to crow about

These lyrics changed considerably, because the music just did not fit them and the composer wanted to write his own lyrics, although frankly, he had absolutely no command of the English language. So in order not to put up Filipino English to ridicule in the United States, I was forced revise his lyrics and the song eventually became this, a combination of his lyrics and mine:

Something to Crow About

The dawn is breaking
Everybody’s out
The sun is rising
We’ve something to crow about

It’s another day
For the men to play
While the women pray
That’s something to crow
That’s something to crow about

The night is over
There can be no doubt
When we’re together
We’ve something to crow about

It’s another day
Let the children stay
They’ll not go astray
That’s something to crow
That’s something to crow about

Come to the cockfight
Everybody shout
There things are all right
That’s something to crow about

It’s another day
For the cocks to play
While the losers pay
That’s something to crow
That’s something to crow about

The cockfight
The cockfight
The cockfight again

Cockfighting’s heaven
No need to explain
All’s fair and even
That’s something to crow about

It’s another day
We will bet today
Happy come what may
That’s something to crow
That’s something to crow about

Please indulge me for just for one more song. Since the highest tribute a writer can give another writer is to write something for him or her, I did these lyrics for Roces’s birthday. I cannot compose music, so I composed it to one of his favorite tunes, Everything’s Coming Up Roses.

Everything’s Coming Up Roces

You’re Anding! You’re the best!
You will always stand out from the rest!
With your books and your looks,
Anding, everything’s coming up Roces!

What a heart! What a mind!
You’re the friend we are so glad to find.
Greet the folk. Crack a joke.
Anding, everything’s coming up Roces!

Your short stories – oh what laughs they can give!
And your columns – they teach us all how to live!
Here’s a toast! Not a boast!
You, my friend, are just really the most!
You’re so prompt, never late.
We all know you are great.
You’ve made us all so proud of what you are!
Anding, everything’s coming up Roces because you’re the star!

Let’s all stand up, let’s all cheer for the man.
Anding Roces, you made us believe we can!
You’re the one! You have won!
What you did we thought could not be done!
In New York or L.A.
When they all saw your play
They knew that what they saw was all so true!
Anding, everything’s coming up Roces and cock and hen!
Everything’s coming up Roces and what a pen!
Everything’s coming up Roces and once again!
Everything’s coming up Roces for us and for you!

For the privilege of working with him on his musical, for all the good things he has done for me in my career as a writer (since he wrote the letters of recommendation that got me all kinds of grants), for being a friend in need and a friend indeed, and for being the human being that he is, I take my hat off, or I guess my hair off, to our one and only, our comic writer, our patriotic columnist, our fiesta champion, our National Hermano Mayor – Alejandro “Anding” Roces.

National Book Awards 2006

Here are the winners of the National Book Awards for books published in the Philippines in calendar year 2006:

PUBLISHER OF THE YEAR
Anvil Publishing

BEST DESIGN
The Governor-General’s Kitchen: Philippine Culinary Vignettes and Period Recipes, 1521-1935, by Felice Prudente Sta. Maria, designed by Guillermo Ramos. Anvil Publishing.

ALFONSO T. ONGPIN PRIZE FOR BEST BOOK ON ART
Ani: The Life and Art of Hermogena Borja Lungay, Boholano Painter, by Marjorie Evasco. University of Santo Tomas Publishing House.
Brushstrokes from the Heart: ArtPetron, The First Five Years, by Alice G. Guillermo. Petron Corporation.

BANGKO SENTRAL NG PILIPINAS PRIZE FOR BEST BOOK ON BUSINESS, ECONOMICS, OR FINANCE
Coconut: The Philippines’ Money Tree, by Renato M. Labadan. RM Labadan and Associates and University Research and Resource Development.

JUAN C. LAYA PRIZE FOR BEST NOVEL IN A PHILIPPINE LANGUAGE
(H)istoryador(a), by Victor Emmanuel Carmelo D. Nadera Jr. University of the Philippines Press.
Ang Sandali ng mga Mata, by Alvin B. Yapan. Ateneo de Manila University Press.

JUAN C. LAYA PRIZE FOR BEST NOVEL IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Banyaga: A Song of War, by Charlson Ong. Anvil Publishing.
The Jupiter Effect, by Katrina Tuvera. Anvil Publishing.

ANTHOLOGY
The Manila We Knew, edited by Erlinda Enriquez Panlilio. Anvil Publishing.

BIOGRAPHY / AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Beyond the Great Wall: A Family Journal, by Mario I. Miclat. Anvil Publishing.
Kapitan: Geny Lopez and the Making of ABS-CBN, by Raul Rodrigo. ABS-CBN Publishing.
Myself, Elsewhere, by Carmen Guerrero Nakpil. Nakpil Publishing.

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
Bad Kings, by Gilda Cordero Fernando. Anvil Publishing.
The Cat Painter, by Becky Bravo. Adarna House.

COOKBOOKS AND FOOD
The Governor-General’s Kitchen: Philippine Culinary Vignettes and Period Recipes, 1521-1935, by Felice Prudente Sta. Maria. Anvil Publishing.
Potluck, Hidalgo Bonding: A Family Heritage Cookbook, edited by Jaime C. Laya and Adelaida Lim. Anvil.

CULTURAL STUDIES
Kasaysayan at Pag-unlad ng Dulaang Pambata sa Pilipinas, by Arthur P. Casanova. UST Publishing House.
Treading Through: 45 Years of Philippine Dance, by Basilio Esteban S. Villaruz. University of the Philippines Press and Philippine Folklife Museum Foundation.

DRAMA
Mga Premyadong Dula, by Lito Casaje. De La Salle University Press.

EDITING
Great Scott!: The New Day William Henry Scott Reader, edited by Bezalie Bautista Uc-Kung. New Day Publishers.

EDUCATION
Daughters True: 100 Years of Scholastican Education, 1906-2006, edited by Neni Sta. Romana-Cruz, Paulynn Paredes Sicam, Karina Africa Bolasco, and Ma. Ceres P. Doyo. St. Scholastica’s College.


ESSAY
Science Solitaire: Essays on Science, Nature, and Becoming Human, by Maria Isabel Garcia. Ateneo de Manila University Press.

FICTION, SHORT
Maligayang Pagdating sa Sitio Catacutan: Mga Kuwentong Kasisindakan, Aklat 1, by Tony Perez. Anvil Publishing. / Malagim ang Gabi sa Sitio Catacutan: Mga Kuwentong Kasisindakan, Aklat 2, by Tony Perez. Anvil Publishing.
Pagluwas, by Zosimo Quibilan Jr. University of the Philippines Press.

FILM
Postmodern Filming of Literature: Sources, Contexts and Adaptations, by Joyce L. Arriola. University of Santo Tomas Publishing House.

