Isagani R. Cruz

On 1 October 2011, I was a speaker in a panel on “So You Want To Write a Book” at the Filipino American International Book Festival held in the San Francisco Public Library. The other panel members were Juanita Tamayo-Lott, Marivi Blanco, Paulino Lim, Jose Dalisay, and Criselda Yabes. Oscar Peñaranda was the moderator. 

For those not able to attend that session, here is a summary of my tips on how to write: 

When should you write?

Anytime as long as it’s the same time. 

If you read the biographies of famous writers, there is one thing most of them had in common. They all had their favorite time to write. That time is called “writing time.” Writing time is sacred. Whether it is early in the morning, late at night, sometime during the day, every weekend, during November (during National Novel Writing Month or “Nanowrimo”), or even every other year, that time is sacred.  If you want to be a writer, you should not allow any distractions during that time – not phone calls, not text messages, not Facebook, not even regular meals. 

The extreme example is American playwright Arthur Miller, who would shut himself in his study all day and not allow his wife Marilyn Monroe to disturb him (needless to say, that marriage did not last!). 

A recent example is Samantha Sotto, who wrote her novel Before Ever After while waiting for her son who was attending prep school. 

Where should you write? 

Anywhere as long as it’s the same place. 

Again, there is Miller in his study. There is Sotto in the coffee shop across the street from her son’s school. J. K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter novel in the back room of a tea and coffee shop in Edinburgh. Unlike writing time, writing place is not sacred, because you can do a lot more things in a study than write, and a coffee shop is about as public a place as you can get. But there is something about a writing place that stimulates creativity. Whatever that is, whether it is the clutter in a study or the smell of coffee, it is crucial to the imagination of a writer. 

How do you write a book?  

There are eight easy steps. 

First, you must have an idea. 

Your idea does not have to be original. Who has original ideas anyway? Apple’s iPad and iPhone are based on ideas found in Star Trek (which itself took its ideas from old science fiction stories). Shakespeare borrowed his plots and characters from earlier writers. F. Sionil Jose admits to being influenced by Jose Rizal who was in turn influenced by Cervantes and so on. Many, if not all, the stories in the Old Testament can be found in other ancient books. Even the idea of resurrection, central in the New Testament, was around long before Jesus was born in Bethlehem. 

What is original about your idea is that it is yours. You are unique. You are the only one on earth ever to have had your life experiences. Use your own experiences as the source of your book. This does not mean that you will be writing an autobiography, but it means that whatever you have to say should be based on what you really did or are really doing in your own life. 

Second, you have to research. You can research in a library, on the Web, or in the field. You cannot rely only on your own experiences. Even if you have traveled a lot, loved and lost a lot, done a lot, you still are only you. There are a lot of people that have similar, though not the same, experiences as you. If you want your book to be read by a lot of people, you must find out what other people have experienced. 

Third, after deciding on which of your ideas you will write about and after doing research on that idea, you can write your first draft. This means writing, writing writing. Write without stopping to correct spelling, grammar, facts, and anything else. Write without worrying about whether what you are writing will go into the first chapter or the last one. This means simply writing to express whatever it is you want to express. 

In technical terms, it means writing until you reach at least 50,000 words if you are writing nonfiction and 70,000 if you are writing a novel. (The number of words is on the lower left hand corner of a Microsoft Word document.) 

Your first draft is what Syd Field (the teacher of many Hollywood screenwriters) calls “the terrible pages.” The thing to do with your first draft is to throw it away. I don’t mean that literally (although some famous writers did that), because you will need your soft copy later when you revise. You should, however, be ready to discard the whole first draft, because it might not look at all like the final product. You have to be psychologically prepared “to kill your baby,” as Alfred Yuson likes to put it. 

The fourth step is what will make you a writer, rather than just someone keeping a diary or fulfilling a classroom assignment. This is the step called “First Rewrite.”  

After choosing an idea, researching, and doing a first draft, you are ready for the fourth step in writing your book – rewriting. 

The first thing to do is to copy the file of your first draft and label the copy “Draft 2” or “Draft Nov 3 2011” or whatever self-explanatory code you wish. 

For your first rewrite, you have to do three things. You have to check your facts; that means looking up names and dates on the Web or going to a library or asking people. You have to go over your first draft to remove repetitions (believe me, there will be lots of those). You have to reorganize your paragraphs according to some conventional pattern (chronological, thematic, logical, whatever). Word processing has made it easier to spot repetitions (use Find) and to reorganize (use Cut and Paste), but the Web has paradoxically made checking facts harder (websites tend to contradict each other). 

Enter your corrections in the copy that you labeled “Draft 2.” If you are using Microsoft Word, use Track Changes (click Review). This will enable you to remember your corrections. (If you are distracted by the colored marks, click Final under Final: Show Markup.) 

After you have checked facts, removed repetitions, and reorganized paragraphs, you are ready for the fifth step – writing the full second draft. 

Again, copy your “Draft 2” and name the new file “Draft 3.” The reason for making multiple copies of the same manuscript is this: sometimes, you will realize that you should not have corrected something in your earlier drafts and you need to be able to retrieve your first thoughts or expressions. 

For your first draft, you need not have started with Page 1. You could have started in the middle (as Perry Mason loves to say), and worked both ways. You could have written Page 40 before your started writing Page 4. For your full second draft, you start with Page 1. 

Start on Page 1 and rewrite until you reach what you think should be the last page. Do not be surprised later if this last page will not look at all like the last page in the final book. You have a lot more rewriting to do before you finish. 

Rewriting does not mean starting from scratch. It means taking what you have written so far, changing the words if you do not feel comfortable with them, keeping the words if you feel you can be proud of them, adding words here and there if you feel that you can say a lot more than you already have. In short, it means improving the draft that you now have. 

Now comes the sixth step. Again, copy the file and make another file (“Draft 4”). This time, go through the entire book letter by letter (seriously!), checking spelling; word by word, checking grammar; and sentence by sentence, checking transitions, logic, style, and consistency. You can save some time by using the Spelling & Grammar feature of Microsoft Word (click Review), but do not put all your trust in software. Computers do not know the difference between “he” and “she” or “his husband” and “her husband.” The human eye is still the best proofreader. 

After you have done what is known as Language Checking (spelling, grammar, and style), you are ready to show your masterpiece to someone else. You are ready for the seventh step. 

If you want to your manuscript to be published professionally (not by yourself through Publish On Demand), you have to be professional about your writing. That means that you have to spend money. (Publish on Demand, of course, is another option, sometimes an even better one than going to a publisher. I will write about that in future columns.) 

The seventh step is sending your manuscript (“Draft 5”) to a professional copyeditor. Copyediting could be free (your spouse, your sibling, or your best friend may be able to do it out of love for you), but if you want to be a professional, you should employ professionals to help you with your writing. Professional copyediting is not cheap (rates are per word or per page of the original manuscript), but if you want to be taken seriously by a publisher, you need to have it done. 

After another person has gone through your manuscript, you are ready to submit your work to a publisher. Send “Draft 6” to the publisher. 

Surprise!  Your work begins all over again! (Nobody promised you that writing would be easy!) 

The publisher will send your work to an editor (distinguished from a copyeditor). An editor does what is known as developmental editing (also known as substantive, content, or comprehensive editing). This means looking not only at spelling, grammar, and style, but also at the marketability of the book.  

Publishing, after all, is a business. No one will invest money on a book that will sell only a handful of copies. If you are really serious about writing, you want a lot of people to read your book. Otherwise, you would just email your manuscript to your loved ones. 

You have your manuscript all ready to share with the world. What do you do? You go to a publisher. (I’m speaking only of the Philippines. If you want to be published outside the Phlippines, you have to go to a literary agent, but that’s another column.)

The thing to remember is that no publisher is like any other. Every publisher is unique.

For example, one publisher will take the manuscript from you and tell you to just wait for the launching. This publisher will take care of everything, from editing, designing, marketing, and selling your book. Another publisher will consult you at every stage of the process, asking you to revise certain portions of your book, giving you samples of cover designs, working with you on the program for the launching, and so on.

In publishing, size matters. A publisher with hundreds of titles might be willing to risk several thousand pesos on your book, but may not have time to pay the kind of attention to your book that you think it deserves. A publisher with limited capital will probably want to use cheaper paper and might not launch a full-blown advertising campaign for your book, but will be there for you and only you. 

In publishing, trust matters. A publisher may believe so much in your book that he or she will mortgage his or her house just to pay printing costs. Another publisher may not believe that your book will sell and might ask you to pay part or even the whole of the printing cost.

In publishing, reputation matters. A multi-awarded publisher may want to publish your book if it is of high quality and promises to be a strong contender for a National Book Award. A publisher known for widely-read romance novels will not be interested in your trailblazing book in nuclear physics.

Choose your publisher carefully. Go to a bookstore and check out a book similar to yours. Which publisher published it? Get the contact number from the copyright page of the book. (That’s usually the page immediately after the title page.)

A publisher will always ask you to sign a contract. The contract, however, may not be ready at once, but you will have one at some point in the publishing process. Be sure to read every single word in the contract. This is very important. You do not want to find out later that you will not earn anything when the book is translated, published abroad, turned into an eBook, or made into a movie. You also do not want to find out later that you owe the publisher money because you added something to your book while it was being designed. (Designing means putting the words in the form that you see them on the pages of a printed book. Every time you add words to or subtract words from your book, the publisher pays the designer extra.)

Since you are not likely to depend for your food and shelter on your book, do not argue with your publisher about royalties. Remember that 20% of net sales is not necessarily bigger than 5% of the selling price. I can assure you that, in general, you can trust Philippine publishers to give you your due.

What you should think seriously about is copyright. If you are a new author, you probably should not worry about selling your copyright outright to the publisher. I say “probably,” because new authors sometimes hit it big (think J. R. Rowling or Bob Ong). This really depends on the book. If it’s that great book in nuclear physics, sell your copyright and just wait for your Nobel Prize. If it’s a novel about vampires, you might want to retain the copyright, or at most share it with the publisher.

What you don’t want to do is to insist on owning the copyright no matter what. Nine out of ten times, the publisher will just tell you to go home. Publishers have worked with the biggest and best authors, and most of these authors do not have as big an ego as you have.  No publisher will want the aggravation of dealing with a difficult but untested writer.

How soon after you give your manuscript to a publisher will you have the book launching? There is no rule. It could be next week (I know of a case where a book was printed overnight), or it could be three or even five years from now (yes, there are such cases). As a writer, your job is really to see to it that the reading public will profit from your insights, imagination, and experience. It is the publisher’s job to see to it that you (and, of course, the publisher, too) will profit from the book.

Once the publisher says that the book is ready to go to the printer (you will hear the word “camera-ready”), you can tell your friends that you have become an author. If they are true friends, they will come to the launching and will buy many copies of your book. Perhaps.

(Published in The Philippine Star, 13 October, 20 October, 3 November 2011)

There are several lists of the best universities around the world.

The most prestigious is that compiled by Shanghai Jiaotong University, which ranks only 1,200 universities, based on Nobel Prizes won by faculty, articles published in the journals Nature and Science, and entries in the Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index.

The second most prestigious is the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, which looks only at “the world’s top universities ranked exclusively on their reputation for teaching and research.”  It bases its ranking on an opinion survey of 13,000 academics from 131 countries.  Although completely subjective and not even statistically valid (the respondents are not randomly selected), THE is curiously considered objective.

The third most prestigious is High Impact Universities Research Performance Index, which bases its rankings of 1,000 universities on the g-index of Scopus (an objective measure of research output).  Since our universities are not exactly strong in research, we do not figure in Shanghai, THE, or High Impact.

The best known, because it is very well marketed, is QS World University Rankings, compiled by Quacquarelli Symonds, a commercial group that prides itself on organizing “the largest business education events in the world.”  Because its business consists of matching international students with international programs, it bases its rankings on academic peer review, employer review, citations per faculty, student faculty ratio, international faculty, and international students.

QS lists as the top ten Philippine universities UP, Ateneo, UST, DLSU, San Carlos, MSU, Silliman, Saturnino Urios, Adamson, and Central Mindanao.

The ranking that monitors the most number of schools is Webometrics Ranking of World Universities.  It bases its ranking of more than 19,000 schools on external inlinks, web page size, number of rich files, and citations in Google Scholar.

Webometrics lists as the top ten Philippine universities UP Diliman, DLSU, Ateneo, UPLB, UP System, UST, Xavier, UP Mindanao, UP Manila, and MSU-IIT. 

Also based only on Web statistics is 4International Colleges & Universities, “an international higher education search engine and directory reviewing accredited universities and colleges in the world.” 4International monitors 10,000 colleges and universities in 200 countries, ranking them in terms of web popularity.  It bases its ranking on three search engines:  Google Page Rank, Yahoo Inbound Links, and Alexa Traffic Rank.

4International lists as the top ten Philippine universities the UP System, Ateneo, UPLB, Aquinas, DLSU, UP Diliman, MSU-IIT, UST, UE, and San Carlos.

Not prestigious but useful to students looking for universities is Top Study Links, which bases its rankings on  size, visibility, research papers, and scholars.

Top Study lists as the top ten Philippine universities UP Diliman, DLSU, UPLB, ADMU, Xavier, UST, UP System, UP Manila, UP Mindanao, and MSU-IIT.

Like Webometrics and 4International, Top Study treats the UP System as a different school from the UP campuses, probably because the UP System has its own website.  That should show you something about how credible these three are.

Less important are rankings done by newspapers, such as Newsweek (discontinued), Asiaweek (defunct), and U.S. News and World Report (ranking only American schools).

The least credible world rankings are the Russia-based Global University Ranking (which lists Moscow State University as better than Harvard and Cambridge) and the Paris-based Professional Ranking of World Universities (which lists five French universities among the top 20 in the world).

Why are world university rankings important?  It’s not just bragging rights that are at stake here.  Getting into these lists is crucial to the existence of our higher education institutions.  The top universities in these lists attract the best scholars, teachers, and students around the world, as well as huge grants and funds from international organizations and foundations.

If we want to get big money for research and development, we have to invest money on getting into these lists.  Of course, if we invest peanuts on faculty salaries, research equipment, and travel to international conferences, we get peanuts, too.  We will rely completely on tuition income, which – like OFW remittances – can just disappear without warning.

(First published in The Philippine Star, 4 August 2011.)

One year into his presidency, how is President Noynoy Aquino (PNoy) doing as far as his education agenda is concerned?

Allow me to quote his exact words when he was campaigning: 

“Let me lay out the ten most critical things I will focus on to fix this problem of basic education. 

1. “I will expand basic education in this country from a short 10-year cycle to a globally-comparable 12 years before the end of the next administration (2016).

2. “All public school children (and all public schools) will have a full year of pre-schooling as their introduction to formal schooling by 2016.

3. “I want a full basic education for all Muslim Filipino children anywhere in the country.

4. “I will re-introduce technical-vocational education in our public high schools to better link schooling to local industry needs and employment.

5. “By the end of the next administration, every child must be a reader by Grade 1.

6. “I will rebuild the science and math infrastructure in schools so that we can produce more scientists, engineers, technicians, technologists and teachers in our universities so that this country can be more globally competitive in industry and manufacturing.

7. “I will expand the Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education Program (GASTPE) to a target of 1 million private HS students every year through education service contracting (ESC) while doing away with the wasteful education voucher system (EVS) of this (Arroyo’s) administration.

8. “My view on the medium of instruction is larger than just the classroom.  We should become tri-lingual as a country:  Learn English well and connect to the world.  Learn Filipino well and connect to our country.  Retain your dialect (sic) and connect to your heritage. 

9. “I will not tolerate poor textbook quality in our schools.  Textbooks will be judged by three criteria:  quality, better quality, and more quality.

10. “I will build more schools in areas where there are no public or private schools in a covenant with LGUs so that we can realize genuine education for all.”

Let us now see what has happened to these campaign promises.

1. The K-12 program is in full swing, with Kindergarten (K) implemented last month.  Some laws still have to be passed and the full curriculum still has to be formulated, but this promise may be considered fulfilled, particularly since there are some model schools that now offer Grades 11 and 12.

2.  Universal Kindergarten was implemented in June 2011.

3.  This was an unnecessary promise.  We have to give credit where credit is due.  Gloria Arroyo already implemented this in 2004 as part of DepEd’s Muslim Basic Education Roadmap.

4. This was also partly unnecessary.  Technical-vocational education has been offered in several public schools for a long time.  The K-12 program merely expands the offering of technical education to all high schools.  Even in the program, however, not all public schools will offer technical education, because some schools may have mostly students that want to go to college.  In the latter case, the electives that will be offered will be academic, rather than technical.

5.  Before PNoy, DepEd aimed to make every student a reader by Grade 3.  Moving literacy down to Grade 1 is a great idea, particularly since everybody else in the world, if literate, reads by age 6.  Unfortunately, this promise has not been fulfilled.  If you don’t believe me, go to any public school and ask the Grade 1 students to read a book.

6.  DepEd has still not decided to adopt the spiral method of teaching math and science in high school, despite overwhelming evidence that our current system does not work.  CHED has not changed its general education curriculum to a science-oriented one (and may never do it, despite my being the head of its Technical Panel on General Education).

7. ESC has been implemented, but the target of 1 million students, as far as I know, has not been reached.

8.  First of all, we have languages, not dialects.  Secondly, the Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education was in place long before PNoy.  Again, an unnecessary promise.

9.  Improve textbooks?  You gotta be kidding!  Here’s a quote from an American news item in 1999:  “Scientists and educators say that many of the textbooks used today in US elementary and high schools contain significant errors, fabricated history, erroneous diagrams and misleading explanations.”  You might want to follow Project 2061 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which regularly finds gross errors in American textbooks.  I do not want to sound like I have colonial mentality, but if American publishers with their enormous budgets cannot produce error-free science textbooks, how can we?

10.  I have not heard anything about this particular promise.  Only PNoy, not DILG Secretary Robredo, can pressure governors and mayors to build schools.  PNoy has to step up!

Since PNoy has fulfilled only three of his seven real promises (since three were fulfilled before he became president and therefore should not be counted), I cannot yet give him a passing grade for his education agenda.  He has, however, another five years to fulfill the four remaining ones.  There is hope, and I for one am doing my best to help him keep his word.  After all, I voted for him and I am his boss.

(First published in The Philippine Star, 21 July 2011.)

Bakit hindi dapat guro ang gurong hindi nagbabasa?

Bakit hindi dapat guro ang gurong hindi nagtuturo sa estudyante kung paano magbasa?

Bakit nga ba kailangang magbasa?

Sasagutin ko ang tatlong tanong na ito.

Unang-una, hindi maaaring no-read, no-write ang isang guro.

Ano ang dapat binabasa ng guro?  Ang mga pinakabagong aklat sa kanyang itinuturong larangan.  Halimbawa, kung hindi nagbabasa ang isang guro sa agham, baka sabihin niya sa kanyang mga estudyante na planeta ang Pluto.  Kung hindi nagbabasa ang isang guro sa Ingles, baka sabihin niya sa kanyang mga estudyante na ang isang pang-abay ay hindi maaaring mag-modify ng isang pangalan.  Kung hindi nagbabasa ang isang guro sa Filipino, baka sabihin niya na ang Florante at Laura ay sinulat ni Balagtas para batikusin ang mga Kastila.  Kung hindi nagbabasa ang isang guro sa Edukasyon sa Pagpapahalaga, baka sabihin niya sa kanyang mga estudyante na masama para sa ating mga Filipino ang pakikisama.

Napakaraming nangyayari sa mundo ng akademya na kailangang alam ng isang guro.  Sabi nga mga ating mga ninuno, hindi mo maituturo ang hindi mo natutuhan, o hindi mo maibibigay ang wala naman sa iyo.  Kung hindi nagbabasa ang isang guro, hindi niya maituturo ang pinakabago at pinakatama na kaalaman sa kanyang sabject na itinuturo.  Masyadong mabilis ang takbo ng mga pagbabago sa iba’t ibang larangan, sa lahat ng larangan, dahil sa Web, dahil sa bilis ng komunikasyon, dahil sa rami ng mga taong paru’t parito sa iba ibang bansa.

Lampas sampung milyon na raw ang mga kababayan natin sa ibang bansa.  Lahat sila ay sumusulat ng liham o ng email sa kanilang mga kamag-anak.  Lahat sila ay nagdadala ng balita tungkol sa mga nangyayari sa ibang bansa na hindi pa nangyayari rito sa atin o hindi man lang nating alam na dapat na malaman natin.  Ang mga anak ng mga OFW o ng kanilang mga kamag-anak ang mga nasa loob ng ating mga paaralan.  Sa madaling sabi’y maraming alam ang ating mga estudyante, at hindi natin sila maloloko.  Hindi sila matutuwa kung may sasabihin tayo sa kanila na alam naman nila na matagal nang pinatunayang hindi totoo o lumang balita na.

