Best Philippine Books of 2004

Here are some of the citations read during the awarding ceremonies of the National Book Awards on Sept. 4, 2005, at the Manila International Book Fair for the best books published in the Philippines in 2004. The citations were written by various members of the Manila Critics Circle.

The Manila Critics Circle cited Christine S. Bellen for her series of children’s books “that have brought to life for today’s young generation the classic tales of Severino Reyes.” The Anvil series includes Ang Alamat ng Lamok, Mga Kuwento ni Lola Basyang, Ang Mahiwagang Biyulin, Ang Parusa ng Duwende, Ang Plautin ni Periking, and Rosamistica.

The Circle cited the Philippine Deaf Resource Center and the Philippine Federation of the Deaf for their four-volume series Introduction to Filipino Sign Language that “offers the reading public an easy and systematic way into being literate in the language of the soundless but not voiceless, a language at once universal and Filipino, meaningful and empowering.”

The Circle cited Summit Books, for its books (such as Have Baby, Will Date; No Boyfriend since Birth; Tough Love; Wander Girl; and Mr. Write) which “promote the habit of reading among a previously unreached group of Filipino readers, in the process developing a kind of Philippine English that should be appreciated for its complexity, profundity, and truthfulness.”

The Circle cited Cantius J. Kobak, O.F.M., and Lucio Gutierrez, O.P., for their “masterful, meticulous, and almost miraculous edition, annotation, and translation” of Jesuit Ignacio Francisco Alcina’s Historia de las Islas e indios de Bisayas as History of the Bisayan People in the Philippine Islands: Evangelization and Culture at the Contact Period (two volumes published by UST Publishing House so far).

The Circle cited Rolando B. Tolentino for his series of cultural criticism (published by Anvil), Ang Bago, Bawal at Kasalukuyan; Si Darna, ang Mahal na Birhen ng Peñafrancia, at si Pepsi Paloma; Disaster, Droga at Skin Whitener; Kulturang Mall; Lalaking Pin-up, GRO, at Macho Dancer; and Paghahanap ng Virtual na Identidad, “which studies ordinary events and processes in our society from the point of view of extraordinary literary theory and social science.”

The Circle cited Centro Escolar University for its series of research-based coffee-table books (Filipino Cuisine, Beyond Rice, Bamboo, The Philippine Forest, and Philippine Markets), “well-conceived, well-written, and well-designed, offering readers unfamiliar views of familiar realities.”

The winner of the National Book Award for Best Book in Education – the two-volume Helping Our Children Do Well in School: 10 Successful Strategies from the Parents’ Best Practices Study of the Ateneo de Manila High School and A Companion Manual to Helping Our Children Do Well in School: 10 Successful Strategies from the Parents’ Best Practices Study of the Ateneo de Manila High School, by Queena N. Lee-Chua and Ma. Isabel Sison-Dionisio (Anvil Publishing) – was cited for “discovering, documenting, analyzing, and applying the strategies used by parents to ensure a bright future for their bright children and for making educational and psychological research accessible to parents not just inside Ateneo de Manila High School but in other schools as well.”

There were two winners for Best Book in Literary Criticism.

On the Subject of the Nation: Filipino Writings from the Margins, 1981 to 2004, by Caroline S. Hau (Ateneo de Manila University Press) was cited for “demonstrating dramatically how powerful literary criticism is in unlocking the mysteries not just of what can be read on paper but of what can be and is being lived in real life by the powerless, the ignored, and the othered.”

Cultural Fictions: Narratives on Philippine Popular Culture, Politics, and Literature, by Isidoro M. Cruz (University of San Agustin) was cited for “using the tools learned in literary theory classes to shed new light on real happenings in the real world outside campus, thus harnessing the powerful analytic tools of theory to help us make sense of the Philippine political, literary, and cultural landscape.”

There were two winners for Best Book of Short Fiction.

Cadena de Amor and Other Short Stories, by Wilfrido D. Nolledo (UST Publishing House) was cited for “collecting in one place the best short stories of a writer who did not so much defy fashion as define and fashion it, anticipating and transcending it, short stories as alive, even more alive now as when they were first fashioned.”