POETRY
Apokripos, by Jerry B. Gracio. University of the Philippines Press.
Gagamba sa Uhay: Kalipunan ng mga Haiku, by Rogelio G. Mangahas. C&E Publishing.

SCIENCES
A Guide to Families of Common Flowering Plants in the Philippines, by Irma Remo Castro. University of the Philippines Press.
Introduction to Complementary and Alternative Medicine (C.A.M.), by Victoriano Y. Lim. University of Santo Tomas Publishing House.

SOCIAL SCIENCES
Adios, Patria Adorada: The Filipino as Ilustrado, the Ilustrado as Filipino, by Alfredo Roces. De La Salle University Press.

SPORTS
Pacific Storm: Dispatches on Pacquiao of the Philippines, by Recah Trinidad. Anvil / Inquirer.

THEOLOGY & RELIGION
God Was Not in the Wind: An Evolutionary Understanding of Popular Religion in the Philippines, by Jimmy A. Belita, C.M. Adamson University Press.

TRANSLATION
The Colonial Odyssey of Leyte, 1521-1914, by Manuel Artigas y Cuerva, translated by Rolando O. Borrinaga and Cantius J. Kobak. New Day.
Gagamba sa Uhay: Kalipunan ng mga Haiku, by Rogelio G. Mangahas, translated by Marne L. Kilates. C&E Publishing.

CITATIONS
Ambassador Kristie A. Kenney, for supporting Philippine literature through the publication of an outstanding children’s book

Ayala Foundation – for children’s books on paintings:
Juan Luna: Patriot and Painter, by Carla C. Pacis
The Boy Who Lost a Father and Found the Sun: The Life of Maestro Fernando Amorsolo, by Rene Villanueva
Fernando Zobel: The Man Who Painted Ideas, by Maria Elena Paterno

Filipinas Institute of Translation, for the Sawikaan series:
Sawikaan 2006: Mga Salita ng Taon, edited by Galileo S. Zafra and Roberto T. Añonuevo. University of the Philippines Press, 2007.
Sawikaan 2005: Mga Salita ng Taon, edited by Galileo S. Zafra and Michael M. Coroza. University of the Philippines Press, 2006.
Sawikaan 2004: Mga Salita ng Taon, edited by Galileo S. Zafra and Romulo P. Baquiran Jr. University of the Philippines Press, 2005. [NBA winner, 2005]

Sy Yinchow, for a lifetime of translating Philippine literature into Chinese

On Poison Pen Letters

Since my columns are now online every Thursday on the website of the Philippine Star , I do not have to upload them to this blog. I will now, therefore, use this space to do what bloggers usually do, which is to write whatever comes into their heads.

I usually pay no attention to poison pen letters or white papers, particularly if they are unsigned or signed by a pseudonym. Anyone too cowardly to use her or his own name when attacking another human being is clearly not worth anything, not even an acknowledgement that she or he exists.

Unfortunately, too many people have been forwarding to me an emailed poison pen letter published on the Philippine Daily Inquirer website about the sarsuwela Something to Crow About, which played in Manila, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

I wrote the lyrics of most of the songs of that sarsuwela, which was based on the short stories of Alejandro Roces. Although I usually charge a substantial fee for my writing services (enough to buy lots of books and computer stuff), I did those lyrics gratis et amore, to repay Roces for the many recommendation letters he wrote for me in the past, allowing me to get some grants. I also paid my own way to watch the productions in the United States, as did, I understand, several of those that were in the production.

The poison pen letter, signed “Marianito Parrenas,” called me “a mediocre Phil. Star columnist who is never known to excel in the area [of writing lyrics].” Frankly, I would rather be a mediocre Philippine Star columnist than an idiot hiding behind a pseudonym! By the way, I do not recall anyone in the Philippine Star ever calling any columnist in the Philippine Daily Inquirer mediocre (or any other name). There is a lesson here for students of journalistic ethics and good taste.

I am never one to boast about my credentials, but I suppose this situation calls for an exception. I am in the Hall of Fame of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature for having won a number of prizes in the annual literary contest, where (for those not familiar with Philippine literary competitions) all entries are anonymous and, therefore, are judged solely on the basis of their merits. Several of the awards I won at the Palancas were for playwriting, not only in Filipino (which is my first language), but in English (also my first language, since linguists tell me that I am a “true bilingual”). I also have written quite a number of musical plays, all of which have been produced by various professional and amateur companies. I may, indeed, not have excelled in the area of writing lyrics, but then, that is the anonymous writer’s opinion and thankfully not of those that pay me good money to write lyrics.

Having gotten that off my chest, let me say something about the letter, at least about what I can make of it, since it is so badly written that it is almost impossible to understand, standard English grammar having been thrown out the window by the writer (or more likely, writers). That the letter is ungrammatical is only the least of its faults. It is even more contemptible in its distortion of facts.

For one thing, the letter calls the Chelsea International Hostel, where all the cast and crew stayed, including writer Alejandro Roces and director Cecile Guidote-Alvarez, a “classy hotel.” This reveals more of the quality of life of the letter writer/s than the standards of the hotel, which is classified as a one-star hotel. (Check any hotel reservation website or traveler’s guide, such as tripadvisor.

The letter says that Earthsavers is not registered, when it is a registered Philippine corporation. Anyone that has ever applied for funding from an international funding agency knows that legal incorporation is required to get anything. As the letter itself admits, Earthsavers has been getting foreign grants, not least because it has been designated by UNESCO as “UNESCO Artists for Peace.”

As anyone that knows anything knows, if someone lies in a small thing, she or he is obviously also lying about big things.

So, whoever you are, “Marianito Parrenas,” stop trying to get out of the gutter where you belong, because that is as classy a place as you will ever get to.

Scared in New York

It should have been a perfect night. The last two performances last June 24, Sunday, of Philippine National Artist Alejandro Roces’s Something to Crow About at the famous La Mama Experimental Theater Club in New York City went very well, and I enjoyed taking my curtain calls for having written the lyrics of fifteen of the nineteen songs.

My relatives in New York had warned me not to take the train to my hotel after dark. I had checked in at the Holiday Inn near LaGuardia Airport, partly because it offered a free airport hotel shuttle and partly because I was a member of the frequent guest club of the hotel chain. The hotel itself was in a peaceful block, but the walk to or from the train station more than a mile away would take me through a street not exactly known for being hospitable to strangers.

My head was also full of the news that day that New York City had 3,612 “unidentified human remains” as of 2004, with the number growing every year by the hundreds. Since I loved my name, I was in no mood to be named a John Doe after having been murdered in New York City and robbed of all my identification cards.

