Critic-at-Large

07 June 2007

28 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)

30 April 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

13 April 2007

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)

02 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)

23 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)

19 February 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)

31 January 2007

Largest English-speaking countries

Thank you to the person that posted the comment about my mistake in identifying Australia (population: 20 million) as the second largest English-speaking country in the world; s/he said it should be the UK. When I checked the latest figures, it turns out that the two largest English-speaking countries in the world are India (350 million out of 1 billion) and the United States (300 million). The Philippine government still officially claims that the country (total population: 90 million, but less than half speak English) is the third largest English-speaking country in the world, despite all linguistic studies that show otherwise. China (almost 300 million so far out of 1.3 billion) is catching up quickly with India and the US. The UK (60 million), of course, outranks the Philippines. I've corrected my previous entry, in order not to mislead first-time visitors to this blog. (Population figures are 2006 estimates.)

22 January 2007

Adios, Patria Adorada

Remarks delivered at the launching of the book Adios, Patria Adorada: The Filipino as Ilustrado, the Ilustrado as Filipino, by Alfredo Roces, published by De La Salle University Press, 3 February 2006, at De La Salle University Manila:

Gemino Abad, echoing poststructuralists, once said that a person is made up of words. We could say, echoing Abad, that a people is made up of words, or more precisely, of books, or even more precisely, of histories. Contrary to what Marx thought, the field of struggle is not the factory nor, as Mao thought, the countryside. The field of struggle in our century, the twenty-first century, is the field that Marx held in such contempt – the field of human consciousness, or the way we see ourselves, the way we imagine ourselves. Alfredo Roces joined this struggle many years ago, primarily through his advocacy of art as an integral element of our past, secondarily through his editorship of various projects rewriting published history. He has now directly challenged our view of ourselves through the book we have just launched.

Today we thank Amelia Galang, Javier Galvan, National Artist F. Sionil Jose, Edna Formilleza, and Antonio Hila for joining Roces in launching not just a book with chapters, but a chapter in the book of our past. The past is really only what we choose to remember, and until today, we chose to remember only what would not make us uncomfortable with the way we rush headlong into revolutions not of our own making. Roces identifies as, in his words, “the core of ilustrado ideology,” the manifesto in prose of Rizal, more telling than his manifesto in verse in “Mi Ultimo Adios.” Foreshadowing Roces, Rizal wrote explicitly, “Reforms, if they are to bear fruit, must come from above, for reforms that come from below are upheavals both violent and transitory.” Mabini, echoing Rizal, offers Roces even more support for the struggle to recreate our past. Said Mabini, “In order to build the proper edifice of our social regeneration, it is imperative that we change radically not only our institutions, but also our ways of thinking and behaving.”

These are words to remember as we struggle once again these days to regain control of our future and even of our present, as we try to stop our so-called national leaders from leading us towards international disaster, as we look around for ways to retrieve our dignity as a nation and our pride as a people. Roces has boldly pointed the way to discover “nuestro perdido eden” that is right here with us now, at this very moment, part not just of our future nor of our past, but of our present.

Congratulations to all of us for sharing the unrealized dream of the ilustrados and the realized dream of the De La Salle University Press and Alfredo Roces to publish Adios, Patria Adorada: The Filipino as Ilustrado, the Ilustrado as Filipino. May we all look forward to our past!

02 January 2007

The Belly of the Business Beast

Last Dec. 4, I found myself in the belly of the beast, so to speak, from the point of view of educators. I spoke at the widely-advertised “Tripartite Summit on Higher Education,” sponsored by the Personnel Management Association of the Philippines, at the RCBC Plaza in Makati City, Philippines.

I knew that I was asking for trouble by opening with a deliberately provocative statement. I had spoken to business groups before, but this was the first time I had an audience that could actually do something about one of my advocacies. I decided to do a Manny Pacquiao.

Here is the text of my speech (though it suffers from the absence of the powerpoint presentation, that gave the statistics in graphic and startling form). I entitled my speech "Three Fingers."

I know that you asked me here to talk primarily of the Far Eastern University (FEU)-ePLDT linkage allowing graduating FEU students to take a course called “Call Center Fundamentals” in preparation for employment in the ePLDT call centers, namely Vocativ and Parlance. I will talk a little bit about that tie-up in a moment, but first, I want to get something off my chest right away.

Every time the so-called mismatch is discussed about what education supplies and what industry demands, industry always points a finger at education, saying, “It is your fault.” You all know what pointing a finger means. It means that one finger is pointing at education and three fingers are pointing back at industry. I say now to you that, yes, education is to blame for the mismatch, but industry is three times to blame. It is your fault that industry demands what education does not, cannot, will not, and should not supply.

Let me borrow from two presentations that show how industry ignores the three fingers. Here is a slide from the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) presentation last February. Government and industry are telling education what to do with curriculum, syllabi, and teacher training.