On Cursed Ground and Other Stories, by Vicente Garcia Groyon (UP Press) was cited as “a book for which the adjective overpowering is an understatement, because it is not just the protagonists that grow up in many of these stories, but also we readers, who participate in what is not so much lust as hunger, in what is not so much the search for soul mates as for the soul, in what is not so much a style of storytelling as a personal unravelling.”

The Juan C. Laya Prize for Best Novel in a Vernacular Language was won by Hunyango sa Bato, by Abdon M. Balde Jr. (UST Publishing House), cited as “a novel daring in style, topic, and characterization, a novel unafraid to challenge what were previously thought to be unbreakable rules of writing and language, a novel forcing the reader to remember past events that still mold the present, a chameleon-like novel showing only one true color.”

The Juan C. Laya Prize for Best Novel in a Foreign Language was shared by two novels.

People on Guerrero Street, by Leoncio P. Deriada (Seguiban Printers), was cited for “portraying life in a ‘small town’ transforming quietly into a big city, with every growing-up event magnified beyond reason and passion, where sex is mistaken for love and love for life, until death brings both protagonist and reader back to semi-urban life in an unreal city with real people in it.”

Women of Tammuz, by Azucena Grajo Uranza (Bookmark), was cited as a novel that “portrays in an extraordinary manner how ordinary people live normally during abnormal times and harnesses the resources of fiction to retrieve our past in order that we may live our present more fully, declared or undeclared war notwithstanding.”

The National Book Award for Best Book of Essays was shared by two books.

Looking for Jose Rizal in Madrid: Journeys, Latitudes, Perspectives, Destinations, by Gregorio C. Brillantes (UP Press), was cited “for giving us Escolastico, intrepid researcher and traveler writing across the continents, and for making nonfiction creative long before the term was invented; from Ateneo’s Heights to Philippines Free Press and Asia Philippines Leader, later to Midweek and Graphic, the world of Greg Brillantes is worlds of wry, journalistic fun.”

Between the Centuries, by Sylvia L. Mayuga (UP Press), was cited “for reinventing the essay as column piece and never giving up on Avenida, parlaying the favors of lovers and other strangers, from Banahaw to Sagada, deep in the heart of a visionary esoterica.”

The National Book Award for Best Book on Music was won by Pinoy Jazz Traditions, by Richie C. Quirino (Anvil Publishing), which was cited “for filling a dearth in local jazz journalism and research, and trading in the musician’s drumsticks for a writer’s instruments on the elusive downbeat, shuffling in a timeline of singers and musicians almost forgotten save for a stroll down this street called Pinoy Jazz Traditions.”

The National Book Award for Art Studies was won by Rice in the Seven Arts, edited by Paul Blanco Zafaralla (Asia Rice Foundation and Metrobank Foundation), which was cited this way: “For paying tribute to the national staple and its role in the national psyche, these studies of rice as artful manifestations warm the stomach and address different levels of hunger more than any rolling store could.”

The National Book Award for Best Book of Poetry was shared by two books.

Liyab sa Alaala, by Roberto T. Añonuevo (UST Publishing House) was cited for “collecting poems as blinding as dancing bamboo during a storm and as shiny as garden grass in sunlight, proving that the fire of poetry is alive, as the memory of his every line illuminates Philippine literature.”

A Feast of Origins, by Dinah Roma (UST Publishing House) was cited for being “a collection, by one of the brightest young poets gracing the literary scene today, of poems on love, the struggle with desolation and despondency, affinities and kinships familial and otherwise, beginnings, mortality, death – in varying shades, all finding their expression in images that swoop and soar in rhythms properly contained, such that reading her poetry makes one instantly connected and encountered.”

The National Book Award for Personal Anthology was won by In Ordinary Time: Poems, Parables, Poetics, 1973-2003, by Gemino H. Abad (UP Press), which was cited as “a selection of poems and parables all catering to the mind’s own ‘essential poetics of finding one’s path through language and making one’s own clearing there,’ grouped according to themes like Things, Words, Self, Love, Country, and God, all bearing that signature beyond forgery in a language bursting at the seams, explored along its infinite possibilities, writing about meaningfulness and not simply meaning, born of moments not only fully lived but also fully imagined – truly no ordinary book by no ordinary writer.”