Since the celebration after the last show lasted until almost midnight, I had no choice but to take a taxi from Manhattan to Queens, a ride of about thirty minutes, usually costing about $25 ($40 if it’s a hotel car), not too much to pay for remaining alive.

I gave the taxi driver the address of the hotel, told him it was two blocks from Shea Stadium (where the Mets had won a game the night before), and unfortunately did what I usually do when I get on a moving car – I fell asleep from exhaustion.

I woke up in time to see the taxi come close to Shea Stadium and my hotel. I told the driver, “That’s where it is.” Suddenly, he stepped on the gas and drove away from the hotel! I started to shout to him that we had passed the hotel and he should turn back. He completely ignored me and just kept on driving.

We must have been more than twenty miles past the hotel when he finally stopped on a dark street. I said to myself that this was it. I was indeed fated to become a John Doe. I did not want to get out of the car, because the whole neighborhood was deserted and I preferred to battle a single taxi driver than a gang on the street.

The driver claimed to have gotten lost. He hailed the only other car on the road. The driver of the other car got down. My driver asked the other driver where Holiday Inn was. (Of course, there are several Holiday Inns in New York!) The other driver said there was a hotel down the road and I could stay there if I wanted to. This was getting to be really ridiculous, if only I were not so scared.

I asked the other driver where Shea Stadium was. He claimed that he had never heard of it. I asked him where the Mets played baseball. He claimed that he had never heard of the Mets either. He had heard of baseball, but did not know what it had to do with our being on a deserted road in the middle of the night. Since I happen to have been born and bred in Manila, I knew that this was all for show. Imagine a New Yorker never having heard of the Mets?

Since I may have looked less like a tourist because I knew the Mets and perhaps because they probably had a stereotype of Asians as kungfu masters, the other driver got back into his car and my driver sped away. This time I told him exactly where to go, even if I had no idea where we were going. I just kept telling him to turn this way and that, more or less in the general direction of the hotel. I knew that, if we somehow got on a main road, we would sooner or later see Shea Stadium.

Finally, in desperation, I told him to go to LaGuardia Airport. Actually, I should have thought of that sooner, because the hotel was just five minutes from the airport. We got to the airport and I showed him the way to the hotel. We got to the street where the hotel was located. Incredibly, we passed the hotel again at top speed! Fortunately for me, a car cut into our lane and my driver was forced to slow down. That gave me the opportunity to really bawl him out, since I had my hand on the door handle and now could really literally just jump out.

The meter showed $45. He said I could take five dollars off because he got lost. Since the hotel car rate was $40 anyway, I paid him $40, even if it was only a yellow cab. I was not going to spend another minute in the car looking for smaller bills.

I went at once to the hotel receptionists and asked them how to call the police. The clerks said that the driver, if he had indeed gotten lost, was supposed to have called his dispatcher. They told me to go to the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission website and to file a complaint. I did that immediately when I got to my room. (Holiday Inn offers free internet access in rooms.) I had, after all, been technically kidnapped, since I was held in the taxi against my will.

Unfortunately, the website said that “in order for disciplinary charges to be brought against a licensee, you must attend a hearing.” Since I was only visiting New York, I could not stay for the hearing. I guess the taxi driver got off scot-free. On the other hand, I got off injury-free, with my name not changed to John Doe. I suppose I should be grateful.

(First published in The Philippine Star, 28 June 2007.)

How to Bring Up Scholars

Much has already been written about Magaling ang Pinoy!: How and Why Filipino Public School Students Achieve, Ateneo’s Filipino Family Best Practices Study in Marikina and Bulacan Public Schools, written by Queena N. Lee-Chua, Ma. Isabel Sison-Dionisio, and Nerisa C. Fernandez, published in 2007 by the Office of Research and Publications of the Loyola Schools of Ateneo de Manila University.

There is no need to summarize the results of the study conducted by the writers. In any case, the book is available from bookstores, as well as from the Ateneo itself.

What I want to do now is to take the results a step further. What can the Department of Education (DepEd) and the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) do to ensure that the pioneering research project does not merely gain applause but actually will affect the lives of the millions of children going to school this year and the next?

The book talks about things that parents can do to help their children achieve their full potential. It does not really talk about what schools can do to do the same thing, though the transition from home to school is implied by many of the chapters in the book.

Let us take some random insights gained by the writers and translate them into doable school projects.

The first chapter talks about the value of discipline in the home. One example says it all: “No one (among one family’s children) has ever violated the 6 pm rule because the children know that Mama means what she says. If they are ever late, they will have to sleep outside the house.”

I suggest that teachers at whatever level – elementary, high school, college, or even graduate school – simply lock the doors of their classrooms when the bell rings and not allow latecomers in. That should instil punctuality in no time flat.

The second chapter talks about setting goals. Many of the parents involved in the study proactively discourage their children from getting married early, obviously because most of them married early and therefore remained poor the rest of their lives.

I suggest that schools make it a policy, clearly spelled out in brochures and manuals, to expel any student that gets married or pregnant. It is not a matter of morality, but a matter of motivation. If students know that they will never be able to finish their education if they have sex early, they will refrain from sex. The sex drive may be strong, but the drive for self-preservation is stronger.

The third chapter, focusing on relying on oneself, identifies favoritism on the part of teachers as a key disincentive for students.

I suggest that schools remove the possibility of favoritism by adopting the British model of external examiners. If the final grade of a student will be given by someone else, a teacher has no reason to play favorites or engage in harassment (sexual, verbal, racist, or otherwise).

The fourth chapter talks about strengthening family bonds. Most schools already have parent associations in place, but we could involve parents not only in raising extra funds, but in designing the curriculum.

I suggest that parents (even of college students) should be asked to sit in curriculum committees, hiring boards, boards of trustees, and the like. On a micro level, parents should be regularly called in to discuss the progress of their children.

The fifth chapter on making the home fit for learning also has implications for teachers. Teachers should formulate homework that involves parents. A simple example on the elementary level is the construction of a genealogy of the family of a student. On the higher levels, an oral history project could start with interviewing one’s parents and grandparents.

The book is clearly meant for parents that want their children to excel in school. The lessons learned by the writers, however, can teach teachers a thing or two.

The researchers (all highly educated) obviously know educational theory. They wisely refrain from using academic jargon in this book meant for a non-specialist reader. Anyone that has studied pedagogy, however, will recognize the principles laid down by the book.

Discipline in the home or in the classroom is nothing else but the routine necessary for any learning to take place. Setting goals refers to the objectives of any course of study or even of action. Self-reliance is an attack on the Filipino value of bahala na (“God will provide”). Family involvement in learning makes positive use of the family, which to Filipinos is often above country or even God (not “God, Country, and Family” but the other way around). Creating a home environment conducive to learning is part of the so-called Whole School Approach, which DepEd has been pushing in the past few years.
Like every other book of any value, Magaling ang Pinoy does not tell us anything new, but merely reminds us of what we know deep down inside us to be true.