(The slide came from a powerpoint presentation done for the DOLE Workforce Development Summit Cyberservices by then Commissioner Damian Mapa. Mapa recommended that English should be taught in all four years of college, that a third of all English lessons should be on “conversational English,” that all college and high school teachers take English lessons, and that all high schools have “English-only zones.”)

Here is another slide from the same presentation (the slide said that there would be 2.45 million college graduates from 2006 to 2010). Government and industry project a need (for cyberservices) for 450 to 550,000 college graduates over a five-year period, as well as a need for 100 to 120,000 from the unemployed or underemployed. Even if we used these figures, we can see that cyberservices wants 22.5% of college graduates to pursue a career in cyberservices, rather than nursing, education, science, or the humanities. The figures, however, according to DepEd and CHED, are wrong, because there are actually only about 350,000 college graduates a year and therefore only 1,750,000 eligible college graduates over five years. This means that cyberservices wants not just 22.5% but 31.4% of college graduates.

(I then showed another slide from the Academe-Industry Collaboration Committee
Manpower Planning Survey of PMAP. The slide gave four recommendations: “Strengthen the linkage between industry and academe; Involve schools in solving some industry problems; Increased emphasis on communication skills; Formulation of competence guide by the industry to be used by the schools.”)

Here are recommendations coming from PMAP itself. Notice that PMAP does not say anything about how industry should improve, but is saying only how it thinks education should improve.

Just as education should solve educational problems, so should industry solve its own problems. If you guys in industry cannot solve your own problems, do not ask education to solve them for you.

To demand that universities deny their vision as universities, which is to be as good as, if not better, than the best in the world or at least in the region, is exactly the same as to say that Henry Sy should not aim to build the biggest mall in Asia or in the world, that Metro or BPI should not be as credible as Citigroup or HSBC, that our local firms or local branches of multinationals should not be as efficient as General Motors, Wal-Mart, or Exxon. Just as all industries strive to be as good as the best industry in the world, so do all schools benchmark with the best in the world. Just as industry has its own role models, so does education.

What are the best schools in the world? According to several recent surveys, the ten best universities in the world, not necessarily in this order, are: Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, MIT, Yale, Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia, and Chicago. In Asia, the top ten are: Tokyo, Kyoto, Australian National, Hebrew, Osaka, Tohoku, Melbourne, Tokyo Tech, Nagoya, and NUS.

Tell me honestly, do you expect a third of the graduates of these universities to have as their ambition careers in teleservices, E-services, IT outsourcing, IT enabled services, ICT enabled services, or business process outsourcing?

Education does not tell industry what to do, so can industry please stop telling education what to do? But since industry has been minding education’s business, I will now mind industry’s business. Since you insist on asking us to solve your problems, I will now give you my own ideas about how industry should solve its own problems.

Let us look at the facts. Every year, practically all 6-year-olds enter the educational system, most of them going into public schools. For every 100 of those who enter the formal school system in Grade 1, 62 will finish Grade 6 and practically all of them will move on to high school. Only 23 will finish high school, but not all of them will go to the post-secondary or tertiary or college level. Only 17 will go to college and only 14 will finish a four-year degree course. In absolute numbers, this means that, of the 2.5 million or so that enter Grade 1, only 1.5 million will go to high school, and only half a million will finish high school. Not all high school graduates go to college; only 400,000 will enter college and only 336,000 will finish a college degree.

The vast majority of these college graduates are nurses and will go abroad. They are not and should not be interested in a job in the Philippines, whether in cyberservices or elsewhere. In fact, FEU nursing graduates, which comprise the overwhelming majority of its graduates, are mostly now abroad (more than 80%, I think). Even if we do not remove the nurses from the potential workforce, however, we are still faced with an anomaly in the way industry thinks.

Let us subtract the number of college graduates from the number of high school graduates. We get roughly 200,000. Education will produce over the next five years 1.08 million high school graduates that will not finish college. According to the CICT’s own estimates, the maximum number of jobs available in cyberservices in the next five years for college graduates and the unemployed is 670,000. There is the solution to your problem. All industry has to do is to tap this vast pool of human resources.

Let me go back to the pointing finger. What are the three fingers that point back at industry?

The first finger is the insistence of industry to require a college degree for tasks that do not need college education. Here are some qualifications listed in wanted ads last week. For Purchaser, “graduate of any 4-year course.” For Quality Control Assistant, “candidate must posses at least a Bachelor’s or College Degree in any field.” For Receptionist, “Must possess a BSBA degree major in Marketing and Sales, Business Development, Economics, Finance or Accounting.” For Insurance Staff Reliever, “Must possess at least a Bachelor’s degree in any field.” For Transcriptionist, “Must possess at least a Bachelor’s degree in Sales and Marketing.” For Real Estate Consultant, “College Graduate.” For Medical Representative, “Graduate of any Science or Business Course.” Just scan the want ads in any Sunday paper, and you know that a college degree is required of practically every job. That industry does not really care whether the specialization of the applicant fits the job is itself a clear sign of bad business sense. By the way, a college degree is not the only popular requirement for all kinds of jobs unrelated to what one studies in college. The other requirement is, you guessed it, a “pleasing personality.”