May mga paaralan tayo na mga mayayaman ang estudyante.  Mayroon silang mga cellphone na nakakabit sa Web.  Mayroon silang tablet o laptop.  Kung wala man silang sariling koneksyon sa Web, madalas sila sa Internet Café at doon ay nababasa ang pinakahuling natuklasan ng mga sayantipiko o dalubhasa sa larangang itinuturo natin.  Wala nang sikreto sa mundo.  Hindi na katulad noong araw na maaari nating sabihin sa estudyante na, hoy, Grade 5 ka lang, sa Grade 6 mo na matututuhan iyan.  Lahat ng estudyante natin ay lampas Fourth Year na, dahil nakikipagsabayan sila sa atin sa pag-surf sa Web.

Tungkulin natin bilang guro na ipagbigay alam sa ating mga estudyante ang pinakabago at pinakawastong kaalaman, hindi lamang sa ating larangan kundi sa lahat ng larangang may kaugnayan sa buhay.  Hindi lamang buhay estudyante kundi buhay ng mamamayan, dahil lalaki at lalaki rin ang ating mga estudyante at sila ang mamumuno sa atin balang araw.  Kailangang alam nila ang katotohanan, ang buong katotohanan, mabuti man isipin o hindi.

Isa lamang ang paraan para malaman ng isang guro ang pinakabago at pinakatama na kaalaman.  Iyan ay ang pagbabasa.  Ngayon, hindi ko sinasabi na dapat magbasa ng aklat na nabibili sa bookstore.  Mas mabuti kung iyon ang babasahin natin, dahil maipahihiram natin iyon sa ating mga estudyante.  Pero puwede ring basahin natin ang lahat ng aklat sa Web, dahil halos lahat sila ngayon ay online na.  Ang iba’y libreng basahin, ang iba’y dapat bayaran para basahin, kailangang bilhin na tulad ng aklat na nakaimprenta.  Pero maaaring basahin at dapat basahin.  Dapat gastusan kung kailangang gastusan.

Pagbabasa rin ang pag-surf o pagbabasa sa mga blog, sa mga inilalathala sa Facebook, sa mga balitang nasa mga pahayagang online.  Pero mababaw ang mga babasahing iyan.  Mga datos lamang ang makukuha diyan.  Ang kailangan ng isang guro ay ang mga argumento at kongklusyon na mababasa lamang sa mga aklat.

Sa madaling sabi’y kailangang nagbabasa ang isang guro dahil baka mali ang maituturo niya sa kanyang mga estudyante kung hindi niya nabasa ang pinakabago at pinakatamang aklat na nakaimprenta o online.  Iyan ang sagot sa una kong tanong.

Ang aking ikalawang tanong ay kung bakit kailangang turuan ng isang guro ang kanyang estudyante kung paano magbasa.

Dalawa ang aspekto ng tanong na ito. 

Una, hindi ko pinag-uusapan ang guro ng Ingles o ng Filipino, dahil talaga namang tungkulin nilang magturo ng pagbabasa.  Ang itinuturing ko ang mga guro ng matematika, agham, at ang mga sabject na saklaw ng Makabayan.  Tungkulin nila na magturo ng pagbabasa.

Ikalawa, hindi ko sinasabi lamang na piliting magbasa ang mga estudyante.  May tama at may maling paraan ng pagbabasa.  Kailangang ituro hindi lamang ng mga guro sa Ingles at Filipino kundi ng lahat ng guro ang tamang paraan ng pagbabasa.

Balikan natin ang unang aspekto.  Bakit kailangang magturo ng pagbabasa ang guro ng matematika at ang guro ng agham?  Alam naman ninyo na lagi tayong kulelat kapag kumukuha tayo ng pandaigdigang test sa matematika at agham.  Natuklasan ng mga sumuri sa problema natin sa mga pandaigdigang test na ang mga itinatanong pala sa mga test na iyan ay nakasulat na mga problema, o ang tinatawag nating word problem.  Kahit na noong isinalin na sa wikang Filipino ang mga item sa test, kulelat pa rin tayo, kaya hindi wikang Ingles ang problema.  Ang problema ay hindi marunong ang ating mga estudyante na umintindi ng problema.

Kapag hindi tuturuan ng guro ng matematika at agham ang mga estudyante ng pagbabasa, hindi masasagot ng mga bata ang mga item hindi lamang sa mga pandaigdigang test kundi pati sa mga test na ibinibigay ng DepEd, ng mga unibersidad bilang entrance exam, ng PRC, at ng mga kompanyang may pagsusulit bago kunin ang mga empleyado.

Magbibigay ako ng halimbawa.  Sabi sa dyaryo kahapon na si Pangulong Noynoy daw, ayon sa SWS, ay bumaba sa +46 ang pagtingin ng ating mga kababayan.  Ngayon, masasagot kaya ng isang estudyante ang ganitong item na hango sa Philippine Star kung ibibigay sa isang pagsusulit:

"The Aquino government’s net satisfaction rating dropped to 46 in March from a record high 64 in the previous quarter, a latest survey by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) revealed.

"The SWS poll, conducted from March 4 to 7, 2011, found 65 percent of 1,200 respondents satisfied and 18 percent dissatisfied with the overall performance of the Aquino administration, for a “good” net rating of 46.

"The remaining 16 percent of the respondents were undecided, it said."

Question:  Is this statistical result credible?  Defend your answer.

Sa aking palagay, mahihirapan ang mga estudyante at baka pa nga ang mga guro ng Statistics na sagutin ang napakasimpleng tanong na ito.  Ang dahilan ay hindi dahil hindi nila alam ang mga pormula sa statistics, dahil pinag-aaralan naman iyan sa klase, o dahil hindi sila masyadong mahilig sa politika, dahil halos lahat naman sa atin ay interesado sa nangyayari sa bayan.  Ang dahilan ay dahil, una, hindi sila sanay na alamin mula sa isang paragrap ang mga equation na gagamitin sa statistics, at ikalawa, hindi nila alam kung paano basahin ang balitang ito.

Iyan ang ikalawang aspekto ng ikalawang tanong.  Kailangang turuan ang mga estudyante kung paano ang paraan ng pagbabasa.

Sa aking halimbawa, malinaw na ito ay isang balita.  Ang isang balita ay laging may lead paragraph na nagsasaad kung sino, ano, saan, kailan, at paano nangyari ang isinasaad.

"The Aquino government’s net satisfaction rating dropped to 46 in March from a record high 64 in the previous quarter, a latest survey by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) revealed."

Ang sinasabi ng lead paragraph ay hindi na naging masama ang papel ni Noynoy ngayon, dahil kapag kulang sa kalahati ng mamamayan ay gusto ka, malinaw na hindi ka gusto ng higit na nakararaming Filipino.  Ang sinasabi ay ito ay ayon sa SWS.

Halimbawa’y sinabi ko sa iyo na, ayon sa manager ni Mosley, matatalo si Pacquiao.  Hindi ko sinabi na matatalo si Pacquiao.  Ang sinabi ko ay iyon ang sabi ng manager ni Mosley, na natural lamang ay kampi kay Mosley.  Ngayon, ang dapat gawin ng estudyante ay alamin kung ano ba itong SWS.  Ito ba ay kapanipaniwala?  Ito ba’y kampi kay Noynoy o kalaban ni Noynoy?

Kapag sinuri ng estudyante ang SWS, malalaman niya na wala itong kinakampihan at, sa katunayan, ay ito ang nakatulong kay Noynoy na maging pangulo dahil ito ang nagsabi noong araw na mananalo siya sa eleksyon.  Samakatwid, kapanipaniwala ang SWS.  Samakatwid, totoo ngang ang higit na nakararaming Filipino o majority ng Filipino ay wala ng tiwala kay Noynoy.

Masamang balita iyan.  Hindi tatakbo nang mahusay ang bansa kung ang karamihan sa atin ay walang tiwala sa namumuno sa atin.  Kapag binasa natin ang kabuuan ng balita, lalo tayong dapat kabahan.  Ito kasi ang sagot ng mga alipures ni Noynoy:

"But even with the drop, Malacañang said it is important to note that satisfaction with the administration remains at near-record levels."

Ano?  Parang sinabi natin na hindi bale nang matalo si Pacquiao, huwag lang siyang ma-knock out.  Parang sinabi natin na wala namang problema na tumataas ang presyo ng gasolina sa ating bansa, dahil mas mahal naman ang gasolina sa ibang bansa.  Parang sinabi natin na hindi bale nang okey lang na may kerida o kerido ang asawa mo, dahil ang kapitbahay mo naman ay may Number Two na may Number Three pa.

Malinaw sa pagbabasa sa balita na may problemang malaki si Noynoy.  Ang mga kasamahan niya sa Malacañang ay malabo mag-isip.  Sa halip na tanungin ang kanilang mga sarili kung ano ba ang ginagawa nilang masama na naging dahilan kung bakit sinabi ng SWS na lalong lumalala ang korupsyon sa bansa ay nagdadahilan pa sila.  Hoy, gising!

May teknolohiya kasi ng pagbabasa.  May teknik.  May paraan.  May pamaraan.  Hindi malalaman iyan nga estudyante kung hindi natin sila tuturuan.  Wala iyan sa Web.  Hindi ituturo ng kompyter kung paano basahin ang nasa kompyuter.  Tayo lamang mga guro ang makagagawa niyan.  Hindi na kailangang sabihin na mangunguna dapat ang mga guro ng Ingles at Filipino sa pagtuturo ng paraan ng pagbabasa, pero tungkulin din ito ng ibang guro.

Ang ikatlong tanong ko ay kung bakit nga ba kailangang mabasa.  Nabanggit ko na ang ilang dahilan.  Dahil maraming bagong kaalaman.  Dahil sa pagbabasa lamang natin malalaman ang tunay na kalagayan ng ating bayan, at tungkulin ng lahat ng mamamayan, bata man o matanda, na lumahok sa pag-unlad ng Filipinas.

Pero may iba pa bang dahilan kung bakit nga ba kailangang magbasa?

Iisa lamang talaga ang dahilan.  Ito ang dahilan. 

Sabi ng matatanda, ang hindi lumilingon sa pinagdaanan ay hindi makararating sa paroroonan.

Ang sabi ko naman ay ito.  Kung tatanungin ko kayo kung ilang taon na ba kayo, ang isasagot ninyo ay 20, 30, 40, 50, o kung anuman ang edad ninyo.  Kung tatanungin ninyo ako kung ilang taon na ako, ang isasagot ko ay 2,500 na taon na ako.

Bakit?  Dahil ang mga kaibigan ko ay sina Confucius, Platon, Aristoteles, Hesus, ang propetang si Muhammed, ang mga manunulat na si Homer, si Dante, si Shakespeare, si Balagtas, si Emily Dickinson, si Rizal, at marami pang ibang taong noon pa nabuhay ngunit hanggang ngayon ay kinakausap pa ako sa pamamagitan ng kanilang mga sinulat, ng kanilang mga aklat.

Napakapobre talaga ang taong 50 o 70 o 100 taon lamang ang gulang.  Hindi nabibigyang-buhay ang kanyang utak, diwa, at kaluluwa ng mga kaisipang mababasa lamang sa mga lumang aklat.  Kung ang alam lamang natin ay ang nasa Web, kung Google lamang ang ginagamit natin para maghanap ng datos, kung cellphone lamang ang paraan para tayo mag-compute o makipag-usap sa mga kaibigan natin, kung 5,000 lamang ang friend mo sa Facebook, kawawa ka namang nilalang.  Milyon ang mga manunulat na pumanaw na, at bilyon ang mga aklat na naisulat nila para mabasa natin.  Hindi natin mababasa ang lahat ng aklat na nailathala o nakalagay ngayon online, pero mababasa natin ang ilan, ang ilang dosena, ang ilang daan siguro.

Huwag kayong maging kontento sa sarili nating buhay.  Maraming buhay na maaari nating intindihin, isaloob, maging atin – sa pamamagitan ng mga aklat.  Aklat ay buhay.  Aklat ay sikat ng araw sa kadiliman ng ating kamangmangan.  Aklat ay sisikat rin.  Aklat noon, ngayon, bukas, at magpakailanman.

(Talumpati sa pambansang pulong ng Sa Aklat Sisikat Foundation, 5 Mayo 2011, sa Far Eastern University, Maynila.)

LITERARY THEORY FOR TEACHERS 

Lectures by Dr. Isagani R. Cruz

May 9 to 13, 2011

Nicanor Reyes Hall – Case Study Room

Far Eastern University, Sampaloc, Manila

A series of public lectures on the use of Literary Theory in teaching literature on the secondary and tertiary levels.  The lectures will acquaint teachers with the fundamentals of literary theory, from its beginnings in China to Ecocriticism and Wikcrit.  The lectures will focus on the way literary theories can be applied in practice to understand and to teach literary texts and other narratives, such as films.  No prior knowledge of literary theory and criticism is required.  The lectures will be conducted in English, but texts in several languages will be used as examples.

Open to high school and college teachers of Literature, Filipino, and English.  Teachers may attend the individual lectures for P500 per lecture and earn Certificates of Attendance.  Teachers may earn three graduate credits by attending all lectures, staying for an extra hour for tutorials after every lecture, and sitting for an oral final examination on May 20; in this case, the university’s regular tuition fee will be charged.

For details, please contact Ms. Cherry H. Cajucom @ 7357629 / 7355621 local 323 and Mr. Dhean R. De Ocampo @ 7360008 / 7355621 local 286 or email @ ccjucom@feu.edu.ph / ddocampo@feu.edu.ph.

Lecturer’s Profile

ISAGANI R. CRUZ, Ph.D., is one of The Outstanding Filipinos (TOFIL) of 2010.  He is the  Consultant for Academic Institutional Development of Far Eastern University.  He is a Professor Emeritus of De La Salle University.  He was an Undersecretary and is currently an Adviser of the Department of Education.  He belongs to the Hall of Fame of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.  In 2010, the world’s leading literary critics contributed articles to a book honoring him as the country’s foremost literary theorist.

According to the classic English translation of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the gate to hell has a sign that says, “All hope abandon ye who enter here.”  Proof that a hospital is not hell is that hope is the one thing you keep, no matter how long you stay confined.  You lose, however, just about everything else.

The first thing you lose when you are admitted into a hospital is your privacy, or more precisely, your dignity.  Total strangers look at every square inch of your body (not just the outside but even the inside of your body), punch holes into you, watch you as you use the bedpan or the urinal, catch you crying and weeping and gnashing your teeth as they get blood from your veins and arteries.  If clothes make the person, the hospital gown unmakes you.

The second thing you lose when you are lying helpless on a hospital bed is your sense of self-importance.  The meetings that you thought could never be held without you, the social events that you thought would be completely dull without your being the life of the party, the projects that you thought would go down the drain without your brilliant inputs – all these go on, most likely even more successfully, without you.  As Eliza Doolittle sings in My Fair Lady, “Art and music will thrive without you / Somehow Keats will survive without you.”

The third thing you lose when you allow doctors to do whatever they want is your sense of control over your own body.  You are injected with all sorts of medicine whose names you can barely pronounce and will certainly never be able to spell.  You are given hospital food that you would never order in a restaurant (although an exception, I have to admit, is St. Luke’s, where a chef actually asks you if you want anything special to cater to your gourmet taste).  You are awakened by nurses in the dead of night to find out if you are really sleeping or are already sleeping the sleep of the dead.

The fourth thing you lose, unless you are a humor writer like Abdon M. Balde Jr., is your sense of humor.  You no longer appreciate your friend trying to make you feel better by remarking that you are still alive (“O, buhay ka pa!”).  You miss seeing the love behind such text messages as “You don’t belong in a hospital” or “Get well already because work is piling up.”  You cannot stand the disciples of Patch Adams coming in and trying to make you laugh.  You cannot even stand watching the television situation comedies you used to enjoy before you got sick.

The fifth thing you lose is your sense that you are the center of the world.  The television set keeps showing you the number of people who died in earthquakes and tsunamis, the faces of returning OFWs who are now out of a job and sure to create social instability in the country, and the senseless political bickering that you know will occupy people’s attention for months to come.  You learn to forgive the nurses who do not come immediately after you buzz them because a “code” has just been announced (the term “code” means that another patient is suffering cardiopulmonary arrest and needs the attention of everybody).

Of course, since life is always fair despite not looking fair, there are some things you gain to make up for the things you lose.

The first thing you gain is your prayerfulness.  There are no atheists in hospitals, just as there are no atheists in foxholes.  You remember prayers you memorized as a child and never actually took seriously.  You start reading the Bible again (or the Qur’an, if you are Islamic).  Suddenly, even the things you used to think reeked of superstition (such as an imported bottle of water from Lourdes in France) appear like they might actually work.  If you are one of those privileged enough to die temporarily (like the boy who wrote the bestseller Heaven is for Real), you come face to face with angels, perhaps even with God.

The second thing you gain is your trust in people.  You may have seen enough episodes of House to know that doctors are often wrong, but you put your complete trust in the real-life doctors trying their best to save your life.  Despite the action movies you have seen where the villain always tries to kill the hospitalized hero by injecting poison into an IV tube, you do not suspect any of the nurses of malicious intent.  Although the little learning you get from the Internet (which, of course, is a very dangerous thing when we are talking about medicine) seems to contradict what the doctors are saying, you trust that the doctors were not absent the day your disease was being taken up in medical school.

The most important thing you gain is your sense of mortality.  You may have believed that you are the one and only human being who will prove that not all men or women are mortal, no matter how hard you overwork yourself.  Now you know that you are not Superman or Superwoman.  One day, as you learned last Ash Wednesday, unto dust shalt thou return.

(First published in The Philippine Star, 31 March 2011.)

On his 100^th birthday (22 March 2011), I remember some of the numerous moments I shared with Bienvenido N. Santos, my literary father.

In San Francisco in December 1975, I attended one of the discussion sessions of the annual convention of the Modern Language Association of America.  Seated beside me was an American scholar named Frank Chin.  I told Chin that one of the chapters in a book he co-edited, entitled Aiiieeeee!:  An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), had been plagiarized from an article written by Santos in Brown Heritage (1967).

Although he did not know me at that time, I had written Santos earlier about the intellectual theft.  He had replied by asking me to get in touch with Antonio Manuud, the editor of Brown Heritage.  Since I had no idea where Manuud was (apparently, he was living in New York at that time), that was the end of our correspondence.

Who should walk into the San Francisco room but Santos?  I recognized him through his photographs.  During a break, I took Chin and brought him to Santos.

“Mister Santos,” I said, “I am Isagani Cruz and this is Frank Chin, one of the editors of Aiiieeeee.”

Santos said to me, “I remember your letter.”  Then Chin started talking to him, and I quietly left the pair to iron out their problem.  What struck me then was that Santos did not show any anger.  In fact, I don’t think he ever did anything about the plagiarism.  I would have sued the book’s editors and publisher, getting a share of the thousands of dollars that book earned in royalties.

I became close to Santos and started calling him Mang Ben, when he would escape the harsh Midwest winter by staying over the Christmas holidays as International Writer-in-Residence at De La Salle University.  Being then head of the Department of Literature, I was his official host.

Once, we were stuck in traffic on the way to a meeting.  I was driving and he was my only passenger.  To pass the time, we played a literary game.  I would recite the first line of a poem, he would recite the second, I would recite the third, and so on.  Invariably, I would forget a line and he would then continue reciting the rest of the poem.  We must have gone through more than a dozen poems, and he always won.  In fact, when it was his turn to choose the poem, I often just conceded the point to him.

The third moment I remember came much later, after I had given a number of public lectures and even taught a graduate seminar on his works.  I had also become quite busy with various professional organizations.

I finally got the courage to show him a chapter of a novel I had started to write.

I appended a note, “Should I continue?”

After reading it, he wrote me, “Drop everything and just write your novel.”

That was the one piece of advice from Mang Ben that I did not heed.  I continued teaching, writing (everything but a novel), administrating, organizing, giving speeches, even joining the government.  In 2005, I retired from De La Salle University on the excuse that I wanted to write my novel, but I was immediately unretired and ended up doing much more work than I did before I turned 60.  Instead of just teaching at De La Salle University, I ended up working (happily, I must say) for Far Eastern University, Ateneo de Manila University, University of Santo Tomas, CHED, DepEd, and various organizations, not to mention De La Salle University itself (which understandably would not hear of me working for others but not for my home for almost 30 years).

I was to reap the whirlwind of not heeding Mang Ben’s advice just last week, when my heart finally almost gave up and I had to be wheeled into the ICU of St. Luke’s Global.  Fortunately, it was St. Luke’s Global, which performs miracles routinely, and as I write this column, I am still confined in a regular hospital room, but very much alive.

Knowing how much of a workaholic I am, my doctor has warned me that she will put me under house arrest for weeks after discharge.  Maybe Mang Ben will get what he wanted, after all.  Maybe, but I would not bet my life on it.

(Read for me at the launching of Ben on Ben, by Leonor Briscoe, at De La Salle University on 22 March 2011, and subsequently published in The Philippine Star on 24 March 2011.)