(First published in The Philippine Star, 14 June 2007)

More Questions from Teachers

During my public lectures I usually announce my cellphone number. This way, the audience is able to send me questions even as I lecture. I am thus able to incorporate the answers to the questions into the lectures themselves. This practice has the added advantage of encouraging microphone-shy listeners to interact with me. After I leave the lecture hall, I also make it a practice to text back those with questions unanswered due to lack of time.

Here are some questions raised in the lectures I gave to teachers in various conferences during the summer. I have, as I did in previous columns of this nature, translated the text language into newspaper English.

Q: You made mention of plagiarism [cut-and-pasted from the Web]. Can you discuss it briefly? For example, how can we identify plagiarized material?

A: You can get anti-plagiarism software (such as WCopyfind, Moss, Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program, or Eve 2), some free, some expensive.

Q: To check if a student output is plagiarized, google a suspected phrase and the source will be found.

A: Not all the time. In fact, even if Google lists the suspected phrase, it may be on the 300th screen page or the 300,000th entry, and you will spend too much time finding it.

Q: What is your comment re: viruses on the web, downtime, and other limitations of technology for teaching?

A: For viruses, just subscribe to one of the standard anti-virus services (McAfee, Norton, and so on). As for downtime, waiting a couple of minutes for something to download from the Web is still preferable to spending a couple of hours typing something, having it photocopied, collating the pages, and distributing it to students. The real limitation to the use of technology for teaching is the teacher. If the teacher is a digital immigrant, we have a real problem, since most, if not all, of our students are digital natives.

Q: What happens to the bonding of students and teachers when everything will be communicated through technological tools, such as the Internet?

A: Not everything can be communicated through the Internet. For example, you cannot teach the difference between the adjectives sweet and sour unless the student eats something sweet and something sour. You cannot teach a student how to swim unless there’s a swimming pool or river nearby. You cannot even teach literature just through technology: no one can understand a simple sentence like Shakespeare’s “parting is such sweet sorrow” without having parted with a loved one.
Never fear that teachers will be superfluous. Teachers will always be needed to guide and mentor students. In fact, even in pure online courses (where students never meet their teachers in a physical classroom), teachers design the courses and answer the questions posed on websites.

Of course, the bonding between teachers and students diminishes with the use of technology. If nothing else, there is less time for teachers and students to talk to each other, because much classroom time is taken up fixing cables and things of that sort. As with everything else, you must weigh the advantages against the disadvantages of using technology to teach and to learn.

Q: Is the teacher in transformative learning similar to a guidance counselor?

A: Similar, yes, but not identical. Both the transformative teacher and the guidance counselor are trained to listen to students and not to impose their own views on students. But the teacher has a duty to help the student fulfill prescribed minimum learning requirements, while the counselor has no predetermined body of knowledge to impart.

The guidance counsellor, faced with a drug dependent student, is duty-bound to try to take the student out of the dependence. Similarly, a transformative teacher, faced with a factual error on the part of a student, has to correct the mistake (for example, you cannot allow a student to grow up convinced that Ferdinand Magellan was Ilocano or that Gabriela Silang was Australian).

What is crucial in transformative education is the wrong attitude of many teachers that they have a monopoly on information. On the other hand, what is wrong with some of those pushing transformative education, however, is that they act precisely like the kind of non-transformative teachers that they detest: they think that they, and only they, know what transformative learning is all about!

The situation in transformative learning today is similar to the situation of Marxism before deconstruction: the older Marxists preached that everything is a product of history and therefore subject to its limitations, except Marxism itself.
Closer to home, what is going on today in transformative education is like what happens when a Filipino says that “Filipinos are lazy, corrupt, and stupid.” Needless to say, the subject of the sentence includes, and therefore refers to, the speaker.

Q: Is chaos theory like Zen? Things will naturally resolve themselves, so we just have to sit back and watch things unfold.

A: Not exactly. Although chaos theory says that we can always find an explanation for what seems to be chaotic, it does not have the acceptance of things as they are that characterizes Zen. Adherents of chaos theory have created the computer, surely an intervention in the flow of nature. Adherents of Zen would rather not disturb the universe.

This question was asked in the context of reforms being undertaken at the Department of Education. Since everything works out in the end, should we just let the natural course of progress catch up with those in charge of the future of our children? Or should we take some deliberate actions to cause change in DepEd?

Chaos theorists would simply point to the inevitability of reform happening in DepEd due to the changes in educational conditions worldwide. For example, when Chinese finally overtakes English as a medium of international business, DepEd will have no choice but to include Chinese as a second language.

Non-chaos theorists, however, are more impatient: since we can see clearly now that China will overtake the United States in economic power at some point in time (maybe within fifty years) and since curricular change occurs only once every ten or so years, should we not start thinking of what we should be doing fifty years from now?

Q: Is technology useful for preschoolers?

A: Absolutely. You will be surprised at the natural aptitude of preschoolers for computers. There are numerous educational software packages meant for very young pupils. Visit, for example, funschool.kaboose.com and softwareforkids.com.

As Rocky Mountain Learning Systems puts it on their website, “Pre-school children are like little sponges. Long before they enter school, most kids are eager to learn. And this is the time to introduce them to [sofware] programs that capitalize on this instinctive desire.”

Q: How can we use the Web to teach Philippine History?

A: Compared to the material available for the histories of other nations, online material on the Philippines is not extensive, but there is enough information for students in Philippine-based websites, as well as in the standard international encylopedia sources, such as Wikipedia.

As of last week, by the way, Wikipedia had 33,132 articles written in Binisayang Sinugboanon (Cebuano), 5,847 articles in Tagalog, 3,076 in Kapampangan, 2,191 articles in Iloko (Ilocano), 2,148 in Winaray (Waray), 260 in Pangasinense (Pangasinan), and one in Chavacano de Zamboanga. The articles are not all about the Philippines, but many of them are.

Q: How can we determine the accuracy of lessons on the Web?

A: Check who wrote the lessons or information. Let us take a simple example.

If you google “Philippine history,” one of the first entries you will get is the entry in Infoplease – “Timeline: Philippines History,” written by David Johnson and Shmuel Ross. If you know your Philippine history, you will know immediately that this entry is full of misinformation (it still believes in “waves of migration,” it calls the Philippine-American war an “insurrection,” that sort of thing). You have to tell students not to believe Infoplease.

Because it is open to corrections from Philippine scholars, Wikipedia is more accurate. The main entry on Philippine history acknowledges that our islands were inhabited by our ancestors as early as 400,000 BC. The entry, however, still identifies the Tabon Woman as the Tabon Man (but then, very few people know that the skeleton dated 50,000 BC found in the Tabon Cave in Palawan was really that of a woman) and even mentions the Datu Kalantiaw Code, a modern hoax (though a subsequent entry calls it fraudulent).