The second finger is the unwillingness of industry to shoulder the costs of training recruits for its own purposes. It has long been known by linguists and language educators that there is no such thing as English for general purposes. All English is English for specific purposes. You need one kind of English to understand movies in English. You need quite a different one to understand the English that computer programmers use. You need another kind to understand the English that chess players use. Language learning today is always geared towards a particular purpose, whether it is to read scientific texts or to visit a foreign country or to order food in a restaurant or to become a call center representative. Schools teach the kind of English one needs to understand academic discourse, which is about as far from conversational English as legal English is to medical English. All industry needs to do to meet its human resources needs is to train high school graduates to speak the kind of English that the individual companies need.

Is that impossible? Not according to all the language schools that advertise on the Web. All these schools claim, and their products prove them right, that it is possible to learn a language, any language, in 200 hours. One foundation I head, and this is blatant self-advertising, has a program called “The 4S Approach to Literacy and Language,” which is being used by some call centers. We can take someone with terrible pronunciation and grammar and very little knowledge of English and we make that someone a call center representative in less than 200 hours. Ask me later if you want details. It’s a foundation, so the admittedly high fees go to charitable projects.

Instant learning of languages is not something new. Filipino scholars funded by Monbusho are asked to study Japanese for one semester and are able to attend classes in Japanese after only that one semester. American soldiers sent to war learn enough of whatever the language is of the country they are in to avoid being killed. If you can put your life on the line after only a few weeks of learning a language, you can certainly become a call center representative after only 200 hours of learning English. Answering calls is not a matter of life and death to CSRs, though they may look that way to those making the call.

In fact, in the FEU-ePLDT program, we do not even offer 200 hours of English language instruction. We offer only 66 hours. This brings me to FEU and ePLDT.

In 2003, FEU and ePLDT started a joint program aimed at supplying Parlance and Vocativ with fresh graduates trained not just in English but in Customer Service Management and American history, geography, and culture. The program consists of 108 hours of instruction over and above the usual subjects required by CHED for students to graduate. There are 42 hours of grammar, 24 hours of pronunciation and accent neutralization, 24 hours of customer service management, and 18 hours on America.

In the 2003-2004 or first batch, there were initially 69 students, 67 of whom finished the program. The terms of the MOA provided that trainees had to pass the normal ePLDT entrance exams. 59 out of the 67 passed ePLDT’s requirements. This pilot batch revealed a major deficiency in the training: most of the trainees resigned only a few days after they were hired, because they were not emotionally prepared for inbound calls. FEU and ePLDT then revised the curriculum to include interpersonal communication and some psychology.

The Summer 2004 batch went through the revised curriculum. Of the 37 initial students, 23 finished the training. This was a poor batch in terms of acceptance. I don’t have the actual figures, but there were very few that ePLDT hired. The main reason turned out to be the inability of the trainees to handle the initial job interview. FEU and ePLDT then revised the curriculum again to include mock interviews, as well as stress management.

Because of the changes, the 2004-2005 batch fared better. 35 students made it through the training and 30 were offered jobs for international accounts and 5 for local accounts, a 100% success rate.

Currently, there is a batch undergoing training, and we are hopeful that they will be as successful as the previous batch.

What are the best practices that FEU has instituted that may be of interest to those planning to start similar linkages? First is the presence of American instructors. Although Filipino English teachers will hate me for this, I think that the main reason our students do not learn English is they are being taught by Filipinos who have never lived in the UK or in the USA. I don’t think you will trust a chef to do a French dish who has never tasted a dish prepared by a French chef. If you had to have a heart bypass, will you entrust your life to a medical doctor who has never been inside an operating room? Will you trust a travel agent who has never traveled? The late Doreen Fernandez, then our best authority on food, used to explain why Philippine spaghetti is sweet, why Philippine paella does not look at all like the Spanish dish, and why there is no lumpiang shanghai in Shanghai. She said that the Filipinos that originally prepared these dishes had never tasted the original food and just made up the dishes according to rumor. Similarly, we make up our own kind of English because most of us have never listened or talked to Americans or the British in their own country.

One thing industry foundations can do, and I’ve said this again and again, is to shoulder the costs of Filipino English teachers visiting the UK or the US. One or two months in English-speaking countries will do more for English for a Filipino than all those grammar exercises and learning modules.

A second best practice is the use of an actual computer lab with software similar to that used in call centers. Hands-on simulation works wonders for training.

A third best practice is visiting an actual call center to get a taste of how it feels to work in one. This is not the same as practicum, because the time is very short, but it gives the potential CSR a chance to see that there is life in call centers.