Research-Based Teaching and Teaching-Based Research 

Congratulations to the winners of the President’s Awards for Teaching Excellence or PATE and the President’s Awards for Research or PAR.  I am happy to note that Miriam rewards teachers that innovate and researchers that contribute to national development.  These two elements of academic life – teaching and research – form the backbone of our higher education system.  Allow me to share with you some of my thoughts on teaching and research. 

First, teaching.  There have been a number of studies to determine what makes a good teacher and what does not.  I remember those conducted by Joseph Lowman in the 1980s, the one done by Flordeliza Reyes in the 1990s, and Bill Gates in the 2000s.  There are even all sorts of awards, such as your own PATE and Metrobank’s Outstanding Educator Award.  These studies and these awards merely confirm what all students know instinctively – that a good teacher cares, not just about the subject he or she is teaching, but more importantly, about students.  I’ve said many times before that, as teachers, we do not teach subjects; we teach students.  We teach human beings.  We help them grow up to be fully human, to be what they can be.  Those of us in administration like to break down good teaching into the criteria that you have used in choosing the PATE awardees today.  That makes for good management, but we should never lose sight of what makes a good teacher. 

There is a simple way to find out what makes a good teacher.  Let us look at the greatest teachers of all time and model ourselves after them.  I am thinking of Socrates, who followed the principles that he taught his students, bravely facing death rather than violate his own teaching.  Jesus also bravely faced death, because he had taught his followers that there was no greater love than that shown by someone giving his or her life for others.  Jesus was, of course, the greatest teacher of all.  He could teach a single person, like the woman at the well.  He could teach hundreds of people at the same time, as in the Sermon on the Mount.  He never relied on technology.  He did not use PowerPoint.  He relied instead on what was at hand, a fig tree, birds, fishing nets.  He knew where his followers were coming from, and he spoke to them not on His level but on theirs.  He did not separate his teaching from his research or from his community service, the way we do.  He used his research on the Scriptures to teach.  He used his teaching to improve the community.  Above all, he lived what he taught. 

I am certain that the PATE awardees today share some of the qualities that Socrates and Jesus had, as well as the Prophet Muhammad and Confucius and Gautama Buddha and all the other great teachers of the past. 

Socrates clearly read whatever could be read during his time, because he kept referring to the Greek texts and could quote liberally from them from memory.  Jesus knew his Jewish Old Testament by heart.  Muhammad knew about the life of Jesus and incorporated it in his Qur’an.  Confucius and Buddha and all the other great teachers all studied a lot.  In our modern terminology, they did research.  The term “research,” of course, is fairly modern, but the idea has always been there.  We cannot be great teachers, not even good teachers, if we do not research. 

Sometime during the past three or four centuries, the world broke up into little worlds or specializations.  We started to have teachers who were good teachers but poor researchers.  We started to have scholars who were good researchers but poor teachers.  We started to have schools that did not have much to do with the outside world.  We started to imagine the campus as isolated from the world.  In other words, we started to divide the function of a university into three – teaching, research, and community service. 

I am glad that, in your criteria for PAR, you have specified that research should significantly contribute to the country and even the region.  Really, in these days of political and economic instability all over the world, not excepting our own country, it is important that schools fulfill their original function, which was to serve as the brains of the nation and of the world. 

If we think of the world as an organism, we realize that it needs a brain.  Schools are that brain.  We in schools are that brain.  We are that brain.  Governments are merely muscles that make the organism move.  Money is merely the blood that circulates and keeps the organism alive.  The physical earth is just the skeleton on which governments and money are pinned.  The ideas that make the world, that change the world, that move the world forward, are generated by the brain, and that brain is us. 

Not too long ago, Stanford University came out with a rationale for research in the humanities.  This is what Stanford said, and I quote:  “Professors who engage in humanities research are often posing questions about common assumptions, uncovering new meanings in artistic works, or finding new ways to understand cultural interactions. This type of inquiry can produce clearer pictures of the past, uncover the many insights that we can draw from our forbears, and in turn, help us better to prepare for the future.”  End of quote. 

The University of California at Berkeley, on the other hand, gave the rationale for research in the sciences.  The rationale is not very different from that for the humanities.  This is what Berkeley said, and I quote:  Research in the sciences “builds knowledge, develops technology, satisfies curiosity, solves everyday problems, informs policy, and addresses societal issues.”  End of quote. 

Note that scientific research is not supposed to be concerned only with technical questions.  Instead, scientific research is meant to address societal issues and to inform policy.  There should not be, there are no artificial boundaries separating research from community service, nor research from teaching, nor teaching from community service.  The three functions of a school – teaching, research, and community service – are really one and the same thing. 

PATE and PAR, therefore, are really merely two sides of the same coin, but they are the same coin.  You cannot have a one-sided coin.  You cannot have a good teacher who is not a good researcher,  nor a good researcher who is not a good teacher. 

Allow me to mention a couple of ideas that might help you in the next round of PATE and PAR. 

We want teachers to innovate.  That is a given, since today’s digitally-oriented students can no longer learn very well if we continue to use the old methods of lecture and discussion.  But there is innovation and there is innovation.  The kind of innovation that we should reward, that we should encourage, is research-based innovation.  There should be scientific proof that a particular kind of innovation works with the kind of students we have today.

 On the other hand, there is research.  We want our faculty to research.  We want them to read papers in conferences.  We want them to publish in refereed journals.  But there are publications and there are publications.  The publications that we should reward, that we should encourage, are those that are based on our experience in the classroom.  I do not mean that we should restrict ourselves to applied education research, although we still need to do a lot of that.  I mean that we should always factor in what we have learned about our students from their experience in our classrooms.  We should research for them, to help them learn, to help them figure out what to do with the world when they become our leaders. 

I am not very familiar with the kind of research that you do here in Miriam, but I know what kind of research I wish Miriam and other higher educational institutions would do to help our country. 

I want to know how children born into the computer age read.  We old fogies like to say that our students do not read, but we know that they queued and are still queuing for wizard and vampire novels, not to mention innumerable romance novels, highly sophisticated graphic novels, and linguistically complex works in Filipino by Bob Ong.  We like to say that our students cannot remember anything, but they remember hundreds of characters in their video games.  We like to say that our students are not interested in the outside world, but there was Egypt just recently, and Yemeni students massing in their university, and very soon apparently, Iran.  The students in the Middle East are exactly like our own students.  Our own students used Facebook to help in the Ondoy rescue missions.  Students got Obama and Noynoy elected.  Today’s students, today’s digital natives, are qualitatively different from us.  I want to know how they read, how they speak, how they think, how they are. 

Do we really know our students?  Research is much needed.  Bloom and Maslow apparently no longer apply to our students.  We are trying out transformative learning, but is that really working?  What is really working?  What are the operative values of the youth today?  Why are we still talking about Freud and Marx and Einstein and Derrida and Porter and other 19^th and 20^th century figures, when our students today were born at the turn of the 21^st century and our students tomorrow will be born well within the 21^st century?  Why are we teachers still living and teaching as though we were still in the 20^th century, which was, let me remind you, last century? 

I don’t have the answers.  I would like to know the answers.  Only researchers who are also teachers can answer these questions.  I hope that Miriam will show the way to knowing what research-based teaching and teaching-based research really look like.  If you can promise to work on that, these PATE and PAR awards will become the benchmarks for all teaching and research awards.  Today’s awards, then, will not be merely for the moment, or for the year, or for Miriam alone, but for tomorrow, for the country, and yes, for the world.

Congratulations to the winners and the judges and the organizers of these awards!  Maraming salamat po at mabuhay!

SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE CLOSING OF THE TWO-DAY LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE SEMINAR ON "RE-THINKING AND RE-DIRECTING PARADIGM AND PEDAGOGY IN THE TEACHING OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE" HELD AT FAR EASTERN UNIVERSITY, 19 FEBRUARY 2011, SPONSORED BY THE ALLIANCE OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE TEACHERS (ALLT)


                              Since you are teachers of language and literature, allow me to think aloud through a Homeric simile or, if you wish, a 17^th-century conceit, or simply, a talinghaga. 

I am an adulterer.  I have a wife and two lovers. 

My wife is the English language.  I married her, making my marriage vows to her, my credentials, my MA and PhD in English, at the Ateneo and at the University of Maryland.  She cooks my meals, gives me sustenance, by helping me participate in meetings for which I get paid.  She bears my children, which are my English columns and books.  I come home to her, I rush back into her arms when I want to feel secure.  I love her.  I love English. 

I have a lover, who is female.  My girlfriend is the Filipino language.  She is much sexier than my wife, because she has all these terms for taste, smell, and touch – the senses that I use when making love.  She is much younger than my wife; English was born about 1,500 years ago, but Filipino was born only in 1973.  My girlfriend’s mother is Tagalog, but her father is Spanish and her grandmother is Chinese.  That is why she is so attractive, because she is down to earth like the Tagalogs and practical like the Chinese, yet she speaks the language that God speaks.  You know, of course, as the Spanish people put it so well, that “children speak in Italian, ladies speak in French, God speaks in Spanish, and the Devil speaks in English.”  Yes, my girlfriend thinks my wife is a devil. 

I have another lover.  He is male.  My boyfriend is literature.  He understands me much more than my wife or my girlfriend does. 

I have to struggle with my English, worrying about whether my behavior, my grammar, is perfect.  I am always so careful when my wife is around.  On the other hand, I cannot take my girlfriend to so-called respectable gatherings.  People do not look kindly at me when I use Filipino to speak at big education or business or international conferences.  Of course I enjoy caressing my girlfriend’s body, all the literary works written in Filipino, such as those by Bob Ong, but I am a bit apprehensive about boasting about her, because my wife is extremely jealous of her.  When I travel outside the country, I have to keep introducing and apologizing for my girlfriend, something I do not have to do with my wife.  Fortunately or unfortunately, my girlfriend is not well known outside the country, so I can take her there and limit our friends to the ten million or so of my compatriots working or living abroad.  Abroad, my girlfriend is our shared secret and we can talk secretely without my wife knowing anything about her. 

But the situation with my boyfriend is very different.  I can take him with me anywhere I go.  Nobody raises an eyebrow when we travel together, stay in the same hotel room, engage in public displays of affection.  After all, boxers and basketball players hug each other tightly, cry on each other’s shoulders, even walk together with their arms on each other’s shoulders.  People think it’s natural when I quote lines from literary pieces, when I have a book of poetry tucked under my arm as I walk down a street, when I read a novel in public.  In fact, when I quote a line or two written by my boyfriend, people even applaud. 

Of course, like other adulterers, I have to admit that I have a real psychological problem, for which I need to see a psychiatrist.  I also have a spiritual problem, for which I need to see a priest or pastor.  Moreover, I have a philosophical problem, because I do not really know who I love more or best or all the time. 

I write in English in an English newspaper.  I talk in English when I am in an international or even sometimes in a national conference.  But I do not really like being with my wife all the time.  I get bored with her and she gets bored with me.  We have done so much together that we find that there is not much to do that now interests us.  Besides, she always seems like a stranger to me.  Like the Duke in Robert Browning’s poem, I feel like my wife, my last Duchess, bestows her favors on everyone, not just on me.  I do not feel that she belongs to me.  I do not own her nor does she want to be owned by me.  She insists on her own rules and does not want to make allowances for my weaknesses. 

On the other hand, I write in Filipino when I feel The Urge, when I feel hot and eager, when it is that time of the month when my hormones are raging and I just want to have someone I can have a very physical, very honest, very intimate, very enjoyable time.  I do not have to worry about my behavior, my grammar, when I am with my girlfriend.  I can let my hair down, whatever is left of it.  Since she is young, she looks up to me and admires me.  She does not have a personality cast in stone, so she does not mind changing when I want her to change.  Since I give her a condo, a maid, a car, and spending money, I own her.  I create words that she has to include in her vocabulary.  I teach her.  She is not my teacher, the way my wife is.  She is my student, someone I mold according to my own likes and dislikes. 

Still, I look forward to being alone with literature, being alone with a short story or a poem or a novel, watching a film based on a literary text, writing a literary text.  My boyfriend combines the best traits of my English wife and my Filipino girlfriend.  He is equally comfortable with both and he joins my wife and me when we entertain at home.  He joins my girlfriend and me on trips abroad.  My wife and my girlfriend, not being of the same gender as I am, do not really understand my needs, physical or psychological.  But my boyfriend does.  He excites me, keeps me interested, makes me eager to be with him, with his texts done from the time of Sophocles to the time of Jaime An Lim, Gemino Abad, Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, Oscar Campomanes, Ferdinand Lopez, and all the writers in this audience.  He knows exactly how and where to excite me.  He is one with me in emotions, in sex, in love, in everything. 

It’s not easy being an adulterer.  My wife does not want me to be with my girlfriend.  My girlfriend wants me to leave my wife and to marry her instead.  My boyfriend wants me to be alone with him, not with my wife nor with my girlfriend.  On the rare occasions when I have all three of them around the dinner table, they seem cordial enough, though I know that they really cannot get along that well.  My boyfriend keeps breaking the rules of grammar that my wife and my girlfriend make.  My wife keeps telling me that she is from a very rich and old family and I would be a fool to leave her.  My girlfriend says that my wife does not understand me and only she can. 

It’s a mess.  Sometimes I feel that I should just go into a Trappist monastery and renounce all language, keeping a vow of silence instead.  But my boyfriend insists that he should come with me to the monastery.  They let males in there, but not females. 

Sometimes I feel that I should just find an uninhabited island among the 7,100 islands of the Philippines and live there without books, without anyone, but my boyfriend is already in my memory, my wife has molded my thoughts, and my girlfriend has conditioned my physical needs. 

There is a practical solution, but I don’t want to take it.  I could just leave the country and become an OFW in a country that does not speak English – and there are quite a number of these countries.  That way, I will never use English, there will be no reason to use Filipino, and I will soon forget all the classic lines of literature that define my being.  But there’s a catch.  That country will have its own literature.  I will surely find a new boyfriend.  My boyfriend will surely introduce me to a new girlfriend.  Before I know it, my new girlfriend will become my wife, and I will be back where I started. 

I am glad I was invited to this seminar, because I can now rethink and redirect my personal paradigm.  I can now teach myself a new way of looking at myself, rethink and redirect my pedagogy in teaching language and literature.  In my imagination, I can be constructive.  I can resolve issues.  I can keep alive my live circuit.  I can break out of my depression and get rid of all my repressions by letting the world know who exactly I am. 

I am an adulterer, and proud of it.  Maraming salamat po.

Subtracting two years

The plan to add two years to basic education is really a plan to subtract two years from a student’s preparation for work.  Although it is more accurate to call the plan K Plus 12 (K+12), it is easier to understand it by calling it Work Minus Two (W-2).

By law, Filipinos under the age of 18 are considered minors.  They cannot work.  They cannot establish their own proprietorships.  They cannot vote.  Unless they are Muslims, they cannot get married without parental consent.  They are, in short, children.

Here is a more precise definition (from the ILO) of being a Filipino child:  “In the Philippines, a child is defined as a person below the age of emancipation which is 18 years. As soon as a person reaches 18 years of age, he/she is no longer considered a child and becomes automatically entitled to do all acts of civil life, such as contracting marriage or transacting business deals with corresponding legal effects.”

Right now, because they enter Grade 1 when they are 6 years old and we have only 10 years of basic education, children finish high school at the age of 16.

When (if) they finish high school, they have to wait two years before they work.  The 12-year basic education cycle that President Aquino has promised will keep them in school until they are ready to work.  It is for their own good, in other words, that the government is requiring them to stay two more years before they get high school diplomas.

It might be argued that children can always go to college while waiting to become adults.  That is true, if we were all rich.  Primarily because of poverty, very few children actually go to college.

Let us look at the facts.

According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 61% of Filipinos of high school age are in school, but only 29% of college age are in tertiary institutions.  (To complete the data, UNESCO also says that 49% of children are in pre-school and 92% are in elementary school.  By the way, our commitment to the UN is that, by 2015, 100% of children will be in elementary school, but that requires a separate column.)

Let us boil it down to simple numbers.  Suppose we gather 10 children that were born 4 years ago in our neighborhood.  5 of them will go to pre-school.  Next year, 9 of them will be in Grade 1.  That means that 4 of those that will not go to pre-school will join them in Grade 1 and will be going to school for the first time.

We can see one problem already.  The 4 that will not have pre-school will have to catch up with the 5 that are now in pre-school.  This is one reason the proposed DepEd model requires that pre-school be for everyone, including the 5 that are not in pre-school in our hypothetical example.

Not all the 9 that enter Grade 1 will get to high school.  Only 6 of them will go to high school, which means that the 3 of them that will drop out will be unable to find a good job when they get to be 18.

We can see a second problem.  By not decreasing the drop-out rate, we have condemned 3 Filipinos (not to mention the 1 child that did not get to elementary school) to an extremely low quality of life (a euphemism for starvation, disease, even crime).

Of the 6 that enter First Year High School, only 3 will go to college.  The UNESCO statistics do not show the graduation rate for high school.  Even high school graduates, after all, may decide not to go on to college because of financial or academic reasons.

What is clear is that 7 of our hypothetical children will not have college degrees.  (Not all the 3 that do go to college will eventually finish. 2 of them will most likely drop out, according to other statistics.)

Are we going to condemn these 7 or 9 to unemployment just because they do not have college degrees?  This is the major problem that President Aquino is trying to solve.

Call centers, for example, say that they are perfectly willing to hire high school graduates that speak good English, but they are not legally allowed to do so.  All other businesses that do not really need college-level knowledge or skills would love to employ young people, but high school graduates are much too young.

The proposed DepEd reform solves the problem of unemployment for high school graduates and the related problem of lack of employable persons.

When an editor puts together in one book the works of different authors, we call that book an anthology.  When an author puts together his or her own works of the same kind, such as a book of poems or a book of essays, we call that a collection.  When an author anthologizes or collects works of different genres or types, covering a considerable part, not just a small part or aspect, of his or her own life, we call that a personal anthology. 

This is the first draft of the acceptance speech I prepared for the awarding ceremonies of The Outstanding Filipino (TOFIL), held last 9 December in Insular Life Auditorium in Alabang.  I wanted to deliver the whole thing, but could not because it was too long.  We were allotted only three minutes for each response.

Maraming, maraming salamat po sa napakalaking karangalang iniregalo ninyo sa akin ngayong kapaskuhan.  Hindi ko po masusuklian ang inyong kagandahang-loob.

Please allow me to use my three minutes of fame to plead for outstanding writing and outstanding reading.

Ibinigay ninyo ang TOFIL kay Dionisio Salazar noong 1994 para sa “Drama and Literature,” at kina Crispin Maslog noong 1995 at Florangel Braid noong 2007 para sa “Literature and Journalism.”  Lagi pong may kahati ang literatura. Ito ang kaunaunahang TOFIL na iginawad ninyo para lamang sa larangan ng literatura.

Kahit po natutuwa ako na ako ang una ninyong napili sa literatura, hindi po ako mapakali na parang ngayon lamang ninyo napansin na may mga manunulat na marami nang naiambag para sa ating bayan.

Bakit ko po nabanggit ito?  Sapagkat literatura po ang bumuo at bubuo sa Filipinas.

The Philippines is a country created by writers.  The first natives to imagine the Philippines as a separate and free country, the first true Filipinos, were writers.  The poet and novelist Jose Rizal, the poet Andres Bonifacio, the poet Marcelo del Pilar, the novelist Pedro Paterno, the essayist Apolinario Mabini – these were all writers, wrestling with words, using words as weapons against oppression, using their imagination instead of, or in addition to, their hands.  They shaped our past.  They shaped the present we are living in now.  They are still shaping our own future.

They were our original heroes.  They gave us hope, hope that we could be free from foreign domination, from our own weaknesses, from our own tendencies to be corrupt and to be greedy and to think only of ourselves and our families.  They placed country above self and family.  They showed us, through the example of their own lives and through their writings, what it means to be Filipino.

They were not the last Filipino writers to be heroes.  Epifanio de los Santos was a poet.  Claro M. Recto was a playwright.  Diosdado Macapagal was a poet.  Ninoy Aquino was a poet.  And since the NDF is about to sit down seriously to talk peace with the government, I should mention that Jose Maria Sison is an internationally awarded poet.  Napakarami pong mga manunulat na naging bahagi ng kasaysayan ng ating bayan.

Pero hindi po magkakaroon ng mga dakilang manunulat kung walang mga dakilang taong magbabasa sa kanila.  Kung hindi binasa ng ating mga kababayan ang mga sinulat nina Rizal, Bonifacio, at iba pang mga bayani ay hindi sila lumaban sa kapangyarihan ng bayang España, ng bayang America, ng bayang Hapon.  Kung hindi dinibnib ng ating mga kababayan ang mga sinulat ng ating mga bayani ay hindi sana nabuhay ang apoy ng pakikibaka laban sa mapang-aping dayuhan.