This is clear proof that we need flesh-and-blood teachers in the classroom. If our students relied only on the Web, they will grow up believing in some mistakes and lies. One of the silliest superstitions of our time is the belief that “everything is available on the Web.” That is true, everything is available, including errors and hoaxes.

Q: What’s appropriate for Filipino kids – American shows such as Barney or our own shows? Will foreign shows not affect the custom or upbringing of children and westernize them?

A: We can complain all day and all night about Filipino children watching foreign shows, but they will watch them anyway. The thing to do is to make the best out of the situation. Globalization is here to stay, particularly in the field of media. What we need to teach children is how to view such shows. Even the Pope has come out strongly in favor of media education. Censorship never works. Values education does.

Q: Which is the correct Filipino spelling – the one ordered by the government in 1997 or the one in 2001?

A: This is one of the contentious issues right now in linguistics. The government body tasked with standardizing our national language, the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, apparently wants to go back to Tagalog-based ortography, a clear step backward. If we look at the way languages have developed in other countries (take English, which the British government tried vainly to regulate a couple of centuries ago), however, government has little influence on the way a language grows. Filipino will grow naturally, and its spelling will be determined by usage, not by rules. Just spell a word any which way you want. If you want to be safe, of course, you can always refer to the UP Diksiyonaryong Filipino, which is the only Filipino dictionary we have right now, warts and all.

Q: I am having a hard time teaching literature. What can you suggest as a better strategy to help my students?

A: The teaching of literature is a skill that needs to be learned. There are books and websites on how to teach literature. If you can wait a while for it to be launched late this year, the project I am doing for the Foundation for Upgrading the Standard of Education (FUSE) called “A Telecourse for Students and Teachers of Literature” features forty different tried-and-tested classroom methods of teaching literature to high school students. Doing teaching demonstrations for the project are Metrobank Outstanding Teachers and the outstanding teachers of DepEd NCR.

Q: Would you provide or suggest some technological means to facilitate language learning like Chinese or French?

A: You don’t even have to be on the Web. There are language learning tools in any bookstore, using audio CDs or software. On the Web, there are plenty of sites which help in learning languages. To learn Tagalog, for example, try viloria.com. For Chinese, try mandarintools.com. For French, try bbc.co.uk/languages/french.


[First published in The Philippine Star, 24 and 31 May 2007]

An Offence of Poetry

“Before the invention of written letters,” British satirist Thomas Love Peacock wrote in 1820 in The Four Ages of Poetry, poets were “not only historians but theologians, moralists, and legislators: delivering their oracles ex cathedra, and being indeed often themselves regarded as portions and emanations of divinity: building cities with a song, and leading brutes with a symphony; which are only metaphors for the faculty of leading multitudes by the nose.”

That “iron age,” said Peacock, was followed by the “golden age” of Homer and Sophocles. “The maturity of poetry,” he said, “may be considered the infancy of history.” The “silver age” followed, “the poetry of civilized life,” which to Peacock was “a step towards its extinction” because it was imitative, “thoroughly wearisome, even to the most indefatigable readers of the newest new nothings.”

The silver age gave way to “the second childhood of poetry,” which Peacock labelled the “age of brass.” These four ages of classical poetry were followed by a cycle of four analogous ages, namely, the Dark Ages, the “revival of learning” or what we now call the Renaissance, the silver age of Dryden and Pope, then the decline, represented principally by Wordsworth. Peacock described the poetry of Wordsworth and the Romantics as “remaining studiously ignorant of history, society, and human nature.”

Peacock’s conclusion hit hard: “A poet in our times is a semibarbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward.”

The British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley could not contain himself and had to answer Peacock. Most 20th-century anthologies of literary criticism include Shelley’s 1840 “A Defence of Poetry” and do not include “The Four Ages of Poetry,” thus unwittingly confirming Peacock’s belief that the poet or poet-lover “buries himself like a mole” in “the darkness of antiquated barbarism.”

Shelley defended poetry by retreating into the realm of language and claiming it to be the poet’s. He was then forced to hold two contradictory views: first, that everyone that uses language is a poet, and second, since only a poet uses a language well, that not everyone that uses language is a poet.

“In the infancy of society,” said Shelley, “every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry.” Poets were “not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they [were] the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers. … Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets.”

At the same time, speaking of his own time, Shelley was not willing to grant the title of poet to everybody. He limited the term to a select few, including himself, of course. “Poetry,” he wrote, “is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” Consequently, “a poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men.” Shelley’s last sentence is a famous quotable quote: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Fast forward to our own day, a day when most people on earth were born after 1980, making them what Marc Prensky famously labelled in 2001 as “digital natives,” as opposed to the few of us still alive that are “digital immigrants.” Prensky identified the “singularity” – “the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century” – that has radically changed the human brain itself, not just psychologically but physically. Digital natives, said Prensky, “are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards.”

In a digital age (which we still do not know will be labelled by future historians as iron, gold, silver, or brass), is poetry or literature a digital immigrant?

I take my cue, but not my tone, from Shelley. Because of both feminism and its backlash, I have to expand Shelley’s use of male pronouns to include biological females. His inexcusable use of exclusive or sexist language was deliberate, because he was talking only to his fellow biological males. In contrast, I want to talk to everyone, not just biological males.

Like Shelley, I believe in poetry. Unlike Shelley, I do not believe that we need to defend poetry. Like some though not all team sports coaches, I believe that the best defence is a good offence.

It is true that many poets are still very much fixated in the 20th century, if not earlier. We still see poetry books published, despite the very low sales of poetry books. We still see poets reciting or performing in poetry jams, in small cafés, in school auditoriums, and places like that.

There are, however, poets that have one foot in the 20th and the other in the 21st: they have blogs, but their blogs feature poems that can be printed out and read, the predigital way.

More important, not all poets today still live in the 20th century. Many poets are very much digital natives, or behave like digital natives. As early as the early 1990s, in Singapore, George P. Landow identified the literary trend that we now call hyperliterature. Hyperliterature now has its own organization (the Electronic Literature Organization), its own scholarly apparatus such as bibliographies (see Landow’s National University of Singapore website), its own journals, conferences, courses, jargon, and so on. It has become, in the predigital sense, established.

I am not aware of any study of the biological age of digital poets. It may or may not be true that hyperpoets or hyperwriters were all born after 1980, that magic year when, according to Prensky, everything changed, in the same way that “on or about December 1910,” as British novelist Virginia Woolf wrote in the 1924 essay “Character in Fiction,” “human character changed.” 1980, not so coincidentally, is also a signal year for literary critics: in that year, critics say, literary theory changed with the publication of British critic Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice.

