As a consultant of the Philippine National Museum Foundation, however, Silva must also do what was once thought of as near impossible: convert teachers and students into museum lovers.
In a single day, Silva says the biggest shopping mall in Makati City could draw half a million visitors. That’s usually the total number of people who visit the National Museum in Manila in a year.
Museum administrators agree that department stores, along with field trips to television studios to watch live noontime shows, compete with museum visits for patronage from teachers, students and their parents.
Silva says this is a sad reality, especially in a country coping with a limited education budget, overcrowded schools, a shortage of textbooks, and poor reading and comprehension skills of students. He says museums should be considered as a vehicle for non-traditional methods of teaching and learning that could be included in the school curriculum.
"Sadly, many teachers fail to grasp a museum’s important role in developing individual thought, nationalist consciousness, and civic pride in a country’s heritage," Silva says.
Under a grant from The Ford Foundation, a New York-based funding institution, the Philippine National Museum Foundation last year tapped Silva to run a project that will teach teachers how to love local museums and make them part of formal classroom teaching methods.
The "I Love Museum" project targeted seven cities in Cavite, Bulacan, Cebu, Bacolod, Iloilo, Cagayan de Oro and Zamboanga where Silva held lectures and organized museum tours. He also shared his skills with the local museums’ personnel for them to train teachers on how to act as effective museum guides to their students. Silva used personal anecdotes, especially from his experiences visiting museums abroad, and local lore and legends in the dialect to encourage teachers to actively participate and appreciate their province’s rich cultural heritage.
All the participants willingly paid the seminar registration fee of P100 per head that went to the local museums, except for Museo Iloilo which opted not to charge. Over 65 percent of those who attended admitted visiting their local museum only for the first time. Many were also pleasantly surprised with the breadth and range of the museum artifacts and the richness of their local culture.
Cristina Barro, who teaches social studies at St. Teresita’s Academy in Silay City, Negros Occidental, admits taking her Grade 3 to 6 pupils to local museums only once a year to comply with the Department of Education’s requirements. Co-teacher Glenda Jomantoc says her high school students usually take the initiative in visiting local museums as part of their school organization’s activities.
While both realize the role of museums in enhancing student learning, they say teachers usually take passive interest in the artifacts they have been used to seeing in their yearly visits. They said they would usually arrange for transportation to bring their class to the museum. Once inside, they would leave it up to the museum guides to discuss the local artifacts and their history, and would listen along with their students.
The teachers say Silva’s alternative learning method made them realize that teachers can also turn the museum into a classroom.
"It’s only now that I’ve learned I could also be a museum guide and teach history, science, culture and the arts inside the museum while showing the artifacts to my class," Barro says.
At the DLSU Museum in Dasmariñas, Cavite, Silva utilized the extensive Bahay na Bato recreation with old furniture to point out the inherent craftsmanship of locals.
"That seminar was a bit of a challenge," Silva admits. "How do you explain the importance of the furniture of the very rich Pampango families, their room recreations, paintings on ceilings, European statues, countless saints and figurines, an elaborate altar – all these incredible display of feudal wealth – to teachers?"
The DLSU Bahay na Bato served as a physical study of feudal culture "like the Chinese communist stance on the Forbidden City in Beijing," Silva explains. In his seminar, he carefully pointed to the lifestyles of the rich during the olden days "without exciting the teachers’ proletarian passions." He instead emphasized the legacy of native craftsmen who carved the furniture and other items which was "worthy of reviewing and remembering."
Silva faced the same challenge in Bacolod City where the Negros Museum hosts artifacts, artwork and crafts that provide a glimpse of the powerful sugar hacienderos in the early times. Instead, visitors were impressed with the rich sugar tales dished out by the animated museum guides, the sugar laboratory once used by Victorias Milling Co. (then the country’s foremost sugar mill), and the 40-foot ship housed on the balcony which carried items traded by locals during the pre-Spanish period and was built by native shipbuilders from Bago.
In Iloilo City, nearly 90 teachers trooped to the Museo Iloilo on a Sunday last March and were treated to a lively guided tour by museum administrator Zaffy Ledesma. Aside from a rare pottery collection, the museum houses a rare statue of the "Dead Christ" lying on a glass coffin and those of other saints, and pays tribute to the interesting life of Jose Calugas, an Ilonggo cook who became the only Filipino who got a Medal of Honor from the United States in 1942. Japanese war relics and artifacts recovered from a British ship that sank in Guimaras in the early 19th century are also displayed at the museum, proof that trade flourished among Filipinos and the British in the early days.
"This shows the potential of this program, not just to benefit teachers and students, but to increase the number of people who visit their museums each year," Silva says. It also shows how teachers could play a pivotal role in preserving museums and their community’s rich cultural heritage.
Silva says there are more than 100 local museums scattered all around the country, crying of neglect and the lack of funds. A typical museum would require a budget of at least P3 million a year. Entrance fees, which usually cost less than P50 (one US dollar), are currently not enough to sustain the maintenance and other operating costs of a museum.
Silva says the Philippine National Museum Foundation has been rallying museums all over the country to reach out to communities, including the schools. Some have started their own educational programs such as the Negros Museum which holds kindergarten classes inside its building for streetchildren. Some also engage the young and the elderly in the community, and college history majors as volunteer guides. Even local taxi and tricycle drivers act as "museum partners" by bringing in visitors.
All these efforts seem to be paying off. Silva says the National Museum in Manila alone expects its number of visitors this year to reach one million, or double that of the previous years.
The initial success of the "I Love Museum" program gave Silva the confidence to personally pay a visit to the foreign donor’s New York headquarters early this year and literally knocked on its doors to plead continued financial support for the program which was supposed to run for only a year.
Impressed with Silva’s dedication and seeing the program’s long-term potential, The Ford Foundation has decided to extend a grant until 2005, despite plans to shut down its Manila office by next year.
Silva wants the three-year program to focus on cultural diversity in the Philippines.
"Religious conflicts, the further impoverishment and decimation of our indigenous peoples, the Christian-Moslem tension in the southern Philippines, and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the US, now make it imperative for teachers, through museums, to instruct their students to appreciate diversity for them to contribute later to world peace," he says.
Silva says museum artifacts such as Moslem grave markers, Bulol rice gods, and ancient Mangyan writings usually require a teaching population that are predominantly Christians. "Teachers require a sophisticated sensitivity so they can imbibe on their students a deep and abiding respect for the various non-Christian populations in our country," he says.
The program will also gauge the effectiveness of museum visits in improving the reading comprehension and skills of students. This will be done by establishing links with ongoing educational programs of non-government organizations and local government units. It will also encourage the participation of parents and media to involve a wider community. Silva is also publishing a guide for teachers on how to love museums and is expected to document the program on video that will be aired for free by television networks.