Totoo nga po na iba na ang ating panahon ngayon.  Hindi na po tayo maaaring mabuhay nang mag-isa sa mundo.  Hindi na maaaring ituring na kaaway ang mga dayuhan at banyaga.  Mas laganap na rin po ang media, ang telebisyon, at ang Internet, kaysa libro, kaysa mga tula, dula, salaysay, at sanaysay.

This is the reason I stand here before you tonight.

To read today is an act of heroism, an act of hope. It is an act of heroism because it means going against the tide.  It is an act of hope because it means going for sustained thinking, rather than the compartmentalized, short-lived thrills that we get from reading a newspaper or a blog or a post in Facebook.  It means sitting down and talking, not with flesh-and-blood persons around us or online, but with authors long dead but who used to be as flesh-and-blood as we are, who had all kinds of things to say about what it really means to be human.

Because being human has not changed.  As the French say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.  What was human in the times of Homer, Shakespeare, Rizal, and even as recent as Amado Hernandez and Lina Espina Moore has not changed.  Ang tao ay tao, noong unang panahon man o sa kasalukuyan.

Rizal, Bonifacio, Balagtas, and all writers living or still alive through their works show us how to live our lives.  They were and are our real heroes, because they gave us hope for a better future.

Let me turn to my favorite American poet and to our greatest Tagalog writer to express how I feel tonight.

I named my older daughter after my favorite American poet, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson.  Dickinson wrote: 

Success is counted sweetest

By those that ne’er succeed

To comprehend a nectar

Requires sorest need.

I love Dickinson, but in this particular poem, she was wrong.  I consider this award a success for me, and thanks to you, I can comprehend the nectar.  I count this success the sweetest.

I named my younger daughter not after a poet, but after a poetic idea.  Her name is Paraluman, a word that means muse, a Beatrice to a writer aspiring to be another Dante Alighieri, who championed the vernacular Italian against the international language of his time, which was Latin.  Paraluman also refers to a mariner’s compass, used to point the way to a promised land, a guide for the future.  She prefers her nickname, which is Luna, the moon, also a beacon of light when darkness overcomes the world.

Ito naman ang sinulat ng parorito kong makatang Filipino na si Balagtas tungkol sa mga taong sobra ang ligaya, tulad ng nararamdaman ko ngayon:

Dito naniuala ang batà cong loob                

na sa mundo,i, ualang catoua-áng lubós,

sa minsang ligaya,i, talì nang casunód,       

macapitóng lumbáy ó hangang matapos.

There is a natural law called regression towards the mean or the law of averages or weather-weather.  Balagtas says that I should not be too happy tonight, although of course I have great reason to be.  Similarly, the Bible, which is the greatest work of literature, says that “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

 What I am trying to say is that this award makes me proud, yes, but it also humbles me, because I now have to live up to its name.  Nakakahiya naman kung ipapahiya ko kayo.

 This award inspires me to continue ensuring that our authors furnish the public with words of wisdom and beauty, that readers inside and outside our country view us for what we really are – a race with remarkable literary achievements second to none in the world.

 Since we cannot have good writers if we do not have good readers, my Christmas message to you is this:  Give a Filipino book for Christmas. 

I am not asking you to buy my books, although I will not object if you do.  I am asking that you buy books written by my fellow writers.  It’s good that 75% of the book sales of National Book Store come from local books and only 25% from foreign books.  It’s good that Bob Ong and Martha Cecilia are outselling J. K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer in the Philippines, but many of our thought leaders are still not reading Abdon Balde and Marjorie Evasco.

My suggestion for your New Year’s resolution is this:  Read a Filipino book.  Read a book in Filipino.

May this award be a guide to me and to my fellow awardees, present, past, and future, to become beacons of light for our beloved country, not because we want to dazzle, but because we want to make everyone see how outstanding are not just us but all literate Filipinos.

 Thank you, JCI Senate and Insular Life, for having chosen me for this award.  Thank you for encouraging good writing and good reading.

Thank you to my family, my closest friends from De La Salle University, Far Eastern University, and my numerous organizations.  Thank you to all my mentors, students, fellow writers, readers, and friends inside and outside of Facebook.

Marami pong salamat.  Mabuhay po tayong lahat.

I had a hate-love relationship with Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta.  The first time I encountered her, I hated her.  Then I eventually, gradually, got to love her. 

In 1971, she wrote a negative review in a magazine of my play Halimaw, as staged by PETA.  I thought my play was awesome; she thought it was awful.  Like the immature, spoiled, self-important upstart that I did not realize I was, I wrote a scathing letter questioning her credentials to find fault with what to me then was the greatest play ever written since Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  When my letter to the editor was printed in the magazine, she appended a short sentence saying something like, thank you for this letter.  I gloated then that I had put her in her place. 

Of course, I did not know at that time that she was already a literary icon and that she had already nurtured quite a number of writers who were much, much better than I was. 

I first met her face to face a decade later, in 1981, when Alfrredo Navarro Salanga and I decided to set up the Manila Critics Circle.  I told Freddie that I wanted Alfred “Krip” Yuson to join us.  He told me that he wanted Ophie to be in the group.  At that time, I already had my doctorate, had already studied quite a bit of literary criticism, and had already realized how right she was about Halimaw.  From my point of view, our first meeting was awkward, but as I look back now, I realize how much patience it must have taken her to come face to face with someone that had insulted her in print.  She never, ever, showed any sign to me, then and since then, that she remembered my words that must have hurt her. 

During the 29 years that we worked together in the Circle, discussing books, finding ways to fund the National Book Awards, choosing the awardees, I found out the extent of her patience, kindness, and insight.  After I would point out the flaws in each book we read, she would point out the good things that the author was able to do.  She knew instinctively how she would, if she were the author’s teacher, develop those good things. 

When she started writing plays in 1994, I was totally floored by her coming humbly to me to ask me to help her out.  If she remembered that I once wrote that she knew nothing about playwriting and should never, ever, write a play, she did not show it.  I felt deeply contrite and ashamed of myself every time I would remember how brash I was, but not having totally grown out of being immature, spoiled, and self-important, I never apologized to her for that juvenile silliness.  I should have.  I do now. 

She asked me not only to look over her play on San Lorenzo Ruiz but even to direct it at the Philamlife auditorium.  She asked me to write an essay for the print version of the play.  In 2008, she asked me to help her with her play on St. Thomas Aquinas and also asked me to direct it; unfortunately, I never got to direct that production.  She asked me to write blurbs for her books of poetry.  She asked me to teach at UST.  She did everything to show me how to turn the other cheek on someone that slaps you in public.  In her quiet way, she served as my unacknowledged mentor throughout my writing life. 

Like me in 1971, there were many young writers that also insulted her, perhaps not as publicly as I had done, but worse, privately, not to her face but behind her back.  She knew what these others had done to her, but she treated them the way she treated me.  Using love to overpower hate, she patiently waited for them to grow up. 

I did grow up, and she stayed around long enough for me to love her.  Thank you, dearest Ophie, for showing me what it really means to be a teacher – to be patient, to trust, to applaud, and above all, to teach all the time and to teach everyone, whether inside or outside the classroom. 

In my short life on earth, I have had the privilege of being around people who already had a place reserved for them in heaven.  Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta was, is, one of them.

Something is marvelous in the state of education.

Congress has started thinking seriously of another Congressional Commission on Education – an EDCOM II to review and update the findings of the 1991 EDCOM I – or at least an Oversight Committee to tally the pluses and minuses of the present trifocal education structure (the three foci or education agencies being DepEd, CHED, and TESDA).

President Noynoy Aquino is deadly serious about bringing our educational system up to the level of the rest of the civilized world, by – among other things – adding two years to basic education and ensuring that every Filipino child is already a reader by the end of Grade One.  He was elected President on the basis of this educational platform (as well as his unwavering stand against corruption, of course).

DepEd has started implementing its new curriculum, with Kindergarten now having its own set of minimum learning competencies and high school Filipino and English subjects being grounded on Philippine literature.

CHED is revising the 1996 General Education Curriculum to prepare students for life in the 21^st century, with its knowledge economy, ethical dilemmas, geographical mobility, rapidly changing technology, digital divide, climate change, and other elements so different from those of the world of today’s parents and teachers.

TESDA is trying to return to its original vision of stimulating technical and vocational education, rather than spending its time doing actual training.

The Congressional Commission on Science, Technology, and Engineering (COMSTE) has firmed up its proposals to increase the pool of Filipino scientists and engineers by, among other things, having a science section in all public high schools.

The Philippine Cultural Education Program (PCEP), established by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) in 2001, is well on its way to achieving its vision of making every Filipino culturally literate by, among other things, ensuring that public schools teach children how to be good Filipinos, rather than good foreigners.

Private schools are rapidly learning what academic freedom really means – the freedom to think, to research, and to innovate.  More and more interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, even nondisciplinary courses are being offered in more and more varied types of schools.  CHED is doing its part by declaring that it will return to its original mandate of being a developmental, rather than a regulatory, agency.

The increase in the number of autonomous and deregulated private higher education institutions (HEIs), the passage or revision of charters of government schools, the linkages with and even actual coming into the country of foreign universities, the local moves to join international accrediting or quality assessment initiatives (such as the Washington Accord, the Bologna Process, and the Asia-Pacific Quality Network), the professionalization of schools through investments by industries, the increasing involvement of industry itself in educational planning and reform – all these and more are signs that, finally, after so many years of studies and pilot projects, education will dramatically improve.

We have studied the educational system too many times.  These are just a few of the “comprehensive” and “final” studies of our education:  the Monroe Commission of 1925, the UNESCO Mission Survey of 1949, the Swanson Survey of 1960, the Presidential Commission to Survey Philippine Education (PCSPE) of 1970, EDCOM I, the Presidential Commission on Educational Reform (PCER) of 1998, the Philippine Education Sector Study (PESS) of 1999, and the Presidential Task Force to Assess, Plan, and Monitor the Entire Educational System (PTFE) of 2007.  We have studied long enough.  We are now putting our money where our mouth was.

We have had literally hundreds of pilot projects.  We have empirical proof that many of these experiments were successful.  We have piloted programs, structures, strategies, methods, techniques, and so on long enough.  We are now putting our money where our instincts were.

In the Curriculum Summit I called last July, the participants (most of the top education officials in the country) asked me to organize a second summit.  Although I am still perfectly willing to do that for the sake of the country, I am very happy that DepEd has agreed to organize, host, and fund it.

Yes, never has there been such an exciting time as today for Philippine education.

(First published in The Philippine Star, 16 September 2010)

On July 15, 2010, I convened a Curriculum Summit at the Foundation for Upgrading the Standard of Education (FUSE) in Manila.  Present were Senate and Congress legislators, DepEd officials (led by Sec. Armin Luistro), CHED commissioners and officials (led by Chair Patricia Licuanan), TESDA officials, presidents of public and private schools, business executives, and education gurus.

Before the three-hour session, I asked the participants to indicate their preference among the various ways of adding two years to the basic education cycle.  After the session, I asked them again where they thought the years should be added in the cycle.  During the session, they discussed the pros and cons of each option, as well as other education issues.

Before the session, 25.6% of the participants thought a Grade 7 and a 5^th year high school (HS) should be inserted into the cycle.  After the discussions, 31.6% preferred this option.  This is the option preferred by President Aquino.  We can expect DepEd to implement this option, although the results of the Summit might make the President change his mind, since 68.4% of our top educators and policy makers do not agree with this course of action.

Before the session, 20.9% thought that basic education should remain exactly as it is today, but the two-year Pre-University proposed by the Presidential Task Force on Education (PFTE) should be instituted.  After the session, only 13.2% preferred this option.  After listening to the arguments against the PTFE proposal, educators realized that there were better options.

Before the session, 18.6% thought that the two years should be added at the end of the basic education cycle, but with 5^th year and 6^th year HS having different curriculums for those going to college and those working full-time after HS.  After the session, 15.8% preferred this option.  Although some changed their minds, this was still considered a better option than the Pre-University,

Before the session, 9.3% thought that the present Kindergarten should be transformed into Grade 1 (thus automatically instituting a 7-year elementary cycle) and a 5^th year HS should be added at the end of the cycle.  After the session, 13.2% thought that this was a good option.  Aquino’s plan actually provides for this option; he wants Kindergarten to become Grade 1 and a real pre-school instituted prior to what we now call pre-school.  Aquino, however, does not want an extra year added after HS but before it (called a bridge between elementary school and HS).  Clearly, the bridging program needs to be rethought.

Before the session, 7.0% thought that there should be two kinds of HS students.  One kind should be given diplomas after Grade 10; these students are those that will work immediately after HS.  The other kind should not be given diplomas but should be made to go to 5^th year and 6^th year HS; these students are those that will go on to college.  After the session, 7.9% agreed with this proposal (not a significant change of opinion).

Before the session, 7.0% thought that everyone should go through the same 5^th year and 6^th year HS, whether they are college-bound or not.  After the session, only 2.6% still thought so, showing clearly that there is little reason to extend the basic education cycle if no streaming is done.

Before the session, 11.6% had other ideas.  After the session, 15.8% still did not like any of the other options.  Some were actually against adding years; these are now beating a dead horse, because Aquino has made it clear that he will add two years.  Some wanted more than two additional years.  Some wanted Ordinary Level (O) and Advanced Level (A) exams, British style.

There were a number of lessons learned during the Curriculum Summit.  The most obvious is that, with discussion, people’s minds change.  An implication of this is that there is a need for even more discussion.  If people can change their minds after three hours, think of how much clearer the options would be if we had three days to really consider all their implications. 

In fact, most of the participants asked for another session, but since I organized the Summit only on my own private initiative (with financial help from FUSE, which waived the rental fee for its conference room and paid for the snacks), I hope I need not have to host the next one.  CHED, DepEd, TESDA, the Presidential Assistant for Education, or the education committees of the Senate or Congress can easily and officially convene Curriculum Summit II.

The Summit also discussed the subjects that should be but are not in the Basic Education Curriculum, whether there should still be General Education in college, the trifocal structure, and other issues.

It is time to talk about what subjects to include in the two years that DepEd will add to the basic education cycle.  As Secretary Armin Luistro correctly says, it is not simply a question of adding subjects.  The whole curriculum has be redesigned so that there will be a smooth flow of learning and teaching from Grade 1 to Grade 12.  (We really should start calling the high school years “Grades” in order to emphasize that the high school years do not represent a break from elementary school in the continuum of education.)

In the Curriculum Summit that I convened last July 15, the participants listed the subjects that they thought each student should have studied before they graduate from high school.  These subjects were of two kinds:  those that colleges and universities expect their incoming freshmen to already know before admission and those that students should know if they start working after high school.

Here are the subjects most mentioned by the participants.

Most mentioned was Mathematics.  The particular subjects suggested varied from basic mathematics (Arithmetic) to Advanced Algebra, Differential Calculus, and Integral Calculus.  In the current 10-year curriculum, most students (except those in science high schools and some private schools) get only as far as Intermediate Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, and Statistics and, if they choose them as electives, Advanced Algebra and Business Mathematics.  With the extra two years, it should be possible to include Calculus, which is taught in high school in other countries.

Mathematics is necessary not because all students will go into science or engineering courses, but because it teaches analytical skills.  Mentioned as also good for honing analytical skills are Philosophy and Logic, although Mathematics wins hands-down as the subject educators want students to master before leaving high school. Mathematics is also instrumental for any student wishing to pursue a business administration degree.

Science came in second as the subject all basic education graduates should have.  To the participants, Science is not the science now taught in public schools, but real science – experiment-based, inquiry-based, research-intensive.  The science subject most mentioned was Chemistry, particularly Inorganic Chemistry.

Part of Science is the study of the human body, variously mentioned as health education, reproductive health, and responsible parenthood.  Unfortunately caricatured in media as Sex Education, a combined Anatomy and Physiology course was mentioned as crucial to the education of the youth.

Incidentally, DepEd can shortcut the process of designing a Mathematics and Science curriculum by consulting the National Institute for Science and Mathematics Education Development (NISMED), based in the University of the Philippines.  NISMED has been working on mathematics and science learning competencies for the longest time.

Culture came in third in the list of favorites of the participants.  Defined primarily as Philippine culture, arts, and heritage, this subject was also expected to deal with the heritage of the ASEAN region.  In this case also, DepEd will have an easy time figuring out how to teach culture across the curriculum, i.e., from Pre-school to Grade 12.  All DepEd has to do is to ask the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) for the ready-made arts curriculum done by the Philippine Cultural Education Program (PCEP).  PCEP spent several years designing the curriculum with the help of DepEd itself, as well as various other stakeholders.

Coming in fourth among the most mentioned subjects needed by our youth is Entrepreneurship.  This is understandable, because livelihood capacity is one of the objectives of all education.  Once we add two years to basic education, a high school graduate will be 18 years old and, therefore, already qualified to work.  It is important that the graduate knows how to be a good employee, but since business corporations cannot absorb all our graduates, each graduate must also know how to set up a business.  Whether one is on one’s own or in a company, however, entrepreneurship is a skill that will serve a high school graduate well.

Among the other subjects mentioned by the participants were civics, English, environmental education, Filipino, financial literacy, foreign languages (especially Spanish and ASEAN languages), geography, IT, media literacy, Philippine history, Southeast Asian history, values, and vocational-technical skills.

Since some of the subjects mentioned form part of the General Education Curriculum (GEC) in college, it is clear that the college curriculum has to be modified.  Most of the participants felt that the GEC should be improved but not eliminated.  Most felt that there should be only one year of GEC subjects (compared to almost two years now), but not necessarily all in freshman year. 

At the end of the Curriculum Summit that I convened last month, I asked the participants what concerns other than those we had discussed during the session were urgent and important.  They listed several, among which are the following.  These concerns reflect the current thinking of our senior educators.  I append my own take on their comments.

Teacher quality.  This was mentioned by most of the participants, who urged better selection of teachers and better teacher training.  Indeed, the most important factor in student achievement tends to be teachers, rather than curriculum, teaching method, textbooks, or other inputs.

Teacher welfare.  As one participant put it, “Teacher welfare must be attended to.”  Clearly, the other side of demanding higher quality teaching from teachers is making sure that they get what they truly deserve.  Good quality teachers should have good quality of life.

Teaching methods.  One participant observed the lack of creativity in the classroom. I agree that teachers should not use only lecture, discussion, and recitation, but also innovative methods of delivering instruction.

Importance of culture.  Reference was made to the NCCA’s Philippine Cultural Education Program (PCEP), which aims to mainstream culture and the arts in all education, whether formal or nonformal.  It is ridiculous that most Filipino children would rather be Americans.

Language of instruction.  Fortunately, the issue of the medium of instruction did not become a sore point during the discussion, which it often does in other forums.  Our top educators have obviously read the research done on the relationship of the medium of instruction to the quality of learning.

Lack of physical facilities.  “We have to build more facilities, such as gyms, libraries, and laboratories” was a common comment.  It is not only classrooms that DepEd should look into, but the other structures that make up education.  Education is not all book learning, but should involve multiple intelligences, experiential knowledge, and hands-on experimentation.

Need to be globally competitive.  Because so many Filipinos work abroad, the participants were aware of the pressure being exerted on the Philippines by other countries to conform to international standards of education.

Prejudice against non-degree holders.  One participant put it this way:  “Those that opt to go to a work-related program and not to go to a university should not be discriminated against.  We must change the image of voc-tech.”  This is such a huge problem, because it is not based on reason or facts, but on age-old prejudice.  Even if the richest man in the world (Bill Gates) is a prime example of the superiority of technical versus academic excellence, practically all Filipino parents believe that a college-educated person is a better human being than a high school graduate.

Textbook quality.   Frankly, I believe that, no matter how many layers of evaluation we have in purchasing textbooks, the quality will not improve unless those writing textbooks are writers who teach, rather than teachers who do not write.

Parent empowerment.  Many comments had to do with parents, who have to pay for so many things, even if tuition were free. We need to find an institutional way of consulting parents.

Student empowerment.  Similarly, students – who are the customers of the education business – have to be able to demand what they should be taught, how they should be taught, and who should teach them.

Timetable for changes.  Finally, as a few participants mentioned, we cannot talk forever.  At some point, somebody has to make a decision to implement (or not to implement) the plan of adding two years.

At the end of the Summit, I asked then incoming CHED Chair Patricia Licuanan and then newly-named DepEd Secretary Armin Luistro to respond to the insights and suggestions of the participants.  They both showed willingness and eagerness to listen, but they also emphasized that, at the end of the day, they had to make the hard decisions.

As with any change, the addition of two more years to the basic education cycle is going to make a lot of people unhappy.  It is, however, a bitter pill.  We need to join the rest of the civilized world in terms of the length and quality of our education cycle.  We have objective proof that our educational system as it is right now does not work.  We always score among the lowest in international tests such as TIMSS.