If we put together the ingredients of digital immigration, hyperliterature, literary theory, and yes, Shelley’s unacknowledged legislation, we have the recipe for offence.

What is the virtual universe without poetry? I mean by the word poetry, of course, what the word originally meant in Aristotle’s Poetics, namely, literature, or as it is more fashionably called these days, as popularized by British literature teacher John McRae in his 1991 book, “literature with a small l.”

If we accept Shelley’s definition of poetry as “the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds,” and if we accept that the “best and happiest minds” nowadays are online, then we logically have to accept that the quadrillions (that’s 10s to the 15th power) of bytes on the Web are analogous, perhaps even identical, to syllables, even words in poems. We are back to Shelley’s original idea that everybody that uses language, now the language of the computer, is a poet.

I make such a claim, and boldly. Composition is composition. Creation is creation. If creation involves words or letters that make up words, then what we have is creative writing, ergo, literature.

That sounds very much like just a play on words, and it is. Poetry is nothing else but playing on words. The Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and quasi-literary theorist Sigmund Freud said as much in his 1908 “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren.” Poets play with words and everyone else plays with poets.

What is poetry but where, in the classic 20th-century definition popularized from the unwitting British critic Samuel Johnson by the British-American poet T. S. Eliot, “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”?

There is heated debate among hyperliterature critics about whether links constitute metaphorical binding or, if we use their jargon, rhizomes (a metaphorically-used botanical term appropriated from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung but more recently from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and French psychotherapist Pierre-Félix Guattari’s 1980 Mille Plateaux, translated by Brian Massumi as A Thousand Plateaus). Debatable or not, there is clearly some connection between clicking on a link to get to another site and using allusion to jump in your memory to another poem or text.

Earlier types of hyperpoems, in fact, were basically ways for a reader to learn the meaning or reference of a word by clicking on it, a more efficient and faster way of looking up a definition or an allusion in a dictionary or encyclopedia. Today’s digital native (perhaps we should use the linguistic term “inner circle”?) does not use allusion but metaphor, in the sense that, by clicking on a link in a poem on the screen, the reader may never get back to the so-called original text, but may and should get lost in the centre-less surfing. In Friendster language, if you restrict yourself to your friends, you have missed the whole point of Friendster. Even in the days before YouTube, if you restricted yourself to the words in a poem, you would have missed the whole point of a poem.

Let us turn that description around. If you think Friendster is only one way of expanding your circle of message senders and receivers, if you think that YouTube is only one way of eavesdropping or allowing others to eavesdrop on personal lives, if you think that blogs are ephemeral, though eternally archived, cocktail conversations, you have forgotten what you learned in kindergarten, namely, that everything is a story, or as the British writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton termed it in his 1908 Orthodoxy, “elfland.”

The Web has the ethics and the logic of elfland, and the logic of elfland is exactly what drives poets to write poetry. Critics must now finally fully discard their concept of Literature with the big letter L, writers must finally fully discard their elitist appropriation of the term “poet,” the billions of webtizens should now finally fully accept that what they punch into their keyboards or say into their voice-activated word processors are not just words on a screen, not just ideas from their heads, not just messages or stubs or posts, but poems.

Poetry is dead. Long live poetry.

(First published in The Philippine Star, May 10 & 17, 2007)

Links to news on language suit

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storypage.aspx?StoryId=75222

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/nation/view_article.php?article_id=62882

http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2007/apr/28/yehey/top_stories/20070428top5.html

http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2007/apr/28/yehey/opinion/20070428opi6.html

http://philippinecommentary.blogspot.com/2007/04/medium-is-mess.html

http://www.asianjournal.com/?c=186&a=19849

http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/man/2007/04/28/news/sc.urged.to.void.order.making.english.the.medium.of.instruction.html

Andrew Gonzalez on Language

Since I am editing two of the late Brother Andrew Gonzalez’s unpublished books, as well as writing the history of De La Salle University while he was its president, I have become even more familiar with his work than I was when we were regularly dining out.

Some articles by the former Philippine Education Secretary on language planning are relevant today, when several linguists, language teachers, educators, and parents are working on a legal way to challenge the Department of Education’s misguided and unlawful drive to increase the number of hours English is used as a medium of instruction in our public schools.

One of the objections against Filipino as a medium of instruction is its alleged inability to handle highly technical subjects. Among linguists, this is known as the issue of intellectualization (spelled intellectualisation in British English). In a 2002 issue of the British journal Current Issues in Language Planning, Gonzalez had an article entitled “Language Planning and Intellectualisation.” The full article is available on the journal’s website (multilingual-matters.net).

Here is the abstract or summary of the article: “The development of the national language of the Philippines is sketched from the initial selection of Tagalog to its standardisation and propagation as Wikang Pambansa (national language), and its renaming as Pilipino, subsequently Filipino.

“The last phase of language development is the phase of cultivation which has many aspects. Usually the national language is cultivated as a language of imaginative literature, the mass media, a medium of instruction in the basic educational system, as the language of governance, and as a language of academic discourse.

“The last phase can be considered as a process of modernisation (through its use to thematise current realities) and as a process of intellectualisation (as a medium of oral and written academic discourse).

“The intellectualisation phase consists not only of lexical expansion (through modern terminologies for the disciplines) but likewise of stylistic differentiation (using syntactic devices for different types of prose discourse). Intellectualisation is examined as process and product and according to its inner (psychological) and outer (sociological) dimensions.

“Some theoretical insights from the Philippine experience are discussed; the intellectualisation of Filipino is unprecedented because it is an ongoing process that can be documented in detail through the corpus being generated and should enrich the scholarly literature on this topic.”

There was no doubt in the mind of Gonzalez that Filipino was well on its way to becoming a fully intellectualized language, were it not for miseducated government officials eager to transform Filipinos from being highly intelligent thinkers to mere telephone operators.

Gonzalez tried to practice what he preached while he was Education Secretary. He changed the medium of instruction of the first three grades to vernacular or regional languages and started the process to change the medium of instruction to conform to what the Constitution mandates, namely, Filipino as the main language of instruction for all subjects at all grade levels, with the other vernacular languages as auxiliary or second languages of instruction and English only as a third or minor language of instruction.

Why did he do that? The answer can be found in another article available on the Web.

In a 2004 conference of the Summer Institute of Linguistics and UNESCO held in Thailand, Gonzalez read a paper on “Language Planning in Multilingual Countries: The Case of the Philippines” (sil.org/asia). In that paper, the world-renowned linguist explained why, based on his experience as Education Secretary and on his expertise as a language scholar, Filipinos were being badly educated due to the use of English as a medium of instruction.

He said, “For [the Filipino] language to be cultivated intellectually, it must be used and not just studied. If school policy makers choose not to use the national language in certain academic domains, the language will not be cultivated for higher cognitive activities in that field of specialization. It is, of course, easier to reach a stage of critical thinking in one’s native language or mother tongue and it takes special tutoring and practice to cultivate a second language for purposes of higher order thinking. In the Philippines, because of the lack of financial resources, the national language has not been sufficiently developed as a language of intellectual discourse. English competence, once attained, becomes a highly effective tool of intellectual discourse and learning of the world’s knowledge. However, the number of those in the system who reach such an advanced stage in a second language such as English is bound to be small and elitist.

“The advice based on investigations and experience of literacy experts is that the best way to teach a second language is by enabling the students to master the first language to the point of critical thinking; these skills can then be transferred to the second language. In spite of this evidence, Philippine decision makers and parents continue to insist on English as early as possible, even though that hinders children’s ability to think critically in the mother tongue or at least in the national language which is structurally similar to the mother tongue. This partially explains the problems of language and quality in Philippine education today.

“In brief, language planning presumes rationality on the part of the language planners in drafting action plans, but these action plans likewise presume rationality on the part of the political decision-makers and would-be beneficiaries (parents and their children) of these rational policies. Unfortunately, in a world not quite fully rational, rational means to realize plans do not always obtain and results are often mixed, which they are in the Philippines!”

This summer break is a good time for DepEd officials to think seriously about acting according to what they know. Since all educational research says that students learn best in their home language and that learning a second language is much easier once the first language is mastered, why does DepEd insist on using English as a medium of instruction?

With English as the medium of instruction, children learn neither English nor the various subject areas. If Filipino were the medium of instruction, children would learn English much more quickly and more effectively.

Since the current Education Secretary refuses to listen to educators, Gonzalez must be turning in his grave or more precisely (since he was cremated, his ashes divided and buried in two places), glowing.  (First published in The Philippine Star, 12 April 2007)

Nikki Coseteng on Education

“I’ve learned more about education in the past two months that I’ve been running the Diliman Preparatory School than I learned in all those years of studying in school and working in government,” said senatorial candidate Anna Dominique “Nikki” Coseteng to me in an exclusive interview last February [2007].

Coseteng has been president of Diliman Preparatory School only since Dec. 4, 2006. The school has more than 3,000 students, from preparatory to high school, and even offers two years of post-secondary education.

Except for its being hard to get to from Commonwealth Avenue due to MMDA’s pink roadblocks, the school is one of the country’s best. It became famous some years ago when it became one of the first schools to voluntarily license its computer software in compliance with the Intellectual Property Code.

When people commend her for the school’s being “world-class,” Coseteng immediately retorts, “It’s Philippine-standard. Why is it that, when things are in order, we say it is world-class? Does it mean that, when things are in disarray, that is Philippine-standard?”

Coseteng has certainly put things in order in the school. When I visited the school, I could not help but notice how clean it was. How does she do it? I learned the trick from Coseteng herself. I saw her go up to a group of students and point to the litter around them. In effect, she stares down students, making them feel guilty for not caring for their environment. Students themselves prevent other students from littering, to avoid being embarrassed and having to clean up other people’s junk. The need for paid janitors is minimized.

What has Coseteng learned from running a school? She learned that there are three areas that need immediate attention.

First, she put in place a training program for teachers this summer, to prepare them for next schoolyear. She hopes to introduce reforms in the way teachers teach mathematics, for example. Instead of drawing straight lines, curved lines, circles, squares, and triangles on the blackboard, teachers will use, starting June, actual cultural objects that students can appreciate. For example, she wants teachers to use a photograph of Kennon Road or a print of Van Gogh to illustrate curved lines, a picture of the pyramids to teach triangles, and a Mindanao weave to show what a square or rectangle looks like. In technical terms (which she never uses), what she wants to do is to do Content-Based Mathematics.

Although she admits to not being a math wiz, Coseteng understands the importance of math in the curriculum. In fact, she has ordered the brightest pupils in each grade or year level to be placed in a special section, so that they do not get bored.

“In each class,” says Coseteng, “there are Ferraris, Volkswagens, and carretelas. Everyone is a Ferrari, but in a different field. We have to develop the Ferraris in their particular fields.” In her school, students are streamed according to their aptitude and ability. Even without using the buzz phrases “multiple intelligences” and “homogeneous grouping,” Coseteng has put in place a system that does not discriminate against the verbally-challenged.

Second, Coseteng has moved to address the lack of analytical thinking in classrooms, by discouraging low-level questioning and exercises. For example, instead of a teacher asking pupils to describe what they see in a photograph, teachers now ask what is not shown in the photograph or what is just outside the borders of the photograph. Instead of pupils merely coloring dress outlines in books, teachers now tell pupils, “Here is a child. Draw her (or his) clothes.” The pupils are thus forced to use their imagination and to think outside the box.

Third, Coseteng has paid particular attention to the textbooks used in the school. She discovered problems with the textbooks that are much more serious than mere errors in facts or grammar. One textbook exercise, for example, says: “My brother is a he. My sister is a she. If he becomes a she and she becomes a he, it is funny.”

“We are teaching kids to be liars, hypocrites, and bigots,” Coseteng complains, “by teaching them to discriminate against gays, for example.”

Coseteng points to a textbook that says that the Crusades brought civilization to the believers in Islam. “What about the pillage?” she asks, incensed by the pro-Christian bias of textbooks.

Believing that schoolchildren have the right to an aesthetically pleasant and educationally-sound campus, Coseteng has also introduced physical innovations in her school. She brought the grade school blackboards down to the level of the students, instead of the usual level convenient to teachers. To save costs of airconditioning and blinds, she asked students to paint their own classroom windows to keep out the sun. She plans to have murals done along the walls of what she calls “Learning Corridors,” with information that all literate citizens are expected to know. Again, without using the buzz phrases “core knowledge” or “cultural literacy,” she is working towards a knowledge-based campus.

What Coseteng is advocating and has implemented in her own school is what education theorists would call “Creative Reading” or “Culture-Based Teaching.” To her credit, the jargon is noticeably absent from Coseteng’s vocabulary. What she is passionate about as far as education is concerned comes from watching schoolchildren in other schools transforming from creative individuals to miseducated herd members. In her school, she wants children to remain creative.

About language, her stand is clear and realistic: all Filipinos, she says, should be articulate in both Filipino and English. If she is reelected to the Senate, we can be assured that she will focus on student welfare and not yield to the recruitment demands of a small portion of the business community. (First published in The Philippine Star, 8 March 2007)

Sonia Roco on Language

Roco on Language


When I asked her what her stand was on the medium of instruction, candidate (for the Philippine Senate) Sonia Roco of Aksyon Demokratiko answered simply, “The Bilingual Education Policy is fine. There is no need to change that policy.”