The National Book Award for Best Book on Theology and Religion was won by Mga Aral sa Daan: Dulog at Paraang Kultural sa Kristolohiya, by Jose M. de Mesa (DLSU Press), cited this way: “The book globalizes the trend to translate the Bible into Filipino and to interpret it according to the needs of the Filipino nation by focusing on the cultural dimensions of Christology and Christianity, thus planting the seeds of reconciling the Bible with the Filipino values of grace, soul, and virtue.”

The National Book Award for Best Book of Plays was won by Oyayi: Sarswela ng Pamilyang Pinoy, by Frank G. Rivera, edited by Arthur P. Casanova, Felix P. Tapongot, and Louela B. Floresca (UST Publishing House), cited this way: “Only recently have the literary gems lying unremembered in the memory of Frank G. Rivera been published, the latest of which is this sarswela first presented in 1979 in Mindanao. Despite its age, the play still talks to the current contradictions in Philippine society and identity.”

The National Book Award for Best Book in the Social Sciences was won by Ginto: History Wrought in Gold, by Ramon N. Villegas (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas), cited for being “a wonderful introduction to a great collection of the nation’s heritage in gold, representing diligent research that not only establishes a previously unknown history of the gold artifacts now housed in the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, but also introduces modern Filipinos to the ancient art of designing jewelry and other decorative articles in gold.”

The National Book Award for Cultural Criticism was won by Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order, by Neferti Xina M. Tadiar (Ateneo de Manila University Press), cited for “proceeding from a rather current concept that imagination is a culturally organized social practice, pursuing some areas of studies in the context of transformations in Philippine society in the twentieth century, using combined postcolonial and feminist perspectives in examining the products of dominant Philippine imaginations through contemporary Philippine phenomena, like overseas employment, prostitution, and people power, to underscore her reading of nationalist and capitalist undertakings that are shaping the Filipinos as a nation.”

Philippine National Book Awards

The Manila Critics Circle announced the winners of the 2004 National Book Awards at the Manila International Book Fair on Sept. 4, 2005.

The University of Santo Tomas Publishing House was named Publisher of the Year for the second year in a row.

Album: Islas Filipinas, 1663-1888, by Jose Maria A. Cariño and Sonia Pinto Ner, Ars Mundi, won the Alfonso T. Ongpin Prize for Best Book on Art or Architecture, with a cash prize of P10,000.

Hunyango sa Bato, by Abdon M. Balde Jr., UST Publishing House, won the Juan C. Laya Prize for Best Novel in a Vernacular Language, with a cash prize of P20,000.

People on Guerrero Street, by Leoncio P. Deriada, Seguiban Printers, and Women of Tammuz, by Azucena Grajo Uranza, Bookmark, shared the Juan C. Laya Prize for Best Novel in a Foreign Language, with a cash prize of P10,000 each.

Ginto: History Wrought in Gold, by Ramon N. Villegas, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, won in two categories: Best Book in Social Sciences and Best Book Design.

Citations for special achievement were given to Centro Escolar University, Christine S. Bellen, Lucio Gutierrez OP, Cantius J. Kobak OFM, the Philippine Deaf Resource Center, the Philippine Federation of the Deaf, Summit Books, and Rolando B. Tolentino.

The rest of the winners: What the Water Said: Alon Poems, University of San Agustin (Anthology); Rice in the Seven Arts, edited by Paul Blanco Zafaralla, Asia Rice Foundation and Metrobank Foundation (Art Studies); A Cofradia of Two: Oral History on the Family Life and Lay Religiosity of Juan D. Nepomuceno and Teresa G. Nepomuceno of Angeles, Pampanga, by Erlita P. Mendoza, Holy Angel University (Biography & Autobiography); Erick Slumbook: Paglalakbay Kasama Ang Anak Kong Autistic, by Fanny A. Garcia, Anvil (Biography & Autobiography); Driven: How to Make it in Philippine Business, by Class 1971, Asian Institute of Management (Business & Economics); Wealth Within Your Reach: Pera Mo, Palaguin Mo!, by Francisco J. Colayco, Colayco Foundation for Education (Business & Economics);