(First published in The Philippine Star, 5, 12, & 19 August 2010)

Since the movie The Bucket List, the webcast of Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture,” and books such as 1000 Places to See Before You Die, it has become fashionable to do a to-do list. Since the student-produced magazine Bounce published my list of to-dos in its Summer Break 2008 issue, letting my bucket list out of the closet (oops! mixed metaphor!), let me go through each of the items in the list. Such self-reflection, though public, may perhaps be allowed since I just celebrated my 63rd birthday. (Thanks, by the way, to all those that texted, emailed, and called to greet me. Special thanks to Crispina Martinez-Belen, who never fails to greet me in her “Celebrity World” column in Manila Bulletin.)

The magazine list does not include any of the impossible things I wish I could do before I die, such as rolling a perfect game in bowling, learning how to do the jump shot in pool, playing blindfold chess against a grandmaster (of course, the grandmaster will be wearing the blindfold), owning a library that looks exactly like that of Henry Higgins in the movie My Fair Lady, directing a superhero movie, finding the perfect banana split (no one remembers anymore how to do the one that Magnolia used to serve in Quiapo), and, of course, to give my Last Lecture and have everyone download it from Google, YouTube, Vodpod, or whatever will come next.

This is my more serious list as published in the student magazine:

1. Win the lottery and buy all the gadgets I want.
2. Get Philippine journals to join Philippine Journals Online (accessed through a UK website).
3. Institutionalize the National Book Awards.
4. Gather fellow Fulbright scholars for common projects that would accelerate the nation’s development.
5. Give 40 educational videos to literature classes and teachers in high schools through a project for the Foundation for Upgrading the Standard of Education.
6. Have the Department of Education mandate the use of local languages as the medium of instruction.
7. Establish an Asian Critics Circle.
8. Write the Encyclopedia of Philippine Literature (arranged by language).
9. Write a series for Anvil Publishing from my columns.
10. Write a long-promised volume on Teaching Literature for Giraffe Publishing.
11. Write the third part in my trilogy of plays on Bienvenido N. Santos.
12. Play tournament bridge at a level good enough to compete internationally.
13. Think up more to-dos.

The student interviewer was very good at getting me to reveal all of these to-dos, though I obviously held back in order to appear professorial to the magazine editors. It was, after all, a feature on a professor in a magazine otherwise devoted to features about students.

First, gadgets. Next only to Philippine Star columnist Jose “Butch” Dalisay, I have the most number of gadgets of any Filipino writer. I do not have the financial resources of Butch (which is why I need to win the lotto), who has the latest paper-thin Mac, but I do have the competing Vista-run Acer. (The Acer is great, Vista is not, and if you’re about to buy a computer, be sure it has Windows XP and not Vista. I can hear Butch say, that’s why you should shift to Mac.)

I don’t think even Butch has my latest gadget: a dual-SIM cellphone that doubles as a portable TV set, with all the usual cellphone things (two cameras for video calls, FM radio, 1GB memory for films in mp4 format, and so on), all for less than ten thousand pesos. Oh, I don’t have to pay anyone anything for the TV shows, since the TV works even without a SIM card.

Second on my bucket list is getting Philippine journals to join Philippines Journals Online (PJOL). This wish is about to be completely fulfilled, with the coming to Manila in May 2008 of two key persons from the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP), which sponsors PJOL. 

INASP’s Sioux Cumming (Publishing Programme Officer) and Julie Walker (Head of Publishing Support) will train more than twenty editors of Philippine journals in the use of the free journal management software called Open Journal Systems (OJS). INASP has been very generous to the Philippines, paying most of the expenses of the workshop, even the transportation of editors from outside Manila. C&E is sponsoring the meals, Ateneo is sponsoring the venue and computer time, and various universities are sending their editors on official time.

Why is it important that Philippine journals are available through a website or portal based in the U.K. and Canada? Right now, our Philippine-based academic websites are not exactly on the top of the list of resources scholars refer to when they do their articles. If you googled any of the current hot issues in academic research, it is highly unlikely that an article published in a Philippine journal would be on the first few pages of the search results.

Why is it important that our articles are read or cited by foreign scholars? Because the name of the game is citation.

One of the major criteria for ranking a university internationally is the number of times articles written by faculty members in that university are used in the footnotes or bibliographies of articles in what are known as “ISI journals.” The abbreviation ISI refers to a now-outdated term (Institute for Scientific Information). ISI is a list of journals considered important by scholars around the world, as evidenced by being routinely included in footnotes and bibliographies. The list is available on the Thomson Reuters website.

Thomson Reuters lists about 9,000 journals. A similar journal list, generated by Scopus, covers 15,000 journals. There are an estimated 100,000 journals in the world, with about 30,000 of them published by universities, rather than organizations or commercial publishers.

There is a formula used to find out what are called the “Impact Factor” and the “Prestige Factor” of a journal. As explained in a 2001 article by Ioan-Iovitz Popescu, “the impact factor of a journal is defined as the ratio between citations and recent (previous two years) citable items published or, in other words, as the average number of citations in a given year of articles published in that journal in the preceding two years.” The logarithm for the prestige factor is more complicated and has six independent variables, but the idea is simple enough: a journal is important if most of its articles are cited by scholars.

University libraries around the world subscribe only to journals with very high impact or prestige factors, since no library is rich enough to subscribe to 100,000 journals. Even financially, therefore, it makes sense for a university journal to get itself cited and, therefore, bought by librarians worldwide.

Currently, as far as I know, there are only six Philippine journals included in the ISI list: Philippine Agricultural Scientist (UP Los Baños), Philippine Entomologist (UP Los Baños), Philippine Journal of Crop Science (UP Los Baños), Philippine Journal of Science (Science Technology Information Institute), Philippine Journal of Veterinary Medicine (UP Los Baños), and Philippine Scientist (University of San Carlos). No other Philippine journal is considered good enough to be cited by foreign scholars.

In order for an article to be cited by anyone, it should first be easily accessible and it should be available in full. This is what PJOL aims to achieve.
Once a journal is easily accessible online, because it is hosted by prestigious British and Canadian sites, it can reach ISI or Scopus status more quickly. Although I have been very vocal against ISI (ironically, my anti-ISI article was recently published in an ISI journal!), I do not think we have a choice at this point. We have to have our journals listed by ISI and Scopus. 

The first step is to be read by others. Once international scholars read us, I am confident that they will find that we are in step with (and in some cases, ahead of) other scholars outside the country.

As I always boast whenever I speak in international conferences, I have read all of the sonnets of Shakespeare, but who among British or North American critics today have read Florante at Laura? But if we do not get Shakespeare scholars to read our articles about Balagtas, nobody will ever think that Balagtas was as good a poet (though not as good a playwright) as Shakespeare. Sad to say, even most Filipinos think that Shakespeare was the better poet, even if they have not yet read either Shakespeare or Balagtas. But colonial mentality is another topic altogether, and I am too realistic to put the eradication of colonial mentality on my wish list.

Third on my bucket list is institutionalizing the National Book Awards of the Manila Critics Circle.

In 1981, Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta, Alfrredo Navarro Salanga, Alfred A. Yuson, and I met in a small eatery across the street from the University of Santo Tomas and decided to establish the Manila Critics Circle. Except for textbooks, there were very few books being published then in the Philippines. We wanted to honor the authors and publishers of the best of the non-textbooks. The next year, we gave the first of what would be annual National Book Awards, with trophies donated by Eduardo Castrillo.

We eventually invited more book reviewers to join us. We unfortunately also eventually lost some of our members – Salanga himself, Leonidas V. Benesa, and Doreen G. Fernandez. Right now, the members of the Circle are, aside from the three surviving founders, Virgilio S. Almario, Juaniyo Arcellana, Cirilo F. Bautista, Fr. Miguel A. Bernad, S.J., Ruel de Vera, Resil B. Mojares, Danton R. Remoto, and Soledad S. Reyes. Our honorary member who does not join our deliberations because he lives in Michigan is Roger Bresnahan.

Except for a couple of years when I was either abroad or in government, I did most of the secretarial work for the Circle, such as asking publishers for copies of their books, soliciting funds and trophies, and setting up the awarding ceremonies.
Since I was not getting any younger, and neither were most of the other members of the Circle, we decided sometime last year to find a way to get an institution to take over the National Book Awards. We still wanted to be the ones to decide which books should get awards, but we (certainly, I) no longer had the energy to run around looking for money, sculptors, and venues.

We turned to the National Book Development Board (NBDB), which had been supporting us financially in recent years. (In our early years, the Circle even sat on the Board.) We were very lucky that the Chair of the Board, Dennis T. Gonzalez, and its Executive Director, Andrea Pasion-Flores, loved good books as passionately as we did. We asked them and the members of the current NBDB board (also a particularly well-chosen group of governors) to take over the awards, and they agreed.
As authors and publishers already know, the process of choosing finalists for the awards has been democratized, with professional organizations now invited to help the Manila Critics Circle choose the best books in their respective fields. Now, instead of having to read all the books published in a given year (last year, each of us in the Circle had to read something like 400 books, which probably contributed to my having to have a laser operation recently), we have to read only 50 or so pre-selected books.

Now, I have one less thing to worry about.

I believe that a project manager should be able to let go of the project and watch on the sidelines as it becomes more successful once he or she is out of the picture. 

Through the years, I accumulated a lot of debts of gratitude, most especially to Primetrade Asia, which hosted the awards during the Manila International Book Fair. To Primetrade and to all the government agencies (such as NCCA), publishers, sponsors, universities, sculptors, and others that supported the National Book Awards, thank you very much! 

Fourth on my bucket list is gathering fellow Fulbright scholars for common projects that will help accelerate the nation’s development.

I have had two Fulbright grants, one to study for my doctorate at the University of Maryland from 1972 to 1976, the second in 2003 to read the papers left behind by Bienvenido N. Santos at the Wichita State University Library.

I first became a member of the board of the Philippine Fulbright Scholars Association (PFSA), composed of almost 2,000 Filipino Fulbright alumni, in 1988, when the association president was Marcelo B. Fernan, then Supreme Court Chief Justice. Being typecast since college days as PRO of various organizations, I was elected PRO (which was defined as both press relations officer and public relations officer).

One of my first tasks was to write the lyrics of the 40th anniversary song, composed by Lucrecia Kasilag. Unfortunately for me, when the song was performed at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in September, 1988, I was on a British Council Senior Fellowship at the University of Oxford. Since the song demanded a full orchestra and only the most experienced singers (it was, after all, a Kasilag composition), it has never again been performed.

Recently, for the 60th Fulbright anniversary, the association wanted me to do another song. Menchie Mantaring of the CCP did the music and I wrote lyrics to fit the music. With Arwin Tan arranging the music and conducting the CCP Chorale, the crowd never knew that, because my schedule was too full to allow lead time, I had written the lyrics overnight.

Among the several projects I was asked by Fernan to handle was an essay contest in 1990 on the American Bill of Rights. We secured the cooperation of Magnolia, the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution, the Philippine American Education Foundation (PAEF), and the Thomas Jefferson Cultural Center, and were able to offer prizes consisting of tickets to the U.S.A., with cash allowances from $1,000 to $2,000 per winner. Another project I enjoyed doing was a rather short-lived PFSA newsletter in 1995 entitled The Filipino Fulbrighter.

Initiated by Fernan was a livelihood project in 1990 in Marilaw, Bulacan, in cooperation with the Hubert H. Humphrey Alumni Association, the East-West Center Alumni Association, and the Marilaw Jaycees. I remember distinctly walking the alleys between the houses constructed on top of the dumpsite (this was before Payatas), with Fernan in the lead; he was completely focused on asking the residents there how they wanted Fulbright scholars to help them.

In 1995 Corazon S. de la Paz (still with the private sector then and not yet with SSS) was elected president. I was re-elected to the board; this time, I shared the position of PRO with Ma. Mercedes M. Fajardo-Robles.

One project assigned to me by the board was the editing and publication of two anthologies of public lectures given by Fulbrighters. The first was The J. William Fulbright Memorial Lectures, 1995-1996 (1996), containing the first to the fifth lectures, as well as the acceptance speech of Corazon C. Aquino when we successfully nominated her in 1996 for the very prestigious Washington-based J. William Fulbright Prize for International Understanding. The second was The J. William Fulbright Memorial Lectures, 1997-1998, containing the 6th to 16th JWF Memorial Lectures, launched in 2000.

In 2005 I succeeded De la Paz as president of the association. I wanted to continue the vision of Fernan to engage Fulbrighters more directly in poverty-alleviation projects. I also wanted to be as active as De la Paz, who was a house on fire. Under her, the association engaged in numerous projects. Of course, under me, the association has not been as active as it was under De la Paz (I have less than half of her energy and hardly a tenth of her network).

Having put in so much of myself in Fulbright work, I included on my bucket list the desire to have Fulbrighters work more directly as a group with the poor. There are already hundreds of Fulbrighters working with the poor, individually or as heads of various community-oriented organizations. But I want the association to adopt a municipality, the way we once did with Marilaw, Bulacan.

Fortunately, the other alumni organizations have the same desire. Humphrey and East-West, in fact, have been doing direct community outreach for some time now. 
You can imagine how difficult it is to manage a program that involves just about everyone that went to the U.S. on American taxpayers’ money. The only organization outside our federation is the United States International Visitor Program Philippine Alumni Foundation (of which I happen to be a very inactive member), which I hope also one day to invite to our alumni presidents’ breakfast meetings.

My fourth wish on my bucket list is about to be fulfilled. There are high hopes now that the Fulbrighters will be able to adopt a municipality in Laguna, thanks to the efforts of Fulbright board member Liborio S. Cabanilla, who happens to be a board member (and former president) of the Fulbright Philippine Agriculture Alumni Association. 

Fifth on my bucket list is giving forty educational videos to literature classes and teachers in high schools through a project for the Foundation for Upgrading the Standard of Education (FUSE).

I am well on my way to fulfilling this wish. 

Since June, 2006, FUSE has been funding my project called “Continuing Studies via Technology (CONSTEC) on Literature: A Telecourse for Students and Teachers of Literature,” a series of 25-minute telelessons meant to enhance the teaching of literature in secondary school.

So far, the project has produced twenty 25-minute video lessons showing different ways of teaching literary texts. Each module consists of two parts: the first part meant to be watched by students in a classroom, the second part meant to be watched only by teachers.

If used inside a classroom, a teacher may plan a lesson in which the first part (about 10 minutes) is shown to the students. In that part, an expert discusses the text being studied, and I give instructions to the students on what to do with the text.

Before the class, the teacher should watch the second part (about 15 minutes), which consists of a discussion of the teaching method used in the first part, plus a demonstration lesson taught by an outstanding teacher. The demonstration teachers are either Metrobank Outstanding Teachers or the best literature teachers in Metro Manila as chosen by DepEd NCR. The demonstration students, taught under actual classroom conditions (there is no script; the teacher actually teaches the class), come from different public and private schools.

Printed teacher’s guides are currently being prepared by a team of expert teachers from Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University, Philippine Normal University, and DepEd. These guides will help teachers make full use of the videos in their classrooms.

The following are the completed telelessons. Each item lists the title of the literary text, the author (if applicable), the expert, the demonstration teacher, the school where the students come from, and the teaching method used.

For First Year:

Darangen, Nagasura Madale, Regina Tirones, Manila Science High School (MSHS), Jingle Rap.

My Brother’s Peculiar Chicken, Alejandro Roces, the author himself, Patricia Jocson, Philippine High School for the Arts (PHSA), Closure.

A Sigh in the Dark, Angela Manalang Gloria, Edna Zapanta Manlapaz, Marjorie Evasco, PHSA, Interpretative Reading.

Wedding Dance, Amador Daguio, Bienvenido Lumbera, Nerissa Lomeda, MSHS, Fashion Design.

The Monkey and the Turtle, Jose Rizal, Carla Pacis, Rosalinda Juan, MSHS, Emoticon.

For Second Year:

Frog Haiku, Matsuo Basho, Minoru Kikuchi, Marjorie Evasco, PHSA, Group Creative Writing.

An Incident, Lu Xun, David Jonathan Bayot, Patricia Jocson, PHSA, Talk Show.

Ramayana, Maharshi Valmiki, Juan Francisco, Pamela Tayag Salvosa, MSHS, Music.

A Singapore Fairy Tale, Catherine Lim, Lily Rose Tope, Leny Pagdanganan, MSHS, Debate.

Mama Wata and the Monster, Veronique Tadjo, Carla Pacis, Pamela Tayag Salvosa, MSHS, Quiz Show.

The Spider’s Thread, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Minoru Kikuchi, Patricia Jocson, PHSA, Multiple Intelligences.

For Third Year:

The Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Kral, Azucena Erencio, MSHS, Virtual Filmmaking.

How Do I Love Thee, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta, Leodivico Lacsamana, MSHS, Memorization.

I Shall Not Live in Vain, Emily Dickinson, Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta, Marjorie Evasco, PHSA, Journal Writing.

Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare, Jaime Ong, Patricia Jocson, MSHS, Modern Adaptation.

For Fourth Year:

The Cave (Qur’an), Mashur Vin-Ghalib Jundam, Patricia Jocson, PHSA, Open Forum.

Les Misérables, Victor Hugo, Cornelio Bascarra, Cecile Correa, MSHS, Question Matrix.

On Writing Poetry, Margaret Atwood, Elmer Ordoñez, Marjorie Evasco, PHSA, Exhibit.

Parable of the Talents (New Testament), Bienvenido Nebres SJ, Leodivico Lacsamana, MSHS, Letter Writing.

The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, Jaime An Lim, MSHS, Twenty Questions.

Secondary schools may request free copies of the telelessons from FUSE. The telelessons are in DVD format.

The series has started airing over Knowledge Channel on the following schedule: Sundays 7:40-8:20 p.m.; Mondays 10:00-10:40 a.m., 12:20-1:00 p.m., 7:40-8:20 p.m.; Tuesdays 7:40-8:20 p.m.; Wednesdays 2:00-2:40 p.m., 7:40-8:20 p.m.; Thursdays 7:40-8:20 p.m.; Fridays 7:00-7:40 a.m., 12:20-1:00 p.m., 7:40-8:20 p.m. 

Sixth on my bucket list is getting the Department of Education to mandate the use of the local language as the medium of instruction in all regions of the country.

In our history, there has been only one professional linguist who became Secretary of Education. That was the late Brother Andrew Gonzalez, FSC, who not only had a doctorate in linguistics from Berkeley, but was recognized internationally as a leading language scholar. He published dozens of articles in international journals on language policy, language learning, and education.

Even before he headed the Department, Gonzalez already believed that English should not be the main medium of instruction in the Philippines. From his studies and experience, he knew that students learn faster and better if taught in their own home language, not in a foreign one. He knew, however, that it was politically naive, not to mention logistically impossible, to shift immediately to a monolingual vernacular medium from the purely English-medium system imposed by Americans at the turn of the century. He, therefore, proposed the Bilingual Education Program (BEP) as a transitory step towards a monolingual vernacular system. 

When he became Secretary, he started the Lingua Franca Project, which successfully transformed several elementary schools into monolingual vernacular systems, at least until third grade. When Raul Roco succeeded him as Secretary, I expanded the project from using only three vernaculars (Cebuano, Ilocano, and Tagalog) to several vernaculars (including Bicol, which was Roco’s native language).

After he left the Department, Gonzalez became more vocal about shifting to a purely vernacular system of education. In the writings that he left behind, he made it clear that bilingualism was only a step towards monolingualism within regions. I should stress that monolingualism did not mean, to him, having every Filipino use only Filipino, but that Cebuanos would be taught in Cebuano, Ilocanos in Ilocano, Bikolanos in Bikol, and so on.

I have argued myself hoarse on innumerable occasions about the shift, especially since I happen to be one of Gonzalez’s admirers (read: disciples). I have often wondered, in fact, why people do not believe linguists when it comes to matters of language. In every other matter, we always turn to experts. We go to a medical doctor if we are sick, we go to an architect if we want to build a house, we even get a professional driver to drive our car, but for some strange reason, we do not want to listen to a linguist when it comes to the language of instruction.

I have paid dearly for my stand on the medium of instruction. I will tell you a story I have told very few friends. I worked closely with Cory Aquino on a few speeches and video scripts during the anti-Marcos years.

Once, when we were alone in her office in Makati and she was considering running for president, she asked me, “What would you do if you were Minister or Secretary of Education?”

I answered without hesitation, “Change the medium of instruction to Filipino.”

I remember her answer very well. She said, “Sobra ka naman.” [That’s too much.]

That is probably why she never invited me to become a cabinet member during her presidency.

When Gloria Macapagal Arroyo wrote Executive Order 210, which mandated the use of English as the primary medium of instruction in basic education, I was one of the main signatories to a petition filed in the Supreme Court to declare her action unconstitutional. Since the Supreme Court is still deciding this issue and although I no longer am a party to the petition currently pending, I cannot speak about it because it is sub judice. That is why I write about the issue only in personal terms (my interactions with Gonzalez, Roco, and Aquino), not in the legal terms the Justices are using as they deliberate on the medium of instruction.

Seventh on my bucket list is, or rather, was establishing an Asian Critics Circle.

Because of the success of the Manila Critics Circle (if I may say so myself), I toyed with the idea of bringing together critics from various Asian countries to come up with Asian Book Awards, similar to our National Book Awards.