What exactly is the policy? Since she has explicitly said that she is running to continue the fight for quality and intelligent governance started by her late husband Raul Roco, former Secretary of Education, we may assume that, once elected to the Senate, Sonia Roco will espouse the same views that Raul Roco had on the medium of instruction.

Roco (by which I mean Raul) enjoyed debating and brainstorming. In private conversations and even in public discussions, he sometimes defended a stand contrary to what he really believed in, just to test the intellectual capacity of the people around him. Those who did not know him well sometimes attributed to him opinions that were not at all his own but articulated by him only to challenge popular views.

Roco and I shared the ancient rhetorical view that, if you are really a good debater, you can start a debate on one side, win over the other side convincingly, then shift to the other side in the middle of the debate and still win.

We can have a more accurate grasp of Roco’s ideas by looking at the departmental policies he implemented while he was Secretary of Education. Although he and I spent countless hours debating all sorts of issues when I was his Senior Undersecretary, he eventually would make a decision on a particular policy, which I then would write out and show to him for his approval.

During his stint as Secretary, Roco did something very few have appreciated. He insisted that Bicolanos should be taught in their own native language, Bicolano or Bikol. He thus expanded the then prevailing Lingua Franca Project (started by his immediate predecessor, Brother Andrew Gonzalez, FSC) to include Bikol.

Gonzalez had set up a mechanism for some schools to use Cebuano, Ilocano (or Iluko), or Tagalog as their sole medium of instruction for the first three grades. It was, during his time, just an experiment, with the scientific rigor supplied by, among others, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (which had been and still is successfully using various vernacular languages to make people literate enough to read the Bible in their own languages).

Roco insisted that Bikol be added to the three languages of choice. Since there were also a huge number of speakers of languages other than Bikol (Hiligaynon or Ilonggo, Samar-Leyte or Waray, Capampangan, Pangasinan, Maranao, Maguindanao, and Tausug, for example), I convinced him to include not just Bikol but the other commonly-used vernacular languages.

Roco ended the experimental stage of the Lingua Franca Project, declared it a success (after consulting with the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the Asian Development Bank), and mandated a language policy that allowed all schools to use the language of their own regions as the sole medium of instruction for the first three grades. The policy was by no means new, since it had its roots at least three decades earlier in government pilot projects. Roco just institutionalized it.

Because he did not stay long enough in the Department, Roco was not able to push through with what would have been the logical continuation of his decision on the first three grades, namely, to change the medium of instruction for the next three grades and eventually the high school years.

We never came to any conclusion in our endless debates on which language or languages to use from Grade 4 to 4th year high school, but it was clear that he did not want English to be the sole or even the main medium of instruction. He was very clear about this, because he believed in the Rule of Law and knew the Constitution by heart. If he had wanted to give English more time in the curriculum, he would simply have told me to write out an order repealing the Bilingual Education Policy. He never did that, and no one has actually done that. The present Secretary has modified the policy by privileging English over Filipino, but he will be held accountable eventually for following an illegal order from the President.

Roco loved Filipino languages. To prove it in terms of educational policy, he mandated that the learning area he himself christened “Makabayan” should be taught completely in Filipino. Only when Arroyo released the blatantly unconstitutional Executive Order 210 were some of the subjects under Makabayan taught in English.

When Sonia Roco gets elected to the Senate, we can be sure that she will oppose vehemently the ridiculous House Bill removing Filipino from the public educational system. (Published in The Philippine Star, 8 March 2007)

Literature in Language Teaching

Sometime in the bad old 1980s, English language teachers decided to remove literature from language teaching. The idea at that time was that English should be taught using “authentic texts” for “specific purposes.” Even today, most English language teachers in the country use “content-based instruction,” which means primarily that the texts used to teach language come from fields other than literature.

The big news today is that literature is back in language teaching, and with a vengeance.

Last week, I attended a British Council international seminar in Kuala Lumpur on “Reading across Cultures: Teaching English through Literature.” The seminar was the first time the Oxford Conference on the Teaching of Literature ventured out of the UK since it began 21 years ago. The Conference continues in Oxford, but from now on, there will also be Oxford seminars outside the UK.

I have to say that it was one of the most personally gratifying weeks of my life. When I attended part of the Conference in 1988, while I was a Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College in Oxford, the speakers were people like Terence Hawkes and Toril Moi, then the biggest names in literary studies.

In the Kuala Lumpur conference, there were only three writers invited as guest speakers: Louise Doughty (multi-awarded British novelist, playwright, critic, and columnist), Roger Robinson (British poet and short fiction writer), and (ehem!) me (to represent Asia).

We were asked to read from our works. I read excerpts from Bienvenido, My Brother and Josephine and did a staged reading of my English translation of Kuwadro. I initially felt intimidated by Robinson (an outstanding performance poet who was earlier in Manila) and Doughty (whose bestselling novel Stone Cradle is funny though profound), but the friendliness of the audience (made up mostly of alumni of Oxford) made me lose my stage fright.

The key academic speaker at the seminar was John McRae of the University of Nottingham, who is the biggest name in language and literature studies nowadays; he is so big that one other big-name lecturer, John Corbett of the University of Glasgow, quoted him, not realizing that he would be in the same seminar.

In 1991, McRae listed several reasons for “covering literature in English Language Teaching” (this is Corbett’s summary): “language learning, linguistic confidence, language description and awareness, language practice, memory, active involvement, classroom interaction, post-lesson stimuli, production, enthusiasm, receptivity, related world knowledge, personal satisfaction, cultural awareness, linguistic or aesthetic curiosity, critical evaluation, grammatical, structural, or functional reinforcement, information, and constructive enjoyment.”

McRae’s and Corbett’s discussions were mostly technical, meant for the high-level government officials and language specialists in the audience, but their thesis was clear: to teach the English language, teachers should use literary texts.

As my own contribution to the language and literature discussions, I showed a working cut of the episode on Basho’s frog haiku in CONSTEC Literature: A Telecourse for Students and Teachers of Literature, the 40-episode television course I am producing for the Foundation for Upgrading the Standard of Literature (FUSE).

A number of the participants asked how they could get a copy of the episode, as well as the rest of the series. I also found out from the Malaysian Ministry of Education officials that Malaysia had a similar series done some years ago. I asked them for a copy of their series, in order that we would not duplicate lessons on the same literary texts. If all goes well, we should be able to show their series together with ours, and they will show ours together with theirs.

After the showing, one Chinese education official approached me and said that the haiku form was invented in China, not in Japan. Ah, well.

(First published in The Philippine Star, 15 February 2007)