The Christmas Fireflies, by Girl Valencia, Papertree Publishing (Children’s Literature); The Greediest Rajahs and the Whitest Of Clouds, by Honoel Ibardolaza, Adarna Books (Children’s Literature); The Adobo Book: Traditional and Jazzed-Up Recipes, by Reynaldo Gamboa Alejandro and Nancy Reyes-Lumen, Anvil (Cookbooks & Food); Philippine Markets: Homage to the Hardworking Men and Women of the Market, by Karla P. Delgado, Centro Escolar University (Cookbooks & Food); Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order, by Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, Ateneo de Manila University Press (Cultural Criticism);

Pidgin Levitations, by Ricardo M. De Ungria, designed by Veni L. Ilowa and Ricardo M. de Ungria, UP Press (Design); Oyayi: Sarswela ng Pamilyang Pinoy, by Frank G. Rivera, UST Publishing House (Drama); Helping Our Children Do Well in School: 10 Successful Strategies from the Parents’ Best Practices Study of the Ateneo de Manila High School and A Companion Manual to Helping Our Children Do Well in School: 10 Successful Strategies from the Parents’ Best Practices Study of the Ateneo de Manila High School, by Queena N. Lee-Chua and Ma. Isabel Sison-Dionisio, Anvil (Education); Between the Centuries, by Sylvia L. Mayuga, UP Press (Essay); Looking for Jose Rizal in Madrid: Journeys, Latitudes, Perspectives, Destinations, by Gregorio C. Brillantes, UP Press (Essay); Japanese Pioneers in the Northern Philippine Highlands: A Centennial Tribute, 1903-2003, edited by Patricia Okuba Afable, Filipino-Japanese Foundation of Northern Luzon (History); The Law on Alternative Dispute Resolution: Private Justice in the Philippines, How to Resolve Legal Disputes Without a Courtroom Trial, by Jim V. Lopez, Rex Book Store (Law);

English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways To Learn Today’s Global Language, by Jose A. Carillo (Carlos O. Llorin Jr.), Manila Times Publishing (Linguistics); On the Subject of the Nation: Filipino Writings from the Margins, 1981 to 2004, by Caroline S. Hau, ADMU Press (Literary Criticism); Pinoy Jazz Traditions, by Richie C. Quirino, Anvil (Music); In Ordinary Time: Poems, Parables, Poetics, 1973-2003, by Gemino H. Abad, UP Press (Personal Anthology); Filipina: A Tribute to the Filipino Woman, Supply Oilfield Services (Photography); A Feast of Origins, by Dinah Roma, UST Publishing House (Poetry); Liyab sa Alaala, by Roberto T. Añonuevo, UST Publishing House (Poetry); Cultural Fictions: Narratives on Philippine Popular Culture, Politics, and Literature, by Isidoro M. Cruz, University of San Agustin (Literary Criticism);

Cadena de Amor and Other Short Stories, by Wilfrido D. Nolledo, UST Publishing House (Short Fiction); On Cursed Ground and Other Stories, by Vicente Garcia Groyon, UP Press (Short Fiction); Mga Aral sa Daan: Dulog at Paraang Kultural sa Kristolohiya, by Jose M. de Mesa, DLSU Press (Theology & Religion); Cuentos Filipinos, by Jose Montero y Vidal, translated by Renan S. Prado, Evelyn C. Soriano, Heide V. Aquino, and Shirley R. Torres, Ateneo de Manila University Press (Translation); Ilocos Norte: A Travel Guidebook, Gameng Foundation (Travel).

It was also announced that critic Soledad S. Reyes of Ateneo de Manila University will join the Manila Critics Circle next year.

The members of the Manila Critics Circle are National Artist Virgilio S. Almario, Juaniyo Arcellana, Cirilo F. Bautista, Miguel A. Bernad SJ, Isagani R. Cruz, Ruel de Vera, Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta, Resil B. Mojares, Danton Remoto, and Alfred A. Yuson.

The awards were sponsored by the National Book Development Board, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and Primetrade Asia.

Makabayan

Understanding Makabayan
from The Philippine Star, 13 January 2005

There is no question that, of all the five learning areas in the Basic Education Curriculum (BEC), the most problematic is Makabayan.

Born out of the perceived need to collapse as many subjects as possible into one and the equally urgent need to teach as many subjects as possible, Makabayan appears to be neither here nor there. Sometimes seen merely as a garbage dump of all the other subjects not needed by a growing child, sometimes seen as a miracle cure for the lack of values in Filipino society, sometimes seen as merely a new name for the average of all grades received in all the subjects left out by the four staples, sometimes seen as the Mother of All Subjects, Makabayan has occasioned instant conferences, quickie workshops, loud demonstrations, heated arguments, reversals of official policies, fears of being fired – all symptoms that no one really knows what is going on.

I cannot presume to be an expert on Makabayan, since no one really is right now, but perhaps, as the person who conceptualized the BEC as it now stands (though the movement that reformed the curriculum actually started more than ten years ago in the Department of Education), I may have an insight or two to contribute to the ongoing debate.

What is Makabayan, and why is everyone against it? (To be candid, I have not met many who are for it, except those who are, by virtue of their positions, forced to support it publicly.)

Everyone is against it because no one knows what it is. That is the oversimplified, but nevertheless correct, reason for the desire to remove or distort or neutralize it.

Simply speaking, Makabayan is Values Education.

We have known Values Education by many names. Our parents knew it as Good Manners and Right Conduct, which was not bad, except that it sometimes deteriorated into Etiquette and Passivity. Mainstream America now knows it as being politically incorrect (against gay marriages, against stem cell research, against African Americans and other Americans of color, against wars of liberation, against human rights for terrorists, against civil liberties for foreigners). Malacañang knows it as being for the incumbent president, no matter who it is; anyone with any kind of independent mind is automatically called a destabilizer and, therefore, not makabayan.

What it should really be, however, is education in its classic sense, which is a way to ensure that a child grows up to be an adult.

The question, then, is what is an adult? If we complicate the question by asking what is an adult Filipino, we can now see what the problem is.

Is an adult Filipino one that stays in the country or one that leaves the country? To say that one should stay in the country in order to be a Filipino clearly is plain stupid, because if we all stayed here, no one would be out there sending us dollars to keep our economy afloat. We might all be in the country, but we would all starve together faster than you can say “visa.”

To say, on the other hand, that we should teach all Filipinos how to speak English because they will go abroad is also plain stupid, because only ten percent of our population is abroad. To force 90% of our people to learn something only 10% will use is to oppress the many for the sake of the few.

Numbers, in fact, reveal the lie that is at the root of our identity as Filipinos. We should probably be grateful that so many call centers are based in the Philippines. But how many Filipinos are actually employed by call centers? The latest count says that less than 2% of employable Filipinos work in call centers. In any other field, anything that accounts for only 2% is ignored. (A simple analogy: there is more than a 2% chance that you will be run over if you cross the street, but everyone, without exception, crosses the street anyway.)

Why, then, are universities educating Filipinos for call centers? In fact, why are universities educating anybody at all, since the figures for unemployment among college graduates is, to put it mildly, disturbing?

If universities were really doing their jobs well, why do companies still have training programs for new hires? On the other hand, if companies think that they can do better than universities, why do they require university diplomas of applicants?

What I am driving at is simple. We do not know what it means to be an adult Filipino. We do not know if an adult Filipino should or should not speak Filipino, Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano, Chinese, Arabic, English, or whatever. We do not know if an adult Filipino should know how to operate the latest nursing equipment that can be found only abroad and not here. We do not know if an adult Filipino should be working in a farm to begin with, since that is where the bulk of our population works.

Because we do not know what the child should grow up to be, we have no idea how to make that child grow up. There is no problem with the tool subjects of Filipino, English, Math, and Science. Every child in every country needs to know a native language, an international language, the language of math and business, and the language of science and technology.

But there is a big problem with being a Filipino child in the Philippines. That problem is the problem of the Filipino identity, which is also a problem of Filipino values. That problem is supposed to be addressed by Makabayan. That Makabayan has to address a problem that has no solution in sight is the root cause of the confusion regarding what the learning area should be.
My answer is simple: Makabayan is nothing else but Values Education. Perhaps, in fact, it is time to rename Makabayan into what it really is and should be – Values Education.

Makabayan as Integrative
from The Philippine Star, 27 January 2005

When Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient thinkers spoke or wrote about anything, they did not classify themselves the way we do now. They were not specialists, but generalists. They were not lawyers, doctors, nurses, journalists, artists, economists, or whatever. They were, for lack of a better word, philosophers.

