Teaching Rizal and Filipino
There is something wrong with how Rizal is being taught in basic education today. A high school student would usually equate Rizal’s Noli and Fili with individual student reports and answering endless guide questions per chapter. For many decades, this has been the teaching method of many Filipino teachers tasked to teach Rizal’s novels in secondary education, probably born out of fear and inability to understand, much more teach Rizal’s take on our situation as a nation. Worse, most students are given a watered-down version of the novels, removing many satirical parts of Rizal’s work, in favor of conciseness and ease of reading for the student.
This, too, has been my experience when I was in high school. Fortunately, Jose Rizal was able to transcend the lack of skill of my teachers and the poor translations of textbook authors. I still distinctly remember the summer before my senior high school year, when out of boredom, I grabbed my El Filibusterismo textbook and finished reading the novel in a week. Back then, Joseph Estrada had just won the presidency, to the frustration of many Filipinos who wondered why the Filipino masses were so ignorant as to elect an unqualified person like Estrada to become the leader of the nation for six years. It was Rizal, though, who first opened my eyes to the cancer of Philippine society, and my first enlightening moment from literature happened on our couch after reading Padre Florentino’s advice to a dying and despairing Simoun:
There is nothing left to do but endure and work. An immoral government is matched by a demoralized people; and an administration without conscience, by greedy and servile citizens. The slave is the image of his master, the country of its government. The just God has condemned us for our lack of faith, our vices and our small regard for dignity and civic virtues. We tolerate vice and become accomplices in it, sometimes even applaud it. No, Mr. Simoun, we must win our freedom by deserving it, by improving our mind and enhancing the dignity of the individual, loving what is just, what is good, what is great, to the point of dying for it. When people reach these heights, tyrants fall and freedom shines in the first dawn. As long as the Filipino people do not have sufficient vigor to proclaim, head held high and chest bared, their right to a life of their own and to guarantee it with their sacrifices, with their very blood; as long as we see our countrymen feel privately ashamed, keeping silent and even joining the oppressor in mocking the oppressed, and begging with their eyes for a share of the booty, why give them independence? With or without Spain, they would be the same, and perhaps, worse. What is the use of independence if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow? If our country is some day to be free, it will not be through bloodshed and corruption. Redemption presupposes virtue; virtue, sacrifice and love!
It was right after reading those words that I paused from my reading, looked at the book in astonishment and wondered in awe how a man who lived a century before could predict with accuracy and precision what would happen to our country. I looked at my humble textbook and felt it was like a prophetic scroll of the destiny of our country. And I wondered further, why we keep on asking why our country has been the sick man of Asia, when all along, our national hero has described for us the root of society’s cancer.
From then on, reading was not just about entertainment. I began to understand that reading’s goal was to achieve understanding and wisdom. From then on, too, I understood, too, how being a Filipino is not just about accepting one’s country of birth, but also by loving the nation enough to know its ills and having the desire to rid the motherland of the affliction it has been suffering for centuries.
I have always been asked, sometimes with contempt and derision, why I chose to be a Filipino teacher. If I could answer the question with one word, it would have to be Rizal. Teaching Filipino is having the opportunity of being able to explain to my students the thoughts of a man who knew the greatness and weakness of the Filipino soul, the chance of pointing out how craft in writing and insight could enlighten a nation, and how, in the fight for true freedom, words could be more loaded than primitive guns and sharper than native bolos.
One hundred fifty years hence, Rizal’s greatness survives and continues to demand of us that to attain true freedom, we must become better Filipinos.
