Return history to K-12

From the queries I receive online, almost daily, from students taking the college course on Philippine history from primary sources, it seems that teachers leave them on their own. With no prescribed textbook, students are required to seek the primary sources on their own and few, if at all, head to the school library. Physical books are analog. Eew! Old fashioned. Jurassic. So they go online and drown in raw, undigested information. This would not be so if teachers taught them the most basic definition of a primary source: a document or artifact created at the time period being studied. So if you are studying Rizal, you have to read documents written by Rizal himself during his lifetime 1861-1896. Books by Gregorio Zaide and Ambeth Ocampo are secondary sources.

In my classes, we discuss primary sources from prehistoric times, prehistory being defined as the period before written records. Isn’t the existence of Homo luzonensis based on a mute piece of bone that pushed back our history 67,000 years? Then the remains of a butchered rhinoceros pushed that history further back 700,000 years. History being the period of recorded or written history, our earliest documents are in scripts unknown to our generation found on the Laguna Copperplate Inscription or the Calatagan Pot, both national treasures preserved in the National Museum. Aside from the Laguna Copperplate Inscription, that is a thousand-year-old receipt for payment of gold, we go through early Chinese accounts of the land and people that we know today as the Philippines. Then we have early European accounts starting from 16th century sources: Antonio Pigafetta’s account of the Magellan expedition, the book “De Moluccis Insulis” based on interviews of survivors, the reports from 1565 sent to the King by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, supplemented with other reports sent by archbishops of Manila.

Early dictionaries, vocabularies, and grammars, compiled by missionary religious, provide more than word meanings. Bienvenido Lumbera mined these for early Tagalog poetry, William Henry Scott for insights into life and technology at the time. One 16th century document, whose author is unknown, has come down to us under the title “The Boxer Codex” after the English historian who owned it and made it known. This manuscript comes with illustrations that show us how Filipinos dressed at the time. A manuscript by the Jesuit Francisco Ignacio Alcina describes 17th-century Visayan life in words and pictures. For the Spanish period alone, 1565-1898, students have recourse to the 55-volume compilation of sources known to scholars as “Blair and Robertson.” Some people argue, however, that as translations from the original Spanish primary sources, should these English renditions be considered “secondary”?

The problem with primary sources for the four centuries, under Spanish rule, is that most were written by Spaniards: missionaries, soldiers, government officials. Where is the voice of the Filipino in these sources? Teodoro Agoncillo declared in the 1960s that there is no Philippine history before 1872, that period is but a history of Spain in the Philippines. This nationalistic view was tempered by William Henry Scott and Renato Constantino who argued that the diligent historian can tease out truth or the Filipino voice even from biased Spanish sources.

So the college course on Philippine history from primary sources is a well for, hopefully, critical and constructive conversation. Unfortunately, that is difficult as it assumes a knowledge of Philippine history built over the K-12 years. With the removal of history as a separate subject in the K-12 curriculum, and melding it into that mishmash we know as Araling Panlipunan, students have to relearn history double-time. To date, Philippine history is only taught as a separate subject in Grade 5. At that level, they learn the very basic who, what, when, and where. With a sprinkling of how, and a dash of why? The next Philippine history course they will take will be seven years later, that is, if they proceed to college.

I am all for the return of more history courses in the K-12 curriculum, provided we review and improve on pedadogy. Students don’t need to memorize facts in the age of Google, but they must know how to find, analyze, and argue from facts that is historical method.

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Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu