james.soriano

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PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 25 February 2009 Issue (Page E-2)

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“Whereas it is but fitting that the entire Filipino nation be given the opportunity to observe this milestone in our country’s history; I… by order of Her Excellency… do hereby declare February 23, 2009 (Monday) as a special holiday for all private and public schools at all levels throughout the country.”

Reading this part of Presidential Proclamation No. 1728, I could not help but giggle involuntarily. Not that there is anything wrong with the segment: the youth is pretty much the ‘entire Filipino nation’, and it is only fitting that we be given an occasion to celebrate, regardless of the fact that we were probably too young to understand the significance of what happened twenty-three years ago, if we were alive at all.

No, what really made me laugh was the fact that the administration was going to celebrate it on Wednesday anyway, which accomplishes two things. First, everyone (even the older people) still gets to celebrate anyway—never mind that it’s not a national holiday like it has been the other twenty-two years, what matters is that everyone, even the older people, gets to commemorate it! Second, we get a free pass away from school, without having to remember what this holiday was for.

Really, what was this holiday for?

I would think that a historical event of such monumental significance would be something that we all collectively treasure, like we would money, especially since the people who witnessed and made it happen are still alive, and the memories and accompanying emotions must still be fresh in their hearts and minds.

It has not been too long ago. America’s Declaration of Independence happened two-hundred-and-thirty-three-years ago, and they still celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks. Now that was too long ago. Here, we don’t even watch the proceedings anymore.

It has only been twenty-three years, yet the importance of People Power seems to have been lost to us already.

Maybe it’s because the People Power Revolution was not truly national in scope. True, millions of people flocked to EDSA. But of those millions, a huge majority came from Metro Manila and the areas surrounding it. The same is true for the second People Power, which changed regimes but not socio-political structures, or the third one, which was not without massive violence. All of these shifts may have been significant to us as a nation, but they were brought about by and for the sake of the urbanites.

I think this is an important observation, because Manila, as our social-political-and-economic center, is where everything is, and therefore everything is bigger in Manila. And because everything, including politics, is bigger in Manila, there is an illusion that the general desire for political change and calls for “people power” are national in scope, when in fact they exclude majority of our country’s opinions.

Or maybe it’s not so much the concept of Imperial Manila as it is the reality that things haven’t changed all that much. It is not seldom that I hear the remark, “I bet we were better of under Marcos,” when it comes to talking about politics and the importance of this revolution. What might be more alarming is that these words are uttered by my peers, who cannot claim to have truly experienced the regime, unlike those people who took to the streets that fateful week in February 1986.

But it is hard to suppress the feeling that we tend to change masters more than we actually change conditions. And if that is all we’ve done in the past twenty-three years, can we truly claim to have broken free from the bonds of slavery?

This reminds me of a chance conversation I had with an older friend during last year’s holiday, which was surrounded by controversy due to the ZTE issue and talks of breaking the national holiday tradition (which is the case this year, except without protest). The most memorable bit of that conversation was as follows: “Alam mo, it’s just the same thing over and over again. What reason is there to celebrate if we have taken more steps backward than [we have] forward?”

And if those who were part of the revolution have no reasons to observe it, what reason do we?

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PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 18 February 2009 Issue

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Amidst all this talk of making English the primary medium of instruction for public schools, one has to ask whether there is real good to be gained from teaching in a language other than our own.

It is a very important question because language and education are inextricably linked. You cannot teach if you cannot be understood. And beyond that, the language of education also shapes the way you think and communicate, because language inevitably affects the types of cultural influences that you are exposed to.

I remember back in grade school how we used to have a so-called “English Rule.” On certain days or class periods, students would not be allowed speak in a language other than English. If a student is caught speaking in, say, Filipino, he would be subjected to a penalty, which differed depending on the grade school you went to (I went to two, and rival ones at that.) While these small pockets of time might not seem to have mattered in determining the way you speak, for me it did. I took the English Rule very seriously, maybe because it made you seem smarter if you could speak it well. Eventually, it became easiest for me to express myself in the language.

Then again, I was in a different sort of environment. My peers belonged to middle-class or otherwise wealthy households, many of which encouraged the children to read English books, watch English shows, and speak the English language at home. So it isn’t surprising that some of us express ourselves more fluently with a vocabulary that is not ours.