A fourth best practice is to let the parents sign a contract with the sponsoring company. In the case of non-minors, who can therefore sign on their own, the parents can sign as witnesses to the contract. This way, the parents put additional pressure on the trainee to finish the training.

Let us go back to the fingers. The third finger pointing back at industry is pride or “fried chicken,” as we say in Philippine English. Industry is too proud to accept that education is itself an industry, with its own goals and objectives. Manufacturers do not tell retailers how to sell. Real estate developers do not tell bankers how to handle money. Although there is, of course, synergy and cooperation between different types of industry, there is also mutual respect. Education is also an industry. In fact, as you know from business surveys, FEU is one of the top corporations in the country as far as ROI is concerned. During the time of the late Brother Andrew Gonzalez, De La Salle University was one of the top corporations in the country in terms of profitability, although it was technically nonprofit and all profit was plowed back to the institution in terms of new infrastructure. That most of the taipans, and now even non-taipans, have deemed it wise to invest in or even to buy universities is a clear sign that education is a viable business. Industry should not tell universities what to do, but should give education the respect it deserves.

What, after all, is a university? Let us look again at Harvard and the other top universities in the world. What they do is what education should do. A university, in fact, all education from elementary to postgraduate, aims at educating, not training, persons. Industry needs trained employees. Education will not supply that training. Education exists for something else altogether, not to give people a chance to earn a living, but to live. There is a vast difference. Just look at Bill Gates. When is he happiest? He tells us himself – when he is playing contract bridge with his bridge partner Warren Buffett. That is living. That has nothing to do with earning money. In fact, Bill Gates hardly ever wins at contract bridge, because he is not a very good bridge player. But that is what makes him happy, not just the billions he makes from all that software. Of course, the billions help. I am not saying that industry should not make money. On the contrary, industry should make money, but universities are not interested or should not be interested in making money, just in making enough money to keep themselves alive to serve students. Bill Gates has a lesson there for all of us, whether we are in industry or education, or in the industry that is education.

Here are my own recommendations for industry. If industry wants to solve the mismatch from its end, not from the end of education, these are some things it can do.

First, industry should not demand a college degree for work that does not require Harvard-level education. I am very happy to note that, lately, advertisements for call center jobs no longer specify that the applicant should have a college degree.

Second, industry should financially support high schools to ensure that high school graduates are employable. After all, the revised Basic Education Curriculum adds livelihood as one of the major goals of secondary education.

Third, we have long known that one reason our education is weak is its length, or lack of it. We have only ten years of basic education, but every other country in the world, except one or two, has at least twelve. Industry should lobby for another two years of basic education, to be added to high school, in order to reach international standards as well as to increase the age of high school graduates.

Fourth, there should be a change in the way call center jobs are advertised. Call center jobs pay well, but that is the only thing good about them. They destroy families that can no longer sit down together for meals, they destroy the physical health of people biorhythmically attuned to sleeping at night, they ruin the mental and spiritual health of idealistic young people who have to listen to angry customers or to unresponsive clients, they lessen the chances of finding a suitable marriage partner.

I suggest that call center jobs be advertised as temporary, as a way to spend a year before taking on a job that one has studied for. For example, nursing graduates have to remain in the country for a year before they go abroad. Instead of being idle, they can work in call centers that cater to insurance claims and such, thus making use of their health vocabulary and knowledge. In fact, since they are good enough to go and work in the USA, they should be good enough to talk to Americans on the phone.

Fifth, industry should put its money where its mouth is. Fund Filipino English teachers to visit the UK and the USA, and see how dramatically the English of both teachers and students improves.

Sixth, industry should fund American and British teachers who can teach in our Teacher Training Institutions.

Having said all that about industry, let me now say something about education.

I head a professional organization of teachers and scholars teaching and writing in Filipino. The organization is called Wika, and it is devoted to making Filipino the sole medium of instruction in our educational system. I also am a member of the Philippine chapter of the English Speaking Union, which is devoted to propagating the use of the English language around the world, as well as the Foundation for Upgrading the Standard of Education (FUSE), which spearheads a lot of English-language programs. People sometimes ask me how I can reconcile these roles, not to mention my writing in both English and Filipino and writing about Filipino in a column in an English newspaper, or my teaching now in straight Filipino and now in straight English.

The answer is simple. There is only one way to improve the English of our students, and that is to make Filipino the medium of instruction in all subjects except English. When I teach an English subject, I teach in English. When I teach a non-English subject, such as literature, criticism, media, and even statistics, I teach in Filipino.

All educators know about the amount of research that has gone into the language of learning. There are hundreds of books and articles that prove that children learn best in their home language. Americans learn best in English, the Chinese learn best in Chinese, the Japanese learn best in Japanese, the French learn best in French, and so on. There is not even one book or article done by linguists (people with PhDs in linguistics) that says the opposite.