When Jesus, Muhammad, and other great religious leaders spoke or wrote about God, they did not classify themselves as Christians, Muslims, or whatever, the way we do now. They thought of themselves as God’s servants, children, or creatures. They were, for lack of a better word, human beings.

Today, if we talk to literary critics, social scientists, physicists, and just about anybody in academe, we will hear pretty much the same names and terms, such as Freud, Marx, Chardin, Lacan, Foucault, and so on. Fields of knowledge today are coming together in a way not seen since antiquity or, to a lesser degree, during the Renaissance. The splitting up of Truth into areas of specialization has stopped, and the world is returning to the days when everybody studied everything.

The learning area Makabayan reflects this trend towards being integrative and generalist, rather than narrowly specialist as in the early twentieth century, when our present system of public education started. In fact, the entire Basic Education Curriculum (BEC) is integrative, with the five learning areas merging seamlessly into each other.

Even the two languages, which should be taught separately, for example, actually depend on each other: in an English class, difficult English terms are defined through translations into the vernacular languages; in a Filipino class, English terms are employed to fill in missing words in the vernaculars. Math and Science, though separate subjects, clearly cannot be understood without referring to each other: math has little practical use except in science and technology, and science and technology cannot be learned without also learning math.

Filipino, English, Math, and Science are tool subjects. That means that they are to be used to understand or to do something else. That something else is Makabayan. Makabayan is the subject in which the students learns what the world is, what life is all about, how to live life, how to become human. As the Filipino proverb goes, it is easy to be born human, it is something else to become human. Or as the feminists say, one is not born a woman but has to become one.

In Makabayan, students learn about the world. In particular, they learn about their world, which is, first of all, their local community, secondly, their country, thirdly, the earth, and finally, the universe (including the unseen part of it, often called the supernatural).

Makabayan, then, is the logical culmination of the long tradition of human thought, from Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Muhammad, and so on, down to the most recent movements (such as Complexity Theory, the Theory of Everything, and stuff like that) derived from modern thinkers like Freud, Marx, Chardin, Lacan, and Foucault.

In the old days, Makabayan would be called philosophy, but even philosophy today has become a specialization, with people actually taking a doctorate in it. The tradition of philosophy being integrative, of course, persists with the academic practice of calling doctorate degrees Doctor of Philosophy or PhD, even if the student majors in something like Computer Science or Accounting. There are attempts to move away from calling all doctoral degrees philosophy (such as Doctor of Fine Arts or Doctor in Business Management), but by and large, such degrees have not displaced the PhD from its exalted position in academe.

Makabayan is an attempt to bring basic education in step with the latest movements in higher education. Just as colleges now offer Philippine Studies, Environmental Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, and the like, in an attempt to break the stranglehold of specialization, our elementary and high schools now offer Makabayan as the integrative content learning area.

When we talk about being human, we are really talking about values. Values Education itself, unfortunately, was taken in by the trend towards specialization; there are actually graduate programs in it! If we go back to the old meaning of values, however, we will realize that Makabayan and Values Education are really synonyms.
We can see this if we take any description of Values Education and match that with the DepEd description of Makabayan. Take, for instance, Jesuit Vitaliano Gorospe’s explanation of former Education USEC Minda Sutaria’s values outline: “A Filipino experiences family closeness and solidarity (pagpapahalaga sa pamilya), politeness (use of po or ho), hospitality (tuloy po kayo), gratitude (utang na loob) from ‘within,’ that is, subjectively and emotionally, unlike a non-Filipino observer, social scientist, or psychologist who studies Filipino values objectively from ‘without’ or ‘from a distance.’ Such Filipino values as social acceptance (pakikisama, amor propio), economic security (pagmamay-ari), and trust in God (paniniwala sa Diyos, bathala or Maykapal) find their philosophical basis in man’s [sic] dynamic openness toward nature and the world (e.g., the value of hanap-buhay ng magsasaka), one’s fellowmen [sic] (the values of paggalang, hiya, katarungan, pag-ibig), and God (the values of pananampalataya, pananalangin, kabanalan).” In that description can be seen all the subjects that are now integrated into Makabayan.

Makabayan Decalogue
from The Philippine Star, 26 May 2005

To understand Makabayan, we can recite ten descriptors or principles.