This brings me back to the summer after high school freshman year, which I spent with a couple of friends teaching underprivileged kids from a nearby slum area. Partnered with one of my classmates, I was tasked to teach basic English grammar and syntax. On the first day, I tried doing my own version of the English Rule to encourage the kids to speak the language, which I figured would make them more familiar with it.

I gave up after ten minutes. I had to switch codes every other sentence, because I couldn’t make myself understood. If you’ve ever tried teaching English to someone in Filipino, then you would know exactly how difficult this is. But sadly, this was the way it went with my teaching all summer. Looking back, I realize now that it was unreasonable for me to expect them to speak it fluently by the end. They come from a background that is different from mine.

Thus, I can only imagine how difficult it would be, even for a qualified teacher, to teach in English in some other far-flung area, like the mountains or an isolated island community. If this teacher weren’t a native, then it would be difficult enough just finding a way to communicate with her students. What more in a language that is foreign?

The first concern of education is to ensure that the knowledge can be understood, and thus imparted in a language that the student can fully understand. It is unreasonable for us to expect students to comprehend their lessons and improve their scores while struggling with their medium at the same time.

This is true even with teaching Science and Math, fields which are dominated mostly by Western dialects. Other countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Slovenia teach Math and Science in their native tongues, and they periodically rank among the world’s best countries in terms of proficiency in these subjects. We teach Math and Science in English, and yet we don’t.

All of this notwithstanding, our policy makers are still grappling with the problem of our country’s failing English proficiency. Changing the primary medium of instruction would seem to help in solving this, because students would ideally be acclimatized to an environment where English is valued as the language of progress and modernization, of intellect and the elite. This is, truly enough, the reality of our neocolonial society. You can’t get far in this country—indeed, this world—without knowing a little English.

But what escapes these policy makers are the harsh realities of education.

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PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 11 February 2009 Issue

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The season of love is also a season of sadness.

Or at least it is for all the single people who are desperately seeking Men or Women for Dating, A Relationship, or Activity Partners—whatever that is supposed to mean.

Valentine’s Day also goes by another internationally-recognized moniker: SAD. These three letters stand for Singles Awareness Day, a self-deprecating joke of a holiday celebrated worldwide by singles as an alternative for the holiday of love. Singles celebrate it for a number of reasons. Some do out of spite; maybe you’re fresh from a breakup, or your best friend got the girl whom you also secretly liked. Others do it as a form of protest against Hallmark holidays, so that they celebrate it a day before or a day after to avoid the wave of commercialism. Still, others do it to remind themselves that being single isn’t so bad at all, even if you’ve watched Love, Actually and believe otherwise.

But regardless of the reasons, I am impressed by the fun, non-cliche ways that people have concocted to celebrate it. While the private school boys would usually be at the gates of their actual/would-be girlfriend’s school, waiting for the bell to ring—their cue to make some exceedingly amorous declaration of love with flowers, chocolates, or Hallmark cards—the single guys would go out with their best buddies to the nearest bar/coffee shop and commiserate over free-flowing beer/coffee. In some countries, the creativity with which they celebrate is truly inspring: on Valentine’s Day 2006, the singles in Taiwan had a demonstration activity against couples in the town of Tamsui.

I don’t know who came up with the idea for this holiday, but God am I thankful that it exists, and not only because it’s fun and not cliché.

I’m glad because it reminds you that you don’t need to be in a romantic relationship in order to be happy.

The problem with Valentine’s Day is that it has come to represent entirely romantic notions of love and companionship. For this, media and commercialism are partly to blame: we have been conditioned from birth, via fairy tales, Disney movies and romantic comedies, that the only way for us to be truly happy is to have a happily-ever-after, or in other words, be in a relationship. What this holiday does is to pressure us into submission, to the profit of businesses and media corporations, and to the detriment of all the single folks forced to gape at the spectacle of couplehood.

For teenagers, this pressure is intense enough without all of the mass marketing. This past week, I have not gone a day without having at least one conversation with a friend who is sincerely, subconsciously, or otherwise pretending not to be sad about Valentine’s Day. It seems to me like everyone’s so eager to experience love without really knowing what that is. I’m not sure that many of us, even those who have had some experience, know what we are looking for.

