Talisay, the name of a tree, was also the name of the place in Dapitan where Rizal had his farm and where he had his medical clinic and his school for boys. The poem was written as a kind of school song. In it Rizal put in the mouth of the students the ideal of education that they aspired to. The following excerpt contains the essence of that ideal:
Los problemas de ciencias exactas,
De la patria la historia estudiamos;
Tres y cuatro lenguas hablamos,
Acordando la fe y la razon.
Nuestros brazos manejan a turno
El cuchillo, la pluma y la azada,
La piqueta, el fusil y la espada,
Compañeros de fuerte varón.
We might translate that freely as follows: "We study the problems of the exact sciences, and the history of our country. We speak three and four languages, reconciling Faith and Reason. Our hands (literally, our arms) are skilled in using in turn the knife, the pen, the spade, the pickaxe, the gun and the sword – companions of the brave man.
That was the ideal of education that Rizal himself had attained and which he tried to give to others. It was a humanistic ideal, the education of the "whole person".
To begin with, the academic education was comprehensive: it included science, "the exact sciences", which meant mathematics and the physical sciences. It also included history, and in particular the history of the country.
It was also a linguistic and literary education, aiming at the mastery of "three or four languages." Rizal himself spoke with ease Spanish, Latin, French, German and English. (He had to speak English during his stay in England, and German and French during his stay in Germany and France.) He did not speak Greek, but he knew Greek literature well enough to win the first prize in it at the Central University in Madrid. He also had studied Arabic and Dutch.
In Dapitan he did not teach Latin and Greek, but he taught his students Spanish and English. He explained the inclusion of English in a letter to Blumentritt: "I teach them English, in case they should travel." Rizal could not have dreamed that within a few years the Americans would occupy the Philippines and English would replace Spanish as the language of instruction.
Rizal did not teach Religion. He had become a rationalist. But he sought to reconcile Faith and Reason – an ideal that all thinking persons must aspire to.
But the students were not merely getting an academic formation. They were also taught to work on the farm.
Rizal’s school did not charge tuition fees in money. The students had to pay for their board, lodging and tuition by working on the farm, thus learning by farming. Rizal also intended to teach them an even more important lesson: he told Blumentritt that he wanted the students to learn to depend on themselves and not on their parents.
The mention of gun and sword must have alarmed the Spaniards, who were only too ready to see treason and rebellion in everything. But there was nothing rebellious about them. In Rizal’s time, everyone tried to become an expert at fencing, the way today boys in the Philippines like to become expert in basketball (in other countries, football and baseball).
That was the humanistic ideal of education. It included a knowledge of languages and literature, of history and the sciences. It also aimed at skill in the use of the pen (for manual work), the gun and sword (for the defense of the persons and things one loves).
In short, a person knowledgeable and also dependable and handy in practical things.