Re: Importance of Philippine History Subject

While surfing the Net I chanced upon a 2008 blog of history teacher Maribeth Q. Galindo that resonated in me, so much so that I had to respond.  She said in her opening paragraph:
 

Often times, my students in Philippine history ask…”Ma’am, is the teaching of Philippine history subject still relevant in our course? Past is past, we could not change it. We could not give back the lives lost nor use the names of our hero’s, such as Jose Rizal, Emilio Aguinaldo, Andres Bonifacio and others as references when we apply for a job. If we do use their names, definitely, we will not be hired. We will not even ask what is Philippine history during the interviews. So, what is the use of studying Philippine history?

I've heard that before.  And students do not even have to ask that question, you can see it in their faces...utter boredom.  Unfortunately I'm dissatisfied with Ms. Galindo's answer to the above question.  Her answer appeared to me the formulaic motherhood statement of nationalism, a lot of flag waving and singing the national anthem.  That may resonate with self-sacrificing teachers and patriots but not with the children of the working class, whose primary objective is survival and crawling out of poverty.

IMHO it would have been better to directly confront the students question rather than unfurling the flag.  Perhaps, the student can be asked, "Why do you need to look for a job?", "What are the chances of you finding a job after graduation?", and "If you were born in another country, say Japan what are the chances of you finding a job after graduation?".  I bet you can link nationality with job hunting.  And nationality would be the doorway for history, since it is created in history.

Furthermore why not ask, "Why do you want to apply for a job, rather than employ people?".  And you can guide the conversation towards the history of the economy and how we ended up this way today, a labor exporting country.

In relation, it is not only Filipino students who find their own history boring.  James Loewen in his book Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong (1995), he said:

High school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history invariably comes in last. Students consider history "the most irrelevant" of twenty-one subjects commonly taught in high school. Bor-r-ring is the adjective they apply to it. When students can, they avoid it, even though most students get higher grades in history than in math, science, or English. Even when they are forced to take classes in history, they repress what they learn, so every year or two another study decries what our seventeen-year-olds don't know.

Among the reasons he cited is that textbooks on American history are boring (Loewen, 1995, p.2).  I would say the same for Phillipine history textbooks in college. It appears that history writers have lost the art of the narrative.  The textbooks had taken events and presented it as evidence for some social scientific fact.  There is no story, it's just one damned thing after another.  Like watching a pageant than looking at a story. A character, a movement, even entire nations would appear and then ... well there is no then or afterwards because you never know what happened next.  They just appear and disappear from the pages.  Take for instance the balangay boat, it's in every history book, but no one dared to say why it disappeared in history.

Another problem with Philippine history textbooks we have today is that they trying hard to show there were Filipinos since time immemorial in the Philippines. The truth is that of the less than five hundred years of history in the Philippines, the Filipino appeared only in the last 100 years under the Americans.  The story was actually the coming together of different nations into a nation-state we call the Philippines.  And not all of the nations or tribes/ethnic groups were under the Spaniards for 300+ years.  The Boholanos minus 80, the Magindanaons and Ifugaos would claim never.  Even Tagalogs would find it hard to know their ancestors because historians try to erase them from history in order to compromise with the other tribes.  I don't think anyone would dare tell students that Bonifacio was trying to build Haring Bayang Katagalugan (Sovereign Tagalog Nation) instead of the Republic of the Philippines or Republica Filipina.  They would always try to gloss over that fact with Emilio Jacinto's footnote in the Sa May Nasang Makisanib sa Katipunan Ito.  What is the weight of a footnote compared to the entire document? It means what it says, they see everyone as Tagalogs because their perspective is local, they were not trying to create a new super-tribe.  The context is that this was a movement of people who had never been outside their own barrio, what could we expect from them?  Pedagogically speaking why not let the students argue over it rather than kill the debate with the footnote?

Each nation/tribe/ethnic group has it's own angle in the story.  We should let everyone tell their version of Philippine History, and how we are coming together into a nation-state (or breaking up :-().  Perhaps it will be less boring ;-).


Reference:

Loewen, J. W. (1995). Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong. New York: Simon & Schuster.


Galindo, M.Q. (2008). The importance of Philippine history subject. Blog post available at http://societyworld.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/the-importance-of-philippine-history-subject/.