Talk of hormones aside, I think that’s partly because it is so easy for us to associate having a significant other with feelings of kilig or self-worth. That’s not necessarily bad, I guess, since it’s natural, but what is detrimental is when we fail to look beyond it and become sad for entirely irrational reasons. Relationships are just as much about sadness, solitude and self-loathing as they are about happiness, companionship and self-respect. They also become more complex as time passes, in a way that romantic movies can never entirely do justice to. But that’s because relationships last for at least a couple of days, while romantic comedies only last at most for a couple of hours.

What I am saying, though—and this is the message of Singles Awareness Day—is that it is okay to be single. On the one hand, maybe you’re missing out, but on the other hand, you also aren’t. It’s just that most people look exclusively at the former and forget about the latter. And celebrating SAD is a good way of combatting the pressures of a culture that forces us to believe that romantic happiness is the best kind of happiness.

If you ask me, the best kind of happiness is to be found in any sincere form of companionship. And you’ll never lack for both on the fourteenth of February.

Happy SAD, everyone!

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PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 4 February 2009 Issue (Page E-4)

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In light of the need to impose educational reforms, CHED has proposed to retool the system into having five-year college courses across the board.

In this plan, the first two years at the college level will be use for “pre-university” courses, supposedly to equip students with skills that would immediately land them jobs should they forgo further specialization.

Ideally, the plan will be put in motion by next school year, amid soaring unemployment rates and the world’s biggest economic crunch since the Great Depression in 1929.

It has gotten me wondering whether the government is looking too far ahead in coming up with a solution—or if it is indeed even looking for one.

In the first place, effective educational reforms necessitate two things: a clear view of the problem, and a well-defined connection between the problem and the solution. It is this link between problem and solution that I cannot fully appreciate.

The problem with our system is not so much in the number of years, but in the caliber of the education it gives.

Right now, our educational system is a moldering mess. Curricula are not up to date, and neither are the ways with which we we educate. While the rest of the world is revolutionizing through computers, we are revolting from the lack of textbooks (which themselves are factually lacking) and classrooms without teachers. There are many students but not enough teachers. In many cases, schooling has become a formality which students undergo without truly learning anything. It is for this reason that so few of us even reach college.

At this point, should we even be talking about expanding years in college when we can barely prepare our students for it?

But say for the sake of argument that we tackle it on the level of the university itself. Ideally, the extra year creates space for more meaningful learning and specialization. Yet if we look at the structure of the policy itself, practically nothing changes.

Currently, the first year of many universities is spent on general education (to compensate for the lack of training our basic education has given) and the next three years is spent on the course itself. Under the proposed system, two years will be spent on “pre-college” courses, and the next three years for specialization. Seems like the only real change is that college students take freshman year twice.

Besides, in an age where specialization has become the key to employment, one has to doubt whether we can feasibly leave school after two years of pre-specialized education.

Before we think about expanding years in college, we should revisit our college curriculum first, and see whether we exact accountability from schools that do not deliver.

Then we have to think about whether families can handle such a change. Not so long ago, millions of Filipinos lost their educational savings by investing in faulty college plans. Nowadays, these same people are reeling from the impact of the financial crisis, which has resulted in significantly reduced incomes, if not outright unemployment. One has to wonder whether they can handle the added expense of another year of college. Indeed, one has to wonder whether they can currently handle the expenses of four years in college.

This is even worse for students who mostly depend on scholarship and financial aid. As you increase the number of years required for education, you also increase the amount of money that must be invested to ensure that a student graduates. This will make scholarships more competitive, and this means that it will be more difficult for poor yet worthy and intelligent students to have access to higher education. Yet here we are talking about how to best utilize the talent of the youth.

Granted, it is admirable that our administration is thinking of ways to make meaningful reforms to the education system. It is also good that we have begun caring about being up to par with international standards. But before we gaze outward and think of big solutions, it is necessary to introspect and discern the kind of changes we need to make first.

At least then, our government won’t seem like it’s looking for a cheap way to reduce unemployment figures.