There are numerous experiments done in the Philippines itself that show that children that learn mathematics and science in Hiligaynon or some other vernacular language always score higher in exams than those that are taught in English. Even the results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) shows that we scored relatively higher, all things considered, when our students took the test in Filipino than when they were forced last time to take it in English.

There is no question whatsoever that Filipino or another vernacular language should be the medium of instruction for math, science, and Makabayan. Even those that say that other countries are trying to learn English while we are supposedly trying to get rid of it conveniently do not mention that China will never allow English to replace Chinese as their medium of instruction, the Japanese will always use Japanese, and so on. The medium of instruction has nothing to do with whether we can learn English or not.

There is also no question whatsoever that Filipinos that finish college every year should know English. The country needs to know what is going on elsewhere in the world, needs to have people to do international business, needs to publish its research, and so on. I have shown you today that high school graduates that do not go to college can be taught BPO English in less than 200 hours per person.

But to learn English, students must have good English teachers. A good English teacher is one that has lived in the UK or the USA, even for only a couple of months. Remember that Filipinos learned English from the Thomasites in only one generation. Our grandparents still claim that they spoke better English than us, because their teachers were American.

The solution for the English problem is simple. Use Filipino to teach math, science, and Makabayan. Bring in good British or American teachers to teach English or make our own English teachers good by sending them out.

Education shares part of the blame for the mismatch, but it has only one part of the blame. Three parts of the blame belong to industry. It is time to stop pointing a finger at each other, because we only condemn ourselves. (First published in The Philippine Star, 7 & 14 December 2006)

02 December 2006

Split-Level Americanization: A Case Study of McDonaldized Philippines

If there is a place on earth that seems more American than the United States of America, that place is the Philippines.

A typical American city does not have a McDonalds on every street corner. There is a McDonalds or similar American fast-food outlet on every street corner in Metro Manila.

A typical American businessman wears a suit (or more likely, a sports jacket or even a blazer) to work and takes off the jacket when the room becomes too warm. A typical Filipino businessman wears a real suit to work (or even to parties) and never takes off the jacket even if the temperature in Manila ranges from 25°C to 28°C. In fact, a jacket is called by Filipinos an americana.

There are four national newspapers in the United States (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal). In the Philippines, there are nine national newspapers in English (Business Mirror, Business World, Daily Tribune, Malaya, Manila Bulletin, Manila Standard, Manila Times, Philippine Daily Inquirer, and Philippine Star).

A typical American buys 17 movies on DVD a year (as of 2004, according to USA Today). A typical Filipino probably buys 17 American movies on DVD a month. (Of course, DVDs in the Philippines are very much cheaper because they are pirated.)

The Philippines is the only country in its region with an American-type presidential form of government featuring a strong president. In fact, it has a stronger president than even George W. Bush. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo controls everything in the Philippines. According to the latest surveys, at least half of all Filipinos still residing in the Philippines say that she personally controls even the corruption (the Philippines is the 98th least corrupt nation on earth), but that impression is most likely only successful propaganda mounted against her by her political enemies. Coincidentally, in the last American elections, according to surveys conducted by CNN, corruption was the Number One issue against Bush.

The United States as a whole has not legislated English as its official language. English is one of only two official languages of the Philippines. In fact, Filipinos claim that the Philippines is the third largest English-speaking country in the world, next only to India and the United States.

On the surface, it looks like the neo-colonization or Macdonaldization of the Philippines is complete, at least in terms of food, fashion, media, government, and language.

But this is only all on the surface. Beneath the surface, in what cultural critics could call a deconstructive anti-hegemonic movement or, in older language, anticolonial subversion, there is no place as unlike the United States as the Philippines.

For example, in general, Americans obey the law, from the simplest traffic laws to their Constitution. In contrast, in general, Filipinos ignore all traffic laws and whoever is the Philippine President routinely issues executive orders that blatantly violate the Philippine Constitution.

In general, Americans go to school. In general, Filipinos do not go to school. Let me qualify that. More than 85% of Americans finish high school. Practically every Filipino enters the first grade of school, but only 62% finish elementary school, only 23% finish high school, and only 14% finish a four-year college course.

In general, both Americans and Filipinos speak English. It is true that 65% of Filipinos claim to speak English as a second language (the primary languages being Tagalog for 22M and Cebuano for 18.5M, among 171 living Philippine languages spoken by the 85-plus million Filipinos), but the English that they speak, which historically they learned from American teachers at the turn of the 20th century, is Philippine English, a variety of English that belongs, according to the usual linguistic classification, to the Outer Circle of English-speaking countries. Documented only partially by dictionaries such as the Anvil-Macquarie Dictionary of Philippine English for High School (2000), Philippine English is almost another language, almost unintelligible to speakers of American English. The second largest English-speaking country in the world, Australia, in fact, has deemed it fit to classify the Philippines as a “non-English-speaking country.” Note this classification from the government website of New South Wales: “The top five countries of birth in NSW (non-English speaking country) are: China, Vietnam, Italy, Lebanon and the Philippines (2001 ABS Census data).”