I made friends with a number of literary critics in Asia, primarily because I met them fairly regularly in international conferences. We referred to ourselves jokingly as conference types, because we enjoyed sitting down in conference rooms for hours and pretending to listen to each other.

I say “pretending” because, most of the time, the talks were either in areas which were so specialized that only the speakers knew what they were talking about or were delivered in languages that needed simultaneous translation. 

Don’t get me wrong. Most simultaneous translators are very competent and manage to convey the ideas in conference papers, but they miss the tones and undertones (which, in literary or cultural conferences, are as important as the ideas). Seeing someone saying something in one language and hearing another person on headphones is like watching dubbed movies: it’s distracting, to say the least.

In any case, during conference breaks or evening drinking sessions, much talk passed about choosing this book or that and giving authors trophies or cash awards. Nothing much was ever remembered the morning after.

I did manage to get a huge amount of funding once, from an aging Taiwan professor, to host a meeting in Taiwan of a few leading Asian critics. Unfortunately, he died before we could all agree on a date.

I once also started an e-mail discussion, but revered and aging critics are not as computer-literate as their grandchildren, and there were too few of us digital immigrants in the egroup to make our decisions credible.

One issue always stumped us – that of language. Although most of us were literate in English, all of us thought that some novels in our own native languages clearly deserved regional awards much more than those written in English. The SEAWRITE (the award given by Thailand) manages to circumvent the issue of language by letting national boards do the judging, but we did not want to do that. We wanted to give awards to books that most, if not all of us would have read. Since none of us read more than a few languages, we could not figure out how we could judge works in Chinese, Malay, Tamil, Japanese, Filipino, and so on.

You see, at the highest levels of literary criticism, critics read a work in its original language. Literature is a particular or specialized use of language, and many literary values are lost in the process of moving from one language to another. 

We all knew the hazards of basing judgments on translations. The Chinese, in particular, are often upset that the works translated into non-Chinese languages are not their best. (There is, of course, a political dimension here, since most non-communist translators prefer to work on Chinese works that attack the Chinese government.)

I know the limits of translation from experience. When I was teaching in Iran, I learned from my Iranian friends that Omar Khayyam was not their best poet. Since he was the only one I had read in translation, I thought he was pretty good, but the Iranians swore that their other poets were much better. Unfortunately, until I got to Iran, I had never read those other poets. Even in Iran, my Persian was good only for shopping, not for reading poetry.

Sad to say, I have given up on this item in my bucket list. I’m glad that regional awards like SEAWRITE and MAN are around, but critics’ awards like our own National Book Awards would give more significant recognition to the excellent work writers are doing in our part of the world. 

Eighth on my bucket list is writing or publishing an Encyclopedia of Philippine Literature, the volumes arranged by the original language of the anthologized texts.
The idea comes from my teacher, mentor, idol, and now National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera.

He was the first scholar to suggest that all Philippine literary texts are part of national literature and that the dichotomy of “national vs. regional” is false. He said that we should not talk of Cebuano literature or Ilocano literature, but of Philippine literature in Cebuano, Philippine literature in Ilocano, Philippine literature in Tagalog, Philippine literature in Maranao, Philippine literature in English, Philippine literature in Spanish, Philippine literature in Chinese, and so on.

This idea has many implications. First, it is not true that our writings in English are more significant than our writings in, say, Bikol. Philippine literature in Bikol is just as important a stream of our national literature as that written in English. In an encyclopedia of Philippine literature, the volume on Philippine literature in Bikol would be as impressive as the volume on Philippine literature in English.

Second, it is not true that our writings in Tagalog are national while writings in, say, Hiligaynon are regional. The Tagalog region is as much a region as the Ilonggo or Hiligaynon region. The National Capital Region is a region and, therefore, has no claim to being more “national” than any other part of the country. Philippine literature in Tagalog enjoys exactly the same stature as Philippine literature in Hiligaynon or in any other language. The word “regional,” therefore, should now be removed from the vocabulary of literary critics.

Third, it is not true that Philippine literature in Chinese is not part of our national literature. For a long time, Filipino writers writing in Mandarin were not taken up in Philippine literature classes, because they were, for racist reasons, not considered by most teachers to be Filipinos. An encyclopedia volume on Philippine literature in Chinese would show that there are many texts written in that language by Filipinos.

I digress at this point to boast a little. The volume Ang Ating Panitikan, which Soledad S. Reyes and I edited in 1984 for the Association of Philippine Colleges of Arts and Sciences (APCAS), was the first textbook, to my knowledge, to include texts originally written in Mandarin Chinese as part of Philippine literature.

Since then, I have been lobbying fairly successfully for the inclusion of Filipinos writing in Chinese in reference materials on Philippine literature, such as the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, a project for which I served as a consultant.

With so many Filipinos winning international awards for their literary works in Chinese, literary critics should not be racist in their treatment of our national literature. Literary critics should rejoice when Hsieh Hsing (Grace Lee) wins yet another poetry award or when Yinchow Sy publishes yet another translation in China.

Back to the idea of an encyclopedia. As publisher of the now defunct De La Salle University Press, I tried very hard to get writers and editors to put together anthologies of Philippine literary texts. I even started a long-term project in the 1980s (still ongoing) calledLiterary History of the Philippines (LIHIP), which has managed to collect thousands of literary texts written in various Philippine languages. Unfortunately, I got out of the DLSU Press before I could finish the project (because I had to quit when I joined government in 2001).

Now that I am back in De La Salle University as Executive Publisher of its Academic Publications Office, I will try again to get enough editors to spend time on this project. An Encyclopedia of Philippine Literature would be a handsome companion to the CCP encyclopedia.

Ninth on my bucket list is writing a series for Anvil Publishing from my columns.

Books made up of columns are very popular among Filipino readers. 

Karina Bolasco, Publishing Manager of Anvil, tells us why. “Columns have a following,” she says during her lectures, “and column readers naturally become book readers.”

Columns have an ephemeral existence. Unless readers take the trouble to clip them and keep them somewhere, columns disappear together with yesterday’s newspapers.
By collecting columns into books, publishers allow readers to keep their favorite writers on bookshelves, to be read and enjoyed once again and, writers hope, again and again.

In fact, one of my first books was a collection of columns. Movie Times, published in 1984 by National Book Store, put together various columns and articles I had written on Philippine films. The publishing manager of National Book Store at that time was Bolasco.

Of course, because columns need not last more than one day, most writers (including me) do not spend more than one day writing them. When columns are collected to become part of a book, they need to be rewritten, checked not just for grammar and style, but for timeliness or, more ambitiously, timelessness.

I have more than enough to fill several books with my columns.

I have been writing columns for various newspapers and magazines since 1972, when I accepted Oscar Villadolid and Gerry Gil’s invitation to join the English daily Philippines Herald as a movie and book reviewer and its sister Tagalog daily Mabuhay as Associate Editor. (I was bilingual from the very beginning of my life as a columnist.)

After I returned from graduate studies in Maryland in the late 1970s, Melinda de Jesus and Rodolfo Reyes invited me to do movie reviews for TV Times. It was at that time that I gained notoriety for bashing popular movies such as The Deer Hunter. The core of the book Movie Times came from this magazine.

In the 1980s, I did weekly movie columns for magazines such asBulaklak, Glitter, Manila Hotline, Modern Romances, Pilipino Daily Mirror, Silver Screen, and Student Canteen. Part of the movie press then, I frequented showbiz parties and hangouts and got to know many of our superstars and would-be stars. (Oh, the stories I could tell if I dared!)

I wrote less showbiz and, to academics, more serious movie reviewing, as well as general commentaries on books, culture, and education for newspapers and magazines such as Asiaweek, Business Star, Diwa, Diyaryo Filipino, Filipino Magazin, Mediawatch, Observer, Onboard Philippines, Parade, Philippine Panorama, Pilipino Tribune,and Times Journal.

For a while, I was also writing for Starweek and Student Star, until I had to limit my time to this column.

I wrote the editorials of the weekly Tagalog Chronicle, which I did not edit, and of course those of the periodicals I edited, such asInterlock, National Book Review, and Palabas. (To name drop, Boy Abunda was my assistant in Palabas.)

I even wrote daily political columns for Manila Times when Alejandro “Anding” Roces was its publisher. When the editors and writers went on strike, I did not join them, since Anding was my ninong (godfather); for this I was labelled a scab for the first and only time in my otherwise union-friendly life.

All my life, I have put personal friendship above ideology or politics. (This particular trait of mine has puzzled many of my very close friends, some of whom cannot stand each other.)

Why Anvil Publishing? Simple. I have long envied the commercial success of writers such as Margarita Holmes, Ambeth Ocampo, Danton Remoto, and Jessica Zafra, all Anvil authors. Whatever it is that Anvil does for them, I hope it will do for me. 
And, yes, I already have two fairly well-selling books with Anvil – A Dictionary of Philippine English (which I did with Ma. Lourdes “Tish” Bautista) and The Basic Education Curriculum in 17 Easy Lessons. 

Tenth on my bucket list is doing a book on the teaching of literature. I promised this book ages ago to Gloria Rodriguez, proprietor of Giraffe Books.

I have been preaching (that’s the word, really) two things about the teaching of literature.

First is that teachers of literature should not teach language. Language teachers teach language and literature teachers teach literature. The teaching of literature is not the same as the teaching of language.

After all, the great writers are not exactly good models of language use. 

Take Emily Dickinson. She did not care about punctuation, capitalization, nor even grammar. In her poem that begins with the line “The Grass so little has to do,” she wrote, “I wish I were a Hay.” No matter how you look at that last line of the poem, it is ungrammatical. Yet the poem is considered one of the best that she wrote. Clearly, literary value is not dependent on linguistic value.

William Shakespeare, considered by most critics as the best playwright not only in English but in any language, wrote in the first scene of his play King Lear: “stranger’d with our oath.” Grammarians had a field day condemning what they called a mistake by Shakespeare, since he used a noun as a verb. But these grammarians are now all forgotten, and Shakespeare lives on.

Examples are legion of literary masters deliberately (and in some cases, not so deliberately) committing what would be grammatical errors in the hands of lesser mortals. William Faulkner, who won a Nobel Prize, was notorious for not knowing grammar; this was admitted after his death by his own editors at Random House. Our own Jose Rizal, according to at least one major literary critic in Spain, had all kinds of grammatical problems with his Spanish.

In any case, if we were teaching infinitives in a language class, we certainly could do much better than to use Shakespeare’s “To be, or not to be: that is the question,” because some smart student will ask how that can be a question since there is no question mark or what the antecedent of the pronoun “that” is or even why there is a comma after the first “to be.” Instead of trying to explain why writers do funny things with language, the language teacher would save a lot of aggravation by simply using what linguists call “authentic texts,” or texts that people actually use in real life, not on stage or in books.

The second thing I preach is that teachers of literature should not lecture. More precisely, although they may lecture occasionally, they should not limit themselves to that particular method of teaching literature. Many literature teachers lecture too much in their classes. 

All educators know that the lecture method, while useful in imparting information quickly, is not very good at changing attitudes or empowering students. There are many other ways of teaching literature. In my FUSE CONSTEC series that is now running over Knowledge Channel, I show forty different ways of teaching literature. Only one of these ways involves lecturing or talking for a long time to students.

Since I have written a number of articles on the teaching of literature, Gloria Rodriguez has been nagging me to put them together in a book. I really should, not only because it might be useful to literature teachers, but also because I owe her a great debt of gratitude. While she was with New Day Publishers, she published my first book of literary criticism, Beyond Futility. Although I have now outgrown some of the critical positions I took in that book, it is still one of my favorites, if only because I was very young then and so iconoclastic.

Now, after more than 39 years of teaching literature, I really should share what I have learned with younger teachers. One of these days, I will. 

Eleventh on my bucket list is writing the third part in my trilogy of plays on Bienvenido N. Santos.

Santos was my literary father. From him I learned many things, such as the usefulness of memorizing lines of poetry (to get you through life’s crises), the indecency or vanity of calling yourself a writer (instead, other people should call you that), the need to be kind to everyone (he would always say, echoing Tennessee Williams, that he relied on the kindness of others), and the importance of thinking in the vernacular even while writing in English (he claimed that he wrote “in Capampangan, using English words”).

I started writing his biography while he was alive. It was, strictly speaking, not a biography, but a combination literary critique and life story, something like what today is called “creative nonfiction.” He used to call it “Project Numero Uno.” He would sometimes scold me for spending time teaching, lecturing, managing, or even writing a column when I should be writing the book on him. (He may have been only joking, but since he was always joking, it was hard to say when he was already serious.)

On his grave in 1996, I swore that I would finish Project Numero Uno. I applied for a Senior Fulbright grant and luckily got it. The grant allowed to me stay in Wichita State University for three months in 2003. Santos left many of his drafts, letters, and other papers at Wichita (from which he retired as a professor), and the grant paid for my travel, lodging, meals, and research expenses. The librarians there gave me full access to the Santos archives. They even allowed me to photocopy most of the materials. (The photocopies are now with the Bienvenido N. Santos Museum in De La Salle University.)

I was well into writing a regular prose biography of him when I realized that it would not do justice to my personal relationship with him. I had written (and am still writing) biographies of other famous persons, but I had no emotional links to them. The outline I had made for the prose biography had, as its chapters, “Wonderer” (childhood, the first twin novels), an interchapter on poetry, “Wanderer” (exile, hyphenation as Asian-American), an interchapter on fiction, and “Wonder” (return to the Philippines). It might have made a good read, but it would have been too impersonal.

Mang Ben (my nickname for Santos) deserved more than the usual prose biography, I told myself, and promptly decided to do a trilogy of plays on him. That was my creative way to respond to his creative influence on me.

The first of the trilogy, The Lovely Bienvenido N. Santos: A Creative Nonfictional Biographical Play in Two Acts, clinched the Hall of Fame award I got from the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards in Literature. Clearly, Mang Ben worked on the judges from his powerful place in heaven! The play has not yet been staged, but it was broadcast over Radio Balintataw in a Filipino translation.

The second of the trilogy, Bienvenido, My Brother: A Creative Nonfictional Biographical Play in One Act, has been staged as well as broadcast. Both the first and the second plays were published by the University of the Philippines Press in 2005.

What I still have to do is the third play in the trilogy, tentatively entitled Bienvenido’s Santas. It will consist of short monologues by various women in Mang Ben’s life, such as his wife, daughters, friends, students, and fans. Just as I had to take time off my regular activities to write the first two plays, I need to get a grant and stay away for a couple of months to do the third play.

You see, when I finally meet Mang Ben again in the afterworld, I want to be able to face him and say that I fulfilled my promise to him about Project Numero Uno. I am sure he will be happy to know that the man he used to call “the other son I never had” has been true to his word. 

Twelfth and last on my bucket list is to play tournament bridge at a level good enough to compete internationally.

I started playing contract bridge in college with friends. I did not know then that I was playing “social bridge” or, more technically, “rubber bridge.”

I had no idea that there were bidding conventions, defensive signals, squeeze plays, and things of that sort. I simply looked at my cards, relied on my instincts, and enjoyed winning or, more often, hated losing.

After college, I discovered that there were such things as bridge books. I learned that there were various bidding conventions and despaired that I could not possibly memorize them all.

There were no computers then, so I could not practice with the bridge programs now available. I just contented myself with reading about the clever tricks famous players did at various tournaments.

Of course, at that time, I really did not know what tournaments were like. It was only much later, when I got invited to contract bridge games at the Manila Polo Club (and various other places, including military social halls), that I realized that my book knowledge and my experience in rubber bridge were not sufficient to make me win duplicates (as players call tournaments where pairs compete with each other) or teams-of-four (as the name suggests, teams consisting of four players compete with each other).

I did win a tournament once, when I was lucky enough to be invited by a Life Master (the equivalent of a chess grandmaster) to be his teammate in a teams-of-four Senior-Junior event. That was the only time I got a trophy from the Philippine professional bridge league. In the innumerable other tournaments I played in, I invariably ended up in the bottom half of the heap, sometimes embarrassingly at the very bottom.

Fortunately, our country’s Life Masters were very good to me, inviting me occasionally to play with them. I suppose it gave them some comic relief from the very high level of play they were used to. (After all, these Life Masters would compete regularly in, and even sometimes win, international tournaments.)

I do have something to boast about, though. While I was teaching one term at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, I joined the city individual tournament (individual because you keep changing partners, so your individual score matters, rather than your partnership or team score as in other tournaments). I won the tournament and was declared Athens Individual Bridge Champion. (Applause, please!)

My Ohio story, however, does not have a good ending. Because I was Athens Individual Champion, I was asked to represent Athens in the Ohio state tournament that year. Of course, my teammates (three Life Masters) and I ended up somewhere near the bottom of the rankings. Since we had driven all night to get to the tournament, not to mention paid the huge tournament fees, they did not exactly excuse my horrible errors. I never got to play in an Athens tournament again!

Aside from playing bridge, I have tried to help promote the game. I joined the Philippine professional bridge league and handled its press relations for several years.

I even tried teaching a bridge class at De La Salle University for a couple of years. My students learned so fast that, when I took them to the tournaments, they would beat me regularly. I gave up teaching bridge when I realized that I was not even as good as my students.

Sad to say, I have not joined any tournament for the past few years, due to the pressure of work.

Before I kick the bucket, I want to start playing tournament bridge again. I want to win at least one more national tournament and perhaps even represent the country in a Bridge Olympiad. I must admit though that, since I have weak playing skills, this is the item in my bucket list least likely to be fulfilled.

(First published in The Philippine Star from 15 May to 31 July 2008.)

KUNG BAKIT MALABO ANG INGLES PERO HINDI DAPAT LUMABO ANG ATING PANINGIN / DECONSTRUCTING ENGLISH AS A LANGUAGE FOR PHILIPPINE THEORY:  ISANG PAPEL, DALAWANG WIKA

I 

Literatura ang teritoryo ko -- sa madaling salita, teritoryo ko ang mga salita.  Kaya mag-uumpisa ako sa pamamagitan ng kiyeme o pakikipagharutan sa mga salita. 

May utang na loob tayo kina Said dahil pinasok nila sa wikang panuri na Ingles ang mga salitang tulad ng orientalism, The Other, at minority discourse.  Pero hindi naman natin dapat pagbigyan na lamang sila dahil marami rin naman silang kasalanan sa atin.  Maraming pagkukulang sa atin ang mga teoristang kano at ingles. 

Ang ibig kong sabihi'y malabo rin naman ang mga salitang tulad ng West, Third World, at The Other. 

Mayabang na rin lang ang mga kano, lalung-lalo na ang mga taga-Nuweba York, ay ibigay na natin ang kanilang hilig.  Magdrowing tayo ng bagong mapa ng mundo.  Ilagay natin sa gitna ang America; samakatwid ay malalagay sa kaliwa ang Asya at sa kanan ang Europa.  Sa ganitong klaseng mapa, nasa kanluran ng America at Europa ang Pilipinas.  Tayo ang kanluran.  Ang literatura natin, samakatwid, ay literaturang kanluranin.  Ang literatura ng America at Europa ay literatura ng silangan o ng Orient. 

Ewan ko kung sino ang nag-imbento ng mga salitang Third World; siguro'y mga pulitiko o mga ekonomista.  Ang implikasyon ng Third World ay nauuna o mas mahusay ang first at second.  Hindi ba't ang isang first-rate na akda ay sinasabing mas masining kaysa sa isang third-rate na akda?  Tulad nga ng sinasabi ng mga Bagong Manunuri o New Critics, dala ng bawat salita ang lahat ng kahulugang naibigay na rito sa mula't mula pa.  Samakatwid ay hindi maaaring maihiwalay ang implikasyong third-rate sa salitang Third World.  Ito ngayon ang tanong ko:  bakit ba sinasabi na nasa Third World tayo?  Ang akala ko ba'y panahon pa ni Descartes ay uso na ang pagsisimula sa sarili?  Ako ang una, samakatwid ako ang First World, at bahala na ang iba na maglabu-labo kung second o third o alinpaman sila.  Kung gagamitan natin ng depinisyon ni Henry James ng punto de bista, ang literaturang Filipino ay literatura ng First World, at ang Third World literature ay walang iba kundi ang literatura ng mga kano.

Eto pa ang isa:  The Other o ang Bukod.  Kayo siguro ay bukod sa akin, pero hindi ko maintindihan kung bakit bubukurin ko ang aking sarili.  Sabi nga ng mga feminista ay ang pagtawag daw sa Babae bilang Bukod ay malaking kayabangan lamang ng mga Lalaki; para bagang nauna ang Lalaki at bukod lamang sa kanya ang Babae.  Iyan ang pinagtritripan ngayon ni Gayatri Spivak, 'di ba?  Kung lahi naman at lugar ang pag-uusapan, bukod lamang tayo kina Said at sa mga kasama niyang nakatira sa America.  Kung ako ang tatanungin, ang America at ang Europa ang bukod. 