First, Makabayan is a work-in-progress, not a completed work. Because each high school holds (or is supposed to hold) regular sessions among its Makabayan teachers where continuous integration of lessons takes place, there is no single Makabayan curriculum completely applicable to all schools. Strictly speaking, there is no Makabayan, but there are Makabayans. There can also be no fixed list of lessons and competencies, because each school designs Makabayan according to the changing needs of its students and the community to which it belongs.

Second, Makabayan is a work-in-progress from below, not from above. Because no human being can possibly understand all the aspects of Makabayan (from cooking to car repair to website design to martial arts to all sorts of other intelligences, skills, and knowledge areas), no one in the Central Office of the Department of Education can dictate what the individual schools need to do. Just to take a simple example, take an agricultural high school in a place where there is no electricity and where people usually eat only one meal a day. How can someone in Metro Manila, used to computers connected to the internet, figure out what competencies students in that school must have in order to find a job? The content of Makabayan has to come from the schools themselves, not from any central office.

Third, Makabayan is our responsibility, not that of DepEd. Because the human beings we are educating are our own children or the children of our neighbors, we are responsible for the content of Makabayan. We know what we want our children to become. As Secretary Abad has put it in management terms, school governance has to be local, not regional nor national. Abad has correctly challenged parents to govern schools themselves.

Fourth, Makabayan, like the Basic Education Curriculum (BEC), is integrative. It is a mistake of many high schools today to treat Makabayan as merely the total of several separate subject areas. The original Department Order that created Makabayan stated very clearly that the duration of the pilot project was only one year. We are way past that one year. It is a violation of the Department Order for any school to still add and average grades taken from separate subjects. There should by now be only one grade for Makabayan, not a mere average of several grades. The idea of Makabayan is to integrate previously distinct subjects, not merely to put them together mechanically.

Fifth, Makabayan has the psychomotor objective of engaging the multiple intelligences of students. Most schools now realize that Makabayan does not address merely the cognitive aspect of the human being. Since what used to be called Physical Education is part of Makabayan, for example, teachers that used to teach only history or art must integrate physical exercises into their lessons.

Sixth, Makabayan has the cognitive objective of acquainting students with the way the human body works in the context of human society. The object of study in Makabayan is the human body. That is why learning to swim, learning to cook, and learning to plant are part of Makabayan. But since each human being lives within a community (from the local one to the global one), students have to study the way the human being depends for its very existence on the way society is structured. The body, after all, contains not only muscles but a brain, which is obviously affected by, say, the amount of oxygen in the air – a product of the number of trees in the area (something one learns in geography and social studies, not to mention science).

Seventh, Makabayan has the affective objective of socializing students in the context of their own generation. All education is meant to train students to live as adults. They will all become adults only in the future, not today. The world in which they have to live is not the world their teachers live in and are familiar with. It is important that students learn to live with their own contemporaries. That is why a huge portion of the Makabayan period is devoted to activities that allow students to talk and act with their classmates.

Eighth, Makabayan is the content part of the BEC, for which Filipino, English, Math, and Science are tools. The other four learning areas in the curriculum are merely tool subjects. They are means to an end. The end is Makabayan, which contains such topics as history, etiquette, and values – in other words, what life is really all about.

Ninth, Makabayan prepares students for the long term goal of lifelong learning and the short-term goal of earning a livelihood. Because students have to live in a future world that their teachers have no experience with, Makabayan focuses on how to learn rather than what to learn. This does not mean, of course, that Makabayan is a skills course. In fact, Makabayan is a content course, but that content must be taught with a practical end in view – to allow the students to find a livelihood, either by themselves as entrepreneurs or family employees, or as employees or managers in corporations. In some schools, for example, students learn to fix electronic equipment or to fish or to drive during their Makabayan sessions. The ultimate objective of the entire BEC, in fact, is to make the students already employable by the end of high school (the way Americans, for example, get hired immediately after high school).

Finally, Makabayan is the heart of the BEC. The curriculum exists for only one purpose – to prepare students to become adults. Although every adult has to know a language to communicate with others in the community (Filipino) and elsewhere (English), has to understand how the world works (Science), and has to manage finances (Math), an educated adult needs to become responsible for the community, the nation, and the whole world (Makabayan). The four tool subjects train, but Makabayan educates students.