These anecdotal but purposive facts are meant only to introduce my thesis, which is that Americanization in the Philippines is split-level. I take the phrase “split-level” from a 1967 paper by Jaime Bulatao on “Split-Level Christianity,” in which he shows that the Christian religion is only skin-deep in the Philippines. The Philippines, by the way, is also unique among Pacific nations when it comes to religion, since it is one of only two countries – the other one being East Timor – whose population is overwhelmingly Christian, at least in name.

As far as definition of terms is concerned, my use of the term “split-level” is different from its use by Laurence A. Rickels to describe the kind of group psychology applicable to California (http://www.hydra.umn.edu/twd/cat1.html), which is the state with the biggest portion of the 2M Filipino population of the United States. As far as I know, no one has used the term “split-level” in discourses on cultural imperialism, American or otherwise.

American cultural imperialism may be very much alive and well in other countries, but in the Philippines, it is not what it is reputed to be. I do not mean to generalize from the case study that is the Philippines, not only because the Philippines is indeed unique in many ways nor only because I am definitely not an expert on any other country except my own. What I merely want to do is to use the Philippines today as the exceptional case study that might prove the rule.

In order to have a focus, I will speak primarily of media – print, film, and television. Since the pervasiveness of media in today’s global culture is a given, media might be a good way to enter the split-level world of American cultural imperialism in the Philippines. In addition, media is a hot topic in Philippine academic circles. Just last week, for example, on 18 November, the American Studies Association of the Philippines devoted its annual general assembly to the topic of “Philippine and American Media: Critical Interaction and Transformation,” with a concept paper that started this way:

In the present era of globalization, it is undeniable that Philippine media has been and continues to be influenced by foreign media. We get our foreign news from satellite feeds from CNN and BBC. Many of the shows aired on local free TV are canned shows from American networks or Pinoy [Filipino] adaptations of some foreign shows. These shows, such as Amazing Race, Fear Factor, American Idol, MTV, or even dubbed Korean telenovelas have become the nightly fare of many Filipino families. American influences on our media and consequently its influence on our culture are here to stay.

This conference aims to present a critical view of the dynamics of Philippine and American media and culture. How has our media and culture been affected by the dominance of American culture throughout the world? How do we adapt to this? As American influences transform our culture, how do we view the interrelation between Philippine and American media and culture critically?

Will we simply follow the way set out by American television, music, food, clothes and films? Is there a way to resist? Must we resist? How?

If you check into an upscale hotel anywhere in the Philippines, when you wake up, you will be given a daily newspaper. That daily newspaper will be in English. This will give you the impression that Philippine print media is in English. That is a wrong impression. In reality, the circulation of the biggest English-language daily newspaper is less than 250,000 a day. (I know that the figure looks silly compared to that of Yomiuri Shimbun with its 14.5M copies a day, but indulge Filipino publishers a bit.) The circulation of the most popular daily newspaper in Filipino is over 450,000 a day. The total circulation of all English-language newspapers is only 1.5M copies a day. The total circulation of all Filipino-language newspapers is over 3.5M a day (Abante, Abante Tonite, Bulgar, People’s Journal, People’s Journal Tonight, and People’s Taliba).

If you go to a shopping mall in Metro Manila, or in fact, anywhere in the Philippines, you will most likely see a number of movie screens (“screens” is usually used rather than “theater”) showing American films. If you were to go only by the number of billboards or posters advertising American movies, you would think that Filipinos watch a lot of American movies. What you should do, however, is to enter the moviehouse to see how many people are actually inside. You might be amazed to find out that a lot more moviegoers see a movie in Filipino per day, than watch an American movie. Because movie attendance records are kept secret by distributors and exhibitors for fear of the right taxes being imposed on them, I do not have hard data about this impression. It can, however, be easily verified by merely entering a moviehouse showing an American movie in Metro Manila.

If you have cable television in the Philippines, you can catch not only CCN but also Fox, CBS, and just about every network Americans watch in their own bedrooms. But the television ratings do not lie. Programs in Filipino have an almost total market share of the viewing public. In fact, foreign television series and movies are dubbed into Filipino in order to be shown on free or non-cable stations.

It is not just the language that is not American in Philippine media, but the content. The New York Times will fire a reporter who manufactures data or copies from other sources. Philippine daily newspapers sometimes, though not often, print unverified news or rumors, with the intention of printing an erratum or even an apology the next day in case the report turns out not to be true. “Print first, deny later” is a popular practice of some, perhaps many, Philippine newspapers.