Kung tama ako ay bakit hindi natin tinatawag ang literaturang Filipino na Western, First World, at kung ano man ang kabaligtaran ng The Other?  Iyan ang tanong.  Ito ang sagot.  Hinaharang kasi tayo mismo ng wikang Ingles. 

Dito dapat matuto ang mga teorista ng lahi sa mga teorista ng kasarian.  Alam ng mga feminista na makalalaki ang wikang Ingles; mismong ang salita para sa tao ay man.  Medyo nagtatagumpay na ang mga feminista sa pagdikonstrak nila sa Ingles.  Ngayon, kung talagang magtyatyaga rin tayo ay baka, isang araw, ay maalis din natin sa wikang Ingles ang pagka-kano, pagka-Europeo, pagkaputi nito.  

Kumopya na lang tayo sa mga feminista at ituring natin ang wika bilang teritoryong kailangang angkinin natin kung gusto nating huwag maging salimpusa sa mundo ng teoryang pampanitikan.  Sabi nina Braj Kachru at iba pang mga linggwista ay pandaigdigan na raw ang wikang Ingles.  Hindi na raw ito maaaring sarilinin ng mga taga-Inner Circle o ng Outer Circle.  Grabe rin iyang salitang Inner Circle.  Iyung Outer Circle naman -- tayo raw iyon.  Samakatwid ay hindi natin dapat pabayaang maghari sa atin ang mga native speaker ng Ingles (isa pa iyang native speaker na iyan; kailangan din iyang idikonstrak).  Tulad ng mga feministang nakikibaka laban sa pagkamakalalaki ng wika ay dapat din nating buwagin, ibagsak, ang pagkamakaputi ng Ingles. 

Teka muna't bago mainis si Raul Pertierra ay tatalakayin ko na ang naghaharing pananaw sa mundo naming mga nananaliksik, nagtuturo, at nagsusulat sa literaturang Filipino.  Hindi namin maipagkakaila na naghahari pa rin ngayon ang sinaunang Bagong Panunuri o kung hindi man ang buong teorya ng Bagong Panunuri ay ang bahagi nito na hindi pa nasisilip ng mga propesor sa U.P. na nahasa at napako na yata sa Aristotelianismo ng Chicago.  Hanggang ngayo'y ang mga sumusunod pa rin ang nilalaman ng pagtuturo, panulat, at pananalita naming mga titser ng literatura:  imagery, tone, point of view, metaphor, symbol, irony, theme, organic unity, at iba pang mga katarantaduhan ng mga manunuring Agraryanista na nagmula sa Timog ng America noong peacetime.  Para bagang pamparami lamang, panagdag, palamuti, ang mga konseptong istrukturalista o istrakturalista (post- structuralist).  Oo nga't may mga bagong salita, pa-French-French, sumusunod daw sa uso, pero iyun pala'y mga pormalista pa rin kaming lahat.  Kahit na ang mga Marksista o mga Marksistang-Maoista na kunwa'y galit na galit sa Bagong Panunuri ay hindi makaahon sa nakadidiring tubig ng baha ng makataong realismo.  Nakatuon pa rin ang pansin namin sa teksto.  Ginagamit pa namin ang sinabi ni Mao tungkol sa estetika para ipagtanggol ang pagkagayuma namin sa porma o sining (craft).  Para bagang hindi ipinanganak sina Saussure at Catherine Belsey. 

Oo nga't nabasa na namin sina Althusser, Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, at kung sinu-sino pang mga post-realist o postmodern na mga kritiko, pero karaniwan naman ay hindi tumatalab.  Siguro'y hindi pa rin kami namamaluktot dahil parang kasya naman ang kumot ng Bagong Panunuri; siguro'y hindi pa lang namin naiisip talaga kung ano ang implikasyon ng mga teorya ng mga di hamak naman ay mas bagong mga manunuri. 

May iba sa amin na kahit na gumagamit ng Bagong Panunuri sa pagtuturo, sa pagdja-judge sa Palanca, sa pagri-rebyu ng mga libro't iba pang mga texto, ay nakikibagay naman kuno sa uso sa ibang bansa.  Pero ang hindi namin naiisip ay ito:  na hindi maaaring ipaghalu-halo ang mga teorya.  Para sa akin, pareho ang ibig sabihin ng salitang electic at tanga, o kung hindi lubusang tanga ay bobo.  Wala namang tunay na teorya na eclectic, pero parang okey lang sa amin iyan. 

Ako, kung inyong tatanungin, ayoko ng Teorya, kung sa Teorya -- capital T -- ay tutukuyin natin ang nangyayari ngayon sa mga unibersidad sa Inglatera at sa America, na kung saan unti-unting nagiging dominante ang umuusbong na ideolohiya ng Theory.  Doon kasi'y parang wala nang pakialam ang teorya sa praxis.  Kaibigan ko si Antony Easthope ng Manchester Polytechnic, na lumuwas sa Maynila kamakailan at nagbigay sa amin ng isang seminar sa teoryang pampanitikan, pero may ginawa siyang hindi ko nagustuhan.  Sa mga sesyon sa umaga ng kanyang seminar ay mahusay niyang nailarawan ang mga teoryang pampanitikan na post- Saussurean.  Pero sa mga sesyon sa hapon, nang nagbabasa na siya ng mga texto, ay pormalista pa rin ang kanyang pamaraan, teksto pa rin ang inasikaso niya.  Magkikita kami sa Setyembre, pagpunta namin nina Bien Lumbera at Sol Reyes sa Cardiff, at doon ay kakantsawan ko ang kaibigan kong iyon.  Sa Cardiff, pagyayabang ito, ay babatikusin ko ang pagkamaka-Europa ng Theory. 

Sa aking palagay ay dapat hango sa pamaraan ng pagbasa ang teorya, hindi baligtad.  May mga implikasyon ito para sa mga kiyeme ko kanina sa wikang Ingles.  Kung magbasa kasi tayo ng mga tekstong Pilipino ay parang nagbabasa tayo ng tekstong Europeo o Amerikano.  Halimbawa'y tinatawag nating nobela ang Noli; ang ibig sabihin nito'y pinapayagan nating madala tayo ng mga teorya ng nobela na nabuo sa pagbabasa lamang ng mga nobelang Europeo.  Alam kong ang akala ni Rizal ay nobelang Europeo ang sinusulat niya, pero akala lang niya iyon.  Ngayong patay na kuno ang awtor ay wala na tayong pakialam sa akala ni Rizal.  Di ba't ang akala ng Amerikanong si Edgar Allan Poe ay sumusulat siya para sa mga magasin ng mga taga-Inglatera?  Pero hanggang ngayo'y maka-Amerikano pa rin ang pagbasa sa kanya ng mga Amerikanong manunuri.  Naisulat na ni Soledad Reyes na may ibang pamaraan ng pagbasa sa ating mga nobela para hindi maging masama ang pagka-sentimental o pagka-romantiko ng mga ito.  Parang ganyan din ang nasabi na ni Emmanuel Reyes tungkol sa pelikula.  Pero hindi ba hanggang ngayo'y inaakala pa rin nating melodramatic ang ating mga nobelang tuluyan at ang ating mga pelikula? 

Mga salitang Ingles kasi ang sentimental, melodramatic, romantic, novel, eclectic, the Other, Third World, at West.  Dahil Ingles ang mga ito'y dala nila ang mapanlinlang na kamalayan ng ating kolonyal na kahapon at ang ating malakolonyal na kasalukuyan.  Matanong ninyo, kung gayon ay bakit pa natin gagamitin ang wikang Ingles?  Ako nga mismo, nitong mga nakaraang taon, ay halos puros Filipino na ang ginagamit sa paneneorya.  Pero sa palagay ko'y hindi natin maiiwasan ang Ingles.  Nariyan na iyan.  Sa halip na talikuran natin ay harapin na natin ng husto.  Tulad ng ginagawa ng mga feminista na walang takot at walang pasubaling gumagamit ng makalalaking wika ay dapat din natin gamitin ang wikang Ingles.  Huwag nga lamang tayo magpapagamit sa Ingles.  Wikang makaputi at makakano ang Ingles.  Ang papel nating mga kritikong pampanitikan o kritikong pangwika ay ang idikonstrak, ang agawin, angkinin, ang wikang umaapi sa atin. 

II 

My field is literature -- in other words, words.  I want to start with a quibble about words. 

I think we should be grateful to Edward Said et al. for introducing into English-language critical discourse such terms as orientalism, The Other, and minority discourse.  We should not, however, let gratitude blind us to the blindness even of well-meaning American and British theorists. 

I want to talk particularly about three terms as used in literary critical discourse:  West, Third World, and The Other. 

We know that many residents of the United States of America, particularly those in New York City, like to think of themselves as being at the center of the world.  Let us indulge them and draw a map of the earth with the Americas in the middle, Asia on the left, and Europe on the right.  On such a map, we can easily see that the Philippines is west of America and Europe.  We are The West.  Our literature, in other words, is Western literature.  The literature of America and Europe, then, is Eastern or Oriental literature. 

The origins of the term Third World in literary discourse are lost in political and economic history.  The adjective third implies a first and a second numerically, and it also implies a pecking order in terms of value.  A first-rate piece of literature is clearly better than a third-rate piece of literature.  As all card-carrying New Critics know, words carry with them all their previous meanings; we cannot dissociate the term third world from third-rate.  I ask:  why are we in the Third World?  Who gave anybody the right to call us the Third World?  If I start counting from where I am -- which is the accepted way since Descartes -- I am the first person, therefore the First World, and all others have to content themselves with being the Second, Third, or nth Worlds.  Philippine literature, in other words, from my point of view (using Henry James' definition of that technical term), is First World literature, and American literature is Third World literature. 

Now, The Other.  You or even Thou are Other than me, but I don't see why I should not enumerate pronouns starting from myself.  In terms of gender, feminists are now beginning to see that calling the Woman the Other naively accepts the patriarchal Weltanschauung; Woman is Other only to Man.  Gayatri Spivak has had a lot of fun deconstructing the term Wo-man.  Similarly, in terms of race and geography, we are Other only to Said and company who live in the United States.  I prefer to see America and Europe as The Other. 

Why, then, do we not call Philippine literature Western, First World, and The One -- or whatever is the binary opposite of The Other?  I'll tell you why.  Because the English language prevents us from doing so. 

Here is where race theorists can learn from gender theorists.  Feminists know that the English language has a built-in bias for patriarchy, starting with the generic term for mankind.  Feminists have succeeded, in some way, in eroding that bias.  If we too, English-speaking non-Americans and non-Europeans work at it, we may yet, one day, put our mouths where our politics is. 

Just as feminists have identified language as a key battleground in the war against patriarchy, we must also see the English language as a crucial space in our fight to tilt the balance of power in literary theory.  If it is true, as Braj Kachru and other linguists say, that the English language has become a true international language and can no longer be confined to the inner circle (there's another term aching to be deconstructed) or even to the outer circle (that includes Filipinos), then we must not allow English to perpetuate the ethnocentricity of English native speakers (still another term ripe for deconstruction).  Just as feminists are seeking to demasculinize language, we must seek to deethnicize English. 

There is no use denying it, but the ruling paradigm in Philippine literary circles today is still New Criticism, or at least that non-ontological part of it not debunked by the neo-Aristotelian Chicago alumni among the English professors at the University of the Philippines.  Teachers and critics still routinely talk about imagery, tone, point of view, metaphor, symbol, irony, theme, organic unity, and the other things made fashionable before the Pacific War by the American Southern Agrarian critics.  Structuralist, even post-structuralist, concepts are seen in the Philippines as mere footnotes -- albeit jargonized, frenchified, trendy -- of formalist close reading.  Even Marxists or Maoist-Marxists who explicitly disavow New Criticism invariably read literary texts in the expressive realist, pre-Saussurean, text-centered fashion so ably  caricatured by Catherine Belsey.  Mao's aesthetic yardstick, for example, is widely (mis)interpreted to refer to form or craft. 

Despite Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and other post-realist, even postmodern thinkers read enthusiastically if unsystematically by Filipino literary critics, the paradigm shift has not yet occurred.  Perhaps we are at a stage where the paradigm still shows signs of adequacy; perhaps we just have not yet realized the theoretical implications of the Newer Critics. 

Some critics, of course, while using New Criticism as their everyday method in classroom teaching, in judging literary contests, and in reviewing books and other texts, give the appearance of living in the heady world of foreign trendsetters, but there is little appreciation of the mutual incompatibility of many contemporary critical theories.  The word eclectic is used to mask massive ignorance or, at least, muddled theoretical thinking.  Nothing electic, strictly speaking, can be called a theory, but that philosophical quibble does not bother even our leading literary critics. 

My own theoretical position is blatantly anti-Theoretical.  I mean by Theory with the capital T the growing institution -- should I say the gradual movement from emergent to dominant ideology? -- of theory in British and American universities.  Theory has become almost entirely divorced from reading practice, a point illustrated by a 1989 seminar in Literary Theory given by my friend Antony Easthope of Manchester Polytechnic to many of us Filipino critics.  In the morning sessions of a week-long seminar, Easthope gave excellent and exhilarating accounts of post-Saussurean literary theories, but in the afternoons, in his readings of cultural texts, he fell back on formalist methods of close reading.  It's something I mean to talk to him about. 

I believe that the way we theorize should derive from the way we read texts, not the other way around.  This has important implications for the linguistic quibble I have with the English language.  We tend to read Philippine texts the way we read European or American texts.  We call Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere a novel, for instance, thereby immediately implying that we have to apply to it theories of the novel derived entirely from European novels.  I know that Rizal thought he was writing a European novel, but that has no bearing on the problem, particularly in these death-of-the-author days.  Edgar Allan Poe thought that he was writing British magazine stories, but that has not changed the way American critics read "The Cask of Amontillado."  Soledad Reyes has already pointed the way to more sympathetic readings of so-called sentimental -- or worse, romantic -- Philippine novels, and Emmanuel Reyes has done a similar thing for Philippine films, but we still denounce Philippine serialized novels and films as melodramatic (again, another word we have to deconstruct). 

Sentimental, melodramatic, romantic, novel, eclectic, the Other, Third World, and West are English words, and they carry with them the undeconstructed consciousness of our colonial past or neo-colonial present.  Why, you may ask, should we then still use English?  In my recent critical work, I have indeed been using primarily what I perceive to be the imagined linguistic construct called Filipino.  But I do not think we can simply ignore English.  We must, as the feminists have done with masculine discourse, appropriate English, racist and ethnicized though it may be.  We must, of course, deracialize it, deethnicize it.  That is our role as literary, therefore linguistic, critics. 

(First delivered as part of a Round-Table on Critical Theory during the Third International Philippine Studies Conference held in Quezon City, Philippines, on 14 July 1989.)

On 15 July 2010, I will host a Curriculum Summit.  So far, several key government officials and university presidents have accepted my invitation.  If the Summit is successful, I intend to host similar discussions in the future about the curriculum.

Balikan natin sandali ang kasaysayan ng pinakamalaki at pinakaimportanteng diksiyonaryo ng wikang Ingles, ang Oxford English Dictionary o OED. 

Unang binalak ang diksiyonaryong iyon noong 1857 ng Philological Society of London.  Maraming diskusyon ang naganap bago sila pumirma ng kontrata sa Oxford University Press.  Taong 1879 na iyon, 22 taon pagkatapos nilang simulan ang proyekto.  Ang ibinigay sa kanilang deadline ng pablisher ay 1889, o sampung taon.  Sa taong 1884 o limang taon bago deadline, umabot na sila sa salitang ant (A-N-T).  Hindi sila umabot sa deadline, pero dahil sikat silang mga iskolar, hindi naman masyadong nagalit ang pablisher. 

Alam ba ninyo kung kailan natapos ang unang edisyon ng OED?  Taong 1928, 71 taon mula noong nagpasya ang Philological Society na simulan ang proyekto.  Kinamatayan na nga ng editor in chief na si James Murray ang proyekto (namatay siya noong 1915, siguro dahil nasobrahan ang trabaho). 

Dapat sana, pagkatapos ng 71 taon, ay maaari nang magpahinga o mamatay ang mga kasapi ng Philological Society of London, pero hindi.  Kalulunsad pa lang ng OED ay sinabi na ng mga editor na hindi pa namamatay na kulang pala ang ginawa nila.  Bumuo sila ng Supplement na natapos at nailathala noong 1933 o limang taon pagkaraan ng unang edisyon. 

Noong 1957 o 24 na taon pagkaraan ng unang Supplement ay naisip ng pablisher na luma na ang OED.  Kinontrata nila si Robert Burchfield para gumawa ng ikalawang Supplement, dahil ang sabi ng pablisher ay napakarami nang bagong salita ang wikang Ingles.  Natapos ang ikalawang Supplement sa taong 1986, o 129 taon mula sa unang miting ng Philological Society tungkol sa proyekto.  Naglathala ang pablisher ng Second Edition ng OED noong 1989.  Masaya na dapat sila. 

Sa susunod na taon, noong 1990, ay ipinanganak ang Internet.  Natural, biglang dumami ang mga salitang Ingles.  Hindi na kaya ng iisang tao, kahit na si Murray pa man siya o si Burchfield, na ipasok ang lahat ng salitang talagang ginagamit ng mga nagsasalita sa Ingles.  

Mayroong 228,132 na salita ang ikalawang edisyon ng OED.  Kaya lang, ayon sa mga mahilig magbilang na linggwista, inaakalang mayroong 750,000 na salita ang wikang Ingles.  Samakatwid ay wala pa sa kalahati ng mga salitang Ingles ang nasa OED.  Kahit na ngayon na online na ang OED at nirerebisa at dinadagdagan bawat tatlong buwan ay hindi makahabol ang Oxford University Press sa sawikaan ng wikang Ingles.  Alam ba ninyo kung gaano kalahi ang budget ng pablisher para sa OED sa taong ito?  34 milyong pounds o 55 milyon US dollars o 2,475,000,000 pesos. 

Kaya ko isinalaysay ang kasaysayan ng OED ay hindi dahil kolonyal ang isip ko, dahil hindi naman tayo nasakop ng Inglaterra, maliban sa maikling panahon na nakuha ng mga sundalong Ingles ang Intramuros, ngunit dahil nais kong matuwa tayo na hindi tayo inabot ng 71 taon bago nagkaroon ng unang edisyon ng UP Diksiyonaryong Filipino at hindi umabot ng 61 taon ang paglathala ng ikalawang edisyon mula noong unang edisyon noong 2001.  Hindi rin gumastos ng dalawang bilyong piso ang UP o ang Anvil para mabuo at mailathala ito.

 Kaya lang, nais kong ipaalaala sa mga gumawa ng ating diksiyonaryo na hindi pa tapos at hindi matatapos ang kanilang trabaho. 

Oo nga’t hindi naman kasinlaki ng wikang Ingles ang wika natin, pero kasinsalimuot naman.  Sa katunayan ay mas mahirap pa nga ang gramatika natin kaysa sa gramatika ng Ingles.  Maipagmamalaki ba nila ang focus?  Pinag-iiba ba nila ang oo at opo?  Problema ba nila na halos 175 ang wikang katutubo na pinagkukunan ng salita, bukod pa sa mga wikang banyagang tulad ng Ingles, Kastila, at Mandarin?  Kahit na pinag-aawayan din nila kung paano dapat ibaybay ang mga salita, kung dapat may u ang honor o wala, ay hindi naman sila nag-iinsultuhan at naghahablahan na tulad natin.  At higit sa lahat, kahit sinong iskolar ng wikang Ingles, kapag may alitan o kontrobersiya, ay sumasang-ayon na ang kaisaisa at kaunaunahan at kagalanggalang na awtoridad sa wikang Ingles ay ang OED.  Dito sa atin, sa kamaynilaan pa lamang, sa mismong UP na lamang, may mga taong hanggang ngayon ay gumagamit ng salita na iba ang baybay, iba ang gamit, o iba mismo ang salita sa mga salitang nasa UP Diksiyonaryong Filipino. 

Kapag ako’y naglelektyur tungkol sa wika, laging may nagtatanong kung paano magbaybay ng salitang ito o salitang iyon.  Ang lagi kong sagot ay ito – konsultahin ang UP Diksiyonaryong Filipino.  Kapag humihirit pa ang nagtatanong at sinasabing mga taga-UP at taga-Anvil lang naman ang naniniwala rito, ang sinasagot ko ay ito – ipakita ninyo sa akin ang diksiyonaryong pinagbabatayan ninyo ng inyong baybay, gamit, o salita.  Hanggang ngayon ay wala pang nakakasagot sa akin dahil, sa totoo lang, wala naman sagot.  Ang diksiyonaryong ito, gustuhin man natin o hindi, ay ang kaisaisang diksiyonaryo ng wikang Filipino.  Ang ibang mga diksiyonaryo, kahit na ang ibang inilathala ng Anvil o mismo ng Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, ay diksiyonaryo ng wikang Tagalog o kung minsa’y ng wikang hindi man lang Tagalog kundi wikain lamang ng sumulat. 

Kayo na ang magbasa ng “Paliwanag para sa Ikalawang Edisyon” ng punong editor na ang Pambansang Alagad ng Sining na si Virgilio S. Almario at ang “Ang UP Diksiyonaryong Filipino sa Konteksto ng Pagpapaunlad ng Wikang Pambansa” ni Galileo S. Zafra.  Kung gusto ninyong malaman kung paano basahin o intindihin ang mga lahok ay mayroong “Gabay sa Paggamit ng UP Diksiyonaryong Filipino.”  Kung nais ninyo namang maengganyo ang mga estudyante ninyo na halughugin ang diksiyonaryo ay banggitin ninyo ang mga salitang may kaugnayan sa pinakamainit na isyu ngayon, ang sex education.  Nasa diksiyonaryo ang mga salitang puke, uten, at kantutan (na ang mas tamang salita ay pagkarat).  Kung may nakakarinig naman na taga-CBCP ay banggitin ninyo ang mga salitang baláan (sa Tagalog, banal), rosary (hindi rō-sa-ri; narito rin ang rosaryo), at iglesya (na ang ibig sabihin ay simbahan at hindi INC).  Kung wala naman kayong magawa sa buhay at hindi kailangang kumayod para tumuka, hanapin ninyo ang mga salitang nasa ikawalang edisyon na wala sa unang edisyon, tulad ng crutch, Crux, at zebra dove. 

May isang mungkahi ako, at hango rin ito sa karanasan sa Inglaterra.  Sana’y ilagay na sa Web ang Diksiyonaryo, para maaaring baguhin at dagdagan nang wala masyadong gastos.  Makatutulong din sa mga kababayan natin sa ibang bansa – alalahanin natin na mahigit sampung milyon na iyon, karamiha’y hindi na nag-aaral dahil OFW – para maging tama ang kanilang paggamit sa wika.  Ipagyayabang ko na, sa lahat ng mga jornal na gawa dito sa ating bansa, ang Malay (na nakasulat sa Filipino) ang pinakamaraming nagbabasa, ayon sa Google Analytics.  Umaabot sa 100,000 katao bawat taon ang nagbabasa ng mga artikulo sa online na bersyon ng Malay.  Malapit nang mabuo ang sistema namin sa Philippine E-Journals para maningil na kami ng sampung dolyar sa bawat dadalaw sa website ng Malay; mura lang ang sampung dolyar, dahil karaniwang 30 o higit pang dolyar ang pay-per-view ngayon sa mga jornal.  Kahit na sampung porsyento na lamang ang matitirang magbabasa sa Malay, sampung libong tao pa rin iyon bawat taon; sa sampung dolyar bawat basa, 100,000 dolyar pa rin iyon o higit sa apat na milyong piso.  Malay lang iyon.  Isipin ninyo kung diksiyonaryo ang babasahin nila.  Sa piso-piso na lamang bawat pahinang babasahin, isipin ninyo kung magkano ang kikitain ng Anvil at UP dito.  (Aba, baka naman may tongpats ako riyan.  Jeje lang.) 

Pero hindi naman pera lamang ang makukuha natin kung ilalagay natin ito sa Web.  Mapapalaganap natin ang wastong paggamit ng ating wika.  Ayon sa Ethnologue, Encarta, at Wikipedia, ang ating wika ang ika-23 sa pinakanagagamit na wika sa buong mundo.  Milyon daw ang gumagamit ng ating wika sa Australia, Canada, People’s Republic of China, Japan, Korea, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, at Estados Unidos.  Umaabot daw sa 100 milyon ang gumagamit ng wikang Filipino bilang una o ikalawang wika.  Mahigit pa iyon sa ating populasyon.  Samakatwid ay maraming hindi Filipino ang gumagamit ng wikang Filipino.  Kailangan nila, at kailangan ng ating mga kababayan hindi lamang sa ibang bansa kundi dito sa atin mismo, ng isang gabay sa bigkas, baybay, gamit, varyant, at kahulugan ng mga salita natin, at ang mga ito mismo ang inaalok sa atin ng UP Diksiyonaryong Filipino. 

Binabati ko ang UP, ang Sentro ng Wikang Filipino, ang Anvil, si Ginoong Almario at ang kanyang mga kabalikat sa proyektong ito, at ang ating bayan sa paglunsad ng librong makabuluhan, kinakailangan, at napapanahon.

These columns were first published in 2005, but are sadly still relevant in 2010. 

The Randall Scandal (The Philippine Star, 3 March 2005) 

Once upon a time, a false god rose in the British isles. His name was John Randall. 

He started the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), an accrediting body established in 1997 whose mission, according to its website, is “to safeguard the public interest in sound standards of higher education qualifications and to encourage continuous improvement in the management of the quality of higher education.” As the first teacher to raise the alarm against the Randall idolatry put it, however, “the QAA is part of the UK government’s bureaucracy for controlling education.” 

Randall had a gospel that he tried to ram down the throats of all British academics. He had a very strange idea that he did not want to sell to the academics, probably because he knew deep inside him that intelligent people would never buy it. Instead, he wanted everyone merely to follow blindly what he said just because he said it. He did not want consultations. He did not want to listen to anyone; he wanted everyone to listen to him. To his disciples at QAA, he was an angel sent from above, a god walking among mere academic mortals. 

He thought that government should control – not support nor encourage – higher education. He wanted government inspectors to enter university classrooms, to check on teachers and students, to look at textbooks. He wanted all universities to document every department meeting and every class session, to follow standardized curricula, to adopt only one method of teaching – that sort of thing. In a country that prides itself on its academic freedom, this was, of course, anathema. Randall knew that nobody would agree with him, but using his position to full advantage, he was able to fool some of the people some of the time, but not most. 

Being bright, most of the British were not fooled by Randall’s bull-headedness. The Association of University Teachers (AUT), the academic trade union and professional association of almost fifty thousand British teachers, launched a revolt against the dictatorship of Randall. The revolt was led by the heads of Oxford and Cambridge, the top universities not just in the UK, but probably even in the world. 

The revolt spread not just like wildfire, but like fish and chips (or in these days, like Big Macs). Before anyone knew it, Parliament got into the act. On Jan. 17, 2001, Randall was summoned by the Select Committee on Education and Employment of the House of Commons. At the investigation, he was confronted by comments such as this: “You are part of the problem. University teachers are so worried about the time and expense and disruption caused by the QAA that they have hardly got time to provide quality education for their first year students.” He was warned about the QAA becoming “the great prescriptor.” (You can read the minutes of the entire interrogation at parliament.co.uk.) 

The problem was really quite simple. Randall was no god, and his ideas were far from divine. In fact, he was dead wrong on many, if not most, issues. When the teachers demanded that they be consulted on his ideas before he did anything, Randall decided to resign. Consultation was the last thing he wanted. He did not want anyone questioning his ideas, for the simple reason that he had no answers to any questions, except to say that he felt he was right. 

Upon his resignation on Aug. 21, 2001, he said to the press: “The Agency is moving to a new phase of its development, with consultation on the way in which the framework we have built will be used in external reviews and by institutions themselves. It is an appropriate time for me to consider the future direction of my career. There are challenges and opportunities that I would like to pursue outside the Agency.” 

Randall, nevertheless, was unrepentant to the end. His last public comment was to compare universities to meat factories (Daily Telegraph, Aug. 22, 2001). Clearly, his desire to control universities was based on a deep disrespect and even disdain for teachers and students. 

The AUT immediately released a statement: “John Randall’s resignation marks the end of an era of overly-bureaucratic and prescriptive regulation in higher education. The last five years have seen a hugely unsuccessful and morale-sapping experiment in higher education. The QAA failed to deliver a sensible balance between bureaucracy and accountability. The development of overly-bureaucratic regulation has antagonised those who work in the sector but has plainly failed to deliver a quality assurance regime that has the confidence of staff, students and the wider public.” 

For intelligent teachers, students, and parents in the UK, Randall was dead. The false god had been unmasked and ridiculed out of office. 

What opportunities did Randall pursue after his disastrous career in the UK? Lo and behold, Randall resurrected in the Philippines and became, in the eyes of our own Commission on Higher Education (CHED), the white god of education. CHED recently ordered all Philippine schools to follow the gospel according to Randall. Heaven help us! 

The Randall Proposal (The Philippine Star, 6 October 2005) 

This is a long-delayed sequel to “The Randall Scandal.” 

On June 18, 2004, John Randall submitted to the Commission on Higher Education a proposal entitled “Quality Assurance of Higher Education in the Philippines.” Although CHED’s Commissioners have assured me that they are not going to implement the proposal in full but will remove impractical and inapplicable components, Randall’s final report to CHED (and to ADB and the British Council, which brought him to the country) remains the key document being used today to compel universities to toe his line. 

As in any other government or consultant’s report, there are good and bad points in Randall’s proposal. 

The best point in the proposal is Randall’s insistence on an “outcomes-based” assessment of universities. The jargon may be confusing, but Randall’s point may be illustrated by an example he does not use. When teachers apply for employment in a university, they are usually asked what their degrees are, how many years they have been teaching, and what research they have undertaken. In Randall’s terms, these data would be “inputs.” 

“There is an assumption,” says Randall, “that, if adequate resources are present, quality will be guaranteed. This, of course, is not true, as much will depend on the effectiveness with which resources are deployed.” In our example, degrees, years of teaching experience, and publications may be irrelevant to teachers that face, let us say, a class of basketball players accepted primarily on the basis of their height. 

Randall points out that universities are also evaluated in terms of their “processes (particularly the processes of teaching and learning).” In our example, teachers are usually judged by what their syllabi contain, what teaching strategies they use, how they fare in student evaluations, how they look to other teachers that observe their classes. Randall argues that evaluating inputs and processes is an immature act. 

“Mature evaluation systems,” he writes, “are based upon outcomes, and in particular the learning outcomes that it is intended that students should achieve.” In our example, teachers applying for employment should be asked what percentage of their former students passed board examinations or found jobs. I myself often provoke literature teachers by telling them that they are bad teachers if their students do not, after high school or college, go on their own to a bookstore or library to read a new novel. As that often-misquoted Biblical verse puts it, by their fruits you shall know them. (Of course, during the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was referring only to false prophets and not necessarily to everyone else; see Matthew 5:15-20.) 

The problem occurs when Randall tries to apply the principle of outcomes-based assessment to the Philippine situation. Although he admits that “CHED, as the regulator of higher education, should be less prescriptive,” he actually ends up urging CHED to be more prescriptive. Randall submits, together with his general statements about the Philippine educational system, a very detailed “Operating Handbook” that is about as prescriptive as you can get. An example: “Formal meetings should always involve at least two members of the [visiting] team.” 

In fact, it is not just the prescriptive portions, but the whole Randall proposal that is wrong, because it falls into the trap of self-contradiction. He starts off by saying, in effect, that Filipinos are doing the wrong thing when it comes to quality assessment. Then, when asked what we should be doing instead, he ends up saying that we should be doing exactly what we have been doing all along. 

Since I belong to PAASCU, as well as to a CHED Technical Panel, I may be accused of bias when it comes to the Randall proposal. But I still have to find in his proposal anything that either PAASCU or CHED is not yet doing. In simpler terms, what Randall is saying is this: you are doing everything wrong, but everything you are doing is right. 

In more intellectual terms, what Randall has done is to assume that he has a monopoly of wisdom. When asked what wisdom that is, he has done nothing else but to point to the wisdom that we already had decades before he arrived in the Philippines. 

I am reminded of a similar argument I used to have with Americans not too long ago. They would tease me about always having a cellphone, saying that in the United States, since everybody had a landline at home and there was a pay phone everywhere you looked, Americans would never buy cellphones. Today, there are affluent homes in the United States without landlines and practically everybody there now has a cellphone. In short, we were (and still are) much more advanced than Americans when it comes to telecommunications. (If you don’t believe that we are more advanced than them, go to any cellphone shop in New York and see how primitive their units there are.) No American can teach us anything when it comes to cellphones. 

Randall came into our country thinking that he knew better than we did about higher education. When he realized that we knew a lot more than he did, he had no choice but to recommend back to us everything that we had already been doing. In effect, he was a false prophet, and the fruit of his labor – his proposal – proves that both the ADB and the British Council wasted their money on him. 

Hello Again, Randall (The Philippine Star, 6 October 2005) 

Once again, the Randall Scandal rears its ugly head. 

First, a flashback. Since it was established in 1994, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) has been quietly and effectively fulfilling its mandate to promote quality assurance among the 1,605 (as of latest count) higher education institutions (HEIs) in the country. 

Soon after its establishment, CHED created regional Quality Assurance Teams (RQATs, called NQAT in NCR), which included volunteer experts in every discipline. These experts usually belonged to the CHED Technical Panels, which were the private sector’s contribution to the governance of higher education in the country. Among the projects of the Technical Panels was the selection of Centers of Excellence (COEs) and Centers of Development (CODs), which were then given funds by CHED to help develop teaching and research in the Philippines. 

On Sept. 25, 2001, CHED granted autonomy to 30 private colleges and universities and deregulated status to 22 others. The criteria for selecting these HEIs were explicit: They were “established as Centers of Excellence or Centers of Development and or private higher education institutions with FAAP Level III Accredited programs; [they showed] outstanding overall performance of graduates in the licensure examinations under the Professional Regulation Commission; [and they had a] long tradition of integrity and untarnished reputation” (CMO 32, s. 2001). 

The reference to accredited programs is important. The Philippines has a long tradition of accreditation, which is another name for quality assurance. Accreditation was first proposed by Congress in 1949, first implemented in 1951, and repeatedly endorsed in laws and memos relating to education (such as the Educational Development Decree of 1972, the Education Act of 1982, and CMO 1, s. 2005). 

This commendable tradition of quality assurance or accreditation was radically disturbed when a certain John Randall came into the country and claimed that the Philippines had never heard of the term “quality assurance.” For some strange reason, CHED forgot that it had been using the term for years and agreed with Randall! 

When I first wrote about what I called the Randall Scandal, I was asked by then CHED Chair Rolando de la Rosa, O.P., and then CHED Commissioner Cristina Padolina to meet with them. They told me that they were not taking Randall hook, line, and sinker, and that they would definitely take a second look at the so-called Quality Assurance Program that he had proposed. I wrote a second column giving fair time to the two commissioners. 

Strange as it may seem, although I head the CHED Technical Panel on Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communication and am an ex-officio member of the CHED University Status team, I was not told that Randall had been resurrected in a memo entitled “Institutional Monitoring and Evaluation for Quality Assurance of All Higher Education Institutions in the Philippines,” shortened to IQuAME (CMO 15, s. 2005) and in a subsequent memo entitled “Evaluation of Higher Education Institutions Granted Autonomous and Deregulated Status in 2001” (CMO 18, s. 2005). Since I do not regard myself as someone that important in CHED, I kept quiet when I found out that autonomous and deregulated universities were beside themselves trying to figure out how to prove that they had quality when they had already been pronounced to have quality. 

Last Aug. 3, 26 of the 30 autonomous and 17 of the 22 deregulated HEIs wrote a strong letter to the CHED Commissioners questioning CMO 18. Here are excerpts from the long letter: 

“We join the many who have expressed reservations about IQuAME as given in CMO No. 15, s. 2005, and the consultancy work on quality assurance done for CHED by Dr. John Randall. We feel that Dr. Randall’s experience and background in the British educational system are very different from our Philippine educational system and situation. As everyone knows, eighty percent of tertiary education in our country is provided by the private sector without any government assistance. We join many who have questioned Dr. Randall’s basic contention that private voluntary accreditation in the Philippines today which is ‘program-based’ does not cover ‘institutional’ concerns and looks mainly on ‘inputs’ rather than ‘outcomes.’ 

“We feel that more time and consultation should have been spent validating Dr. Randall’s recommendations and the instrument to be used for IQuAME visits. 

“We strongly feel that making use of a new and untested IQuAME instrument is not the best way to monitor and evaluate the HEIs granted special status. 

“We feel that for the review of HEIs with these special status, CHED should use the same criteria [as in CMO 32, s. 2001].” 

Guess what CHED did to respond to the letter? On Sept. 28, CHED called the heads of all the autonomous and deregulated HEIs to a meeting at Richville Hotel in Mandaluyong and, wonder of wonders, distributed to all the participants a “Primer on the Quality Assurance, Monitoring, and Evaluation of Higher Education Institutions,” with this explicit note at the end of it: “This primer is based on materials prepared by Dr. John Randall, Quality Assurance Consultant, CHED Organizational Development, Asian Development Bank (ADB) Philippines 2004.” 

Why CHED is allowing itself to look silly when it already looked good is something only we Filipinos living in our self-destabilizing world can understand. 

Quality Assurance and CHED (The Philippine Star, 3 November 2005) 

What is the difference between quality assurance and accreditation? 

Nothing, if we are to listen to the vast majority of accrediting associations around the world. Here are three examples: 

The Council for Higher Education Accreditation of the United States, with more than sixty American national, regional, and specialized accrediting organizations as members, uses the two terms interchangeably. 

The German Akkreditierungs-, Certifizierungs- und Qualitätssicherungs-Instituts (Accreditation, Certification and Quality Assurance Institute) does the same thing. 

So does the Swiss L’Organe d’accréditation et d’assurance qualité des hautes écoles suisses (Center of Accreditation and Quality Assurance of the Swiss Universities). 

Of course, a few countries make a distinction between the two. 

The Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA), for example, looks at accreditation as something universities do themselves and to themselves; quality assurance is what an outside agency does. 

By and large, however, universities and governments around the world treat the two terms as synonyms, whether what they are talking about is program accreditation (meaning that only certain programs, and not whole institutions, are accredited) or institutional accreditation (which means that a whole institution is accredited, even if its programs are not all on the same level of quality). 

There are only two groups that still are in the dark about the two terms – students in Europe and our CHED commissioners. 

The National Unions of Students in Europe (ESIB) bewailed in 2000 that “at the moment there is no common frame in which actors of higher education can discuss quality assurance and accreditation. There are quality assurance systems actually doing accreditation and the other way around. Furthermore the aims and methods of quality assurance and accreditation differ from country to country and there are obscurities in the terms being used.” 

Behaving more like students than the professionals they are supposed to be, our CHED commissioners are equally confused. 

In 1995, CHED recognized that Philippine accrediting associations were already doing quality assurance or accreditation, both institutional and program. It did this through CMO 31, s. 1995 (“Policies on Voluntary Accreditation in Aid of Quality and Excellence in Higher Education”), which used the terms accreditation and quality in the same breath. CHED at that time also recognized that voluntary accreditation included both programs and institutions. CHED used the term Institutions/Programs even for Level I or the starting level of accreditation. 

CHED actually had no choice in 1995 but to recognize voluntary accreditation, which was first proposed by a Joint Congressional Committee in 1949. The first Philippine accrediting association was formed in 1951, and the first actual accreditations were conducted in 1957. 

By the way, the initial delay was due to something very similar to what is happening to CHED today. 

Francisco Dalupan and several other educators formed the Philippine Accrediting Association of Universities and Colleges (PAAUC) in 1951, preparing for voluntary accreditation done by private schools themselves, based on the objectives of each institution to be accredited. Then Education Secretary Manuel Carreon, however, following advice from a consultant named Pius Barth, wanted compulsory accreditation done by the government, based on so-called objective standards. It was only in 1957, when the Philippine Accrediting Association of Schools, Colleges, and Universities (PAASCU) started actual accreditation, that the impasse was broken. PAASCU’s efforts were officially recognized and endorsed by then Education Secretary Carlos P. Romulo in 1967. Since then, accreditation in the country has been private and voluntary. 

Early this year, CHED issued CMO 1, s. 2005 (“Revised Policies and Guidelines on Voluntary Accreditation in Aid of Quality and Excellence in Higher Education”), which removed the word institutional from the different levels, but still recognized that quality assurance or accreditation itself was being done and should be done by the already existing accrediting associations. 

CHED then famously imposed the so-called IQuAME, based on an expensive, but silly study by its consultant John Randall, in two infamous memos, “Institutional Monitoring and Evaluation for Quality Assurance of All Higher Education Institutions in the Philippines” (CMO 15, s. 2005) and “Evaluation of Higher Education Institutions Granted Autonomous and Deregulated Status in 2001” (CMO 18, s. 2005). Suddenly, despite having said that quality assurance, in the worldwide sense of program and institutional accreditation, existed in the Philippines, CHED said that there was a need for quality assurance! 

How can the present CHED claim that schools should undergo quality assurance when many of them (though admittedly not all of them) have already been accredited and, especially in the case of autonomous and deregulated institutions, been recognized as having quality? 

I have only two foreign words: ignorantia, as in “Ignorantia judicis est calamitas innocentis” (The ignorance of a judge is the misfortune of the innocent), and hubris, as in Oedipus and Macbeth. I could say that what we now have in CHED is pure tragedy, but if you know your Aristotle, there are no tragic figures in that otherwise rational government agency, just comic ones.