Philippine movies may look like derivatives of American movies, with a proliferation of fantastic characters and plagiarized storylines, but if we look closely at the structure of the movies, they do not follow the Hollywood three-act structure as promulgated and popularized by Syd Field. The mindset of the Philippine audience is not a carbon copy of that of the American audience, but is qualitatively different. For example, the Philippine plagiarized version of Wonder Woman, named Darna, adds a distinctly Filipino characterization of Narda, the woman who turns into a superwoman. Narda typifies the ordinary Filipino, in contrast to the atypical character of the woman behind Wonder Woman. I am not the first scholar to say this, but it is worth saying again: Filipino superheroes are qualitatively different from American superheroes because the former relies on forces outside her or him (such as a magic stone or clever relatives), unlike the latter, who generally have the powers bestowed upon them either by virtue of birth (such as Superman) or by wealth (such as Batman).

Television news in the Philippines is nothing at all like American television news. There is no such thing as television news in the Philippines in the American sense. All Philippine television news is either advertising for products or entertaining for ratings or both. For example, 24 Oras, Saksi, and TV Patrol, the three highest-rated television news shows, focus not on news that the public has to know, but on insignificant news that looks good on the screen because it is either sexy or violent or both.

Speaking of ratings, among cable viewers, that is, those with access to American shows, the highest rating shows are Filipino free channel game shows using only a little English and having little American content. The audience that comes out of the economic A and B classes comprise less than three percent of the television market, and media being an industry more than a public service, media networks have deemed it wise simply to ignore the rich and to target the poor.

The ratings, in fact, paint a portrait of the Filipino television viewer as interested only in shows either originally or dubbed in vernacular languages. Examples of highly-rated shows (figures as of 23 October 2006) are Eat Bulaga (24.8%) and Wowowee (19.4%) on the same time slot, together eating up 44.7% of the viewing public. 24 Oras (29.6%) and TV Patrol (26.2%) on the same time slot take up an even larger 55.8%. Primetime shows show the same pattern: Captain Barbell (34.5%) with Deal or No Deal (31.6%), Atlantika (30%) with Super Inggo (29%), and Bakekang (31%) with Maging Sino Ka Man (25.2%). Clearly, American shows are non-existent and uninteresting as far as the majority of Filipino viewers are concerned.

If in reality the language used in media is not English and Filipinos overwhelmingly prefer their news and entertainment in their own languages and if in reality the content of the media is significantly different, why is there an appearance of Americanization in Philippine media?

The phenomenon of split-level cultural imperialism cannot be fully understood if we stick only to the Raymond Williams model of residual-dominant-emergent culture. To think of something Filipino as residual, of American or Western culture as dominant, and perhaps deliberately subversive sub- or anti-culture as emergent glosses over the lack of clear distinctions between types of culture in the country. Someone driving a Japanese car with the CD player or iPod blasting out a pirated American song may strike European critics as postmodern, but if we look at old Philippine houses, we will realize that eclecticism is the rule rather than the exception in Philippine culture. Even the typical modern building in the business center of Makati City is based on the Asian model of a house on stilts, with the ground floor being used merely as a holding area for visitors. The cell phone is a way not to accelerate communication, but to spread tsismis (a blend of gossip and censored news), the main preoccupation of Filipinos of whatever social standing.

Nor can Americanization be understood fully within postcolonial theory, since the Philippines is twice-removed from the Empire, the United States being itself a postcolonial country. I like to call the Philippines the Other Other, since it hardly ever appears in discussions of postcoloniality. If I may be forgiven for quoting myself, in a paragraph that I have used repeatedly in various international conferences, I like to think that, although contemporary Filipino theorists presumably work in decolonized space, Philippine culture is still heavily undertheorized. At first glance, this undertheorization appears due either to the decentering of critical theory within the Philippine academic community or to the marginalization of cultural orientalism within Anglo-American academic discourse. Upon closer examination, however, this undertheorization may be shown to stem from the internalization of a hegemonic universalization of culturally imperialistic, pre- or anti- theoretical, quasi-formalistic, mechanically reflectionist, white patriarchy. The abstract nature of that paragraph can be grasped more easily if we turn to its objective correlative – boxer Manny Pacquiao beating up a Mexican, since the Philippines was ruled by Spain through Mexico for three hundred years. It is no coincidence that Pacquiao is known as “The National Fist,” since the closed fist is the accepted symbol of the New People’s Army, the communist armed force that has been waging war against the Philippine government for decades, as well as the symbol of the successful civilian-backed coup d’etat against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

Nor can the phenomenon of split-level Americanization be understood fully even with the familiar indigenization-subversion duality. Falling into an essentialist trap is too difficult to avoid for those insisting on a nativist past reacting to or against a foreign invader. In certain areas of culture, notably food, there is clear evidence that no foreign food gets cooked exactly the same way that it is cooked in its country of origin (in the Philippines, spaghetti is sweet, paella is full of ingredients other than rice, Chinese noodles have no relationship to their Chinese ancestors; even McDonald’s serves rice and very salty hamburgers). Gemino Abad and other critics have even claimed that Filipinos have colonized the English language. Clodualdo del Mundo Jr. says the same of film, calling the phenomenon “native resistance.” But in general, it is impossible to say what has been indigenized, whether deliberately or by inertia, and what is being subverted, whether because of ideology in the vulgar Marxist sense or ideology in the way Marx understood the term.

To understand split-level Americanization, let us use the concept of counterhegemonic struggle. I borrow the term from Antonio Gramsci, but the concept from Jose Rizal, the nineteenth-century writer who first realized that intellectuals from the ruling class were actually brainwashing the oppressed masses with scholarship that appeared to be reality-based but was actually only ideological propaganda. Ideology (in the Marxist sense) or hegemony or, as I call it in my own language, gahum is the reason we find split-leveling in the Americanization of the Philippines.

In particular, let me cite the issue of language. On paper, the official policy of the Philippine Constitution is that Filipino is the primary language of instruction in all classrooms at all levels. The traditional policy of the Department of Education, enacted before the present Constitution, is that both English and Filipino are the languages of instruction in public school classrooms. Arroyo has issued an executive order forcing public school teachers to use English as the primary language of instruction (thus violating the Constitution); until the Supreme Court slaps Arroyo on the wrist, as it has done a number of times to date, the Department of Education has no choice but to implement such an order.

In reality, however, despite the Constitution, the presidential order, and the Department orders, there is only one language of instruction in practically all classrooms in the country. It is Taglish, a non-language that is variously labeled as code-switching, pidgin, or a lingua franca, featuring a still-unsystematized mixture of Tagalog, English, and vernacular languages of various regions. The government’s own language body, the Commission on Philippine Languages, defines the official language Filipino as whatever language is spoken in the urban centers, especially Metro Manila (in the North), Metro Cebu (in the middle of the archipelago), and Metro Davao (in the South). Since there is no scientific documentation of Taglish, we can rely only on broad impression – the language or non-language spoken in the three urban centers is Taglish, and since this language is defined as Filipino, Filipino is really Taglish. The few academic sources on Filipino, such as the Filipino dictionary (UP Diksiyonaryong Filipino, 2001) prepared by the University of the Philippines (the first of only four Philippine universities listed in the latest world university rankings), strengthen the impression that Filipino is really Taglish.

Why is language so crucial in any study of media and culture? The answer should be obvious. Print media uses language extensively, and the periodicals in Filipino are outstripping the periodicals in English in circulation more than 2 to 1, yet the false impression remains that English is the language of print media. Television uses language also extensively, though less obviously than print; television programs in English are invisible in terms of ratings, yet the false impression remains that English is the language of television. Film as a whole has declined in theater attendance, due not only to the rising poverty in the country but also to the declining attractiveness of movie theaters worldwide, but Filipino has been and remains the language of all Philippine films. The gap between fact and impression contributes to the split-leveling of Americanization.

In 1946, the Filipino-American writer and dissident Carlos Bulosan published a novel entitled America is in the Heart. America today is not in the heart, if it ever was. It is in the cataract, in the blurred vision that keeps the rich and the influential from seeing what and who they really are.

The wartime Japanese Co-prosperity Sphere seems outrageously a bad idea on hindsight, particularly in an American base such as Okinawa, but most Filipino intellectuals thought it a very good idea in the late thirties and early forties of the last century. Most Filipino intellectuals and practically everybody that had any money or property collaborated with the Japanese invaders during the Pacific War. Then, as now, it was the masses of the Filipino people that saw through the propaganda of the rich and the powerful and actively resisted the onslaught of foreign culture. It was the poor and the powerless that took up the call of patriotism and ran the nationwide guerrilla movement that forced the Japanese military to overlook obvious signs of the American recovery from early defeat.

The Philippines today may look foreign even to some Filipinos, but beneath the surface and behind the Western walls, the country remains as inscrutable to foreigners, as exotic if you like, as pure, and as Filipino as it was when the first Filipinos, back in the first century before the Christian era, carved out from the northern mountainside a series of engineering marvels known as the rice terraces, the only ancient wonder of the world that up to today serves its original purpose, which was to give food and pride to a population that was much more advanced in technology and certainly very much more civilized than its future colonizers.

At the end of the day, in what might very well be true also of other postcolonial nations in the Asia-Pacific region, what we are witnessing in the Philippine case is a people – or if you wish an imagined community – constantly and unceasingly reimagining itself through the medium of media, reasserting its identity in the face of both the homogenizing power of external or global forces and the collaborating hegemony of internal or selfish elites, and redefining the nation on its own terms and in its own time.

(Paper read at the International Conference on the United States and the Pacific Islands: Culture, Science, Politics, held in Okinawa, Japan, on 25-26 November 2006)