Jose Rizal valued physical education

When I was in high school, very few of us took physical education (PE) seriously, and as it turns out, neither do our policymakers. Already marginal in the grading system if not the educational system itself, there are plans to merge PE with social studies, culture, history in at least some grade levels.

But there is someone who took PE very seriously—and may well be one of the first Filipinos to do so: Jose Rizal.

This is reflected in his own efforts to educate himself in various sports from fencing to weightlifting and martial arts; he enjoyed home pursuits like reading books but he also loved outdoor activities like swimming and climbing mountains.

This is also reflected in his effort to share his passion to others. He may have built gyms in the Philippines, when, upon his return from his first Europe trip, in 1887, he built the first recorded gymnasium in the Philippines, with wrestling, weightlifting, fencing, marksmanship, and arnis de mano, fulfilling Ibarra’s vision of a school with a gym in “Noli Me Tangere” (see Perez, 2020). As he recounted at the time: “May I tell you that I have popularized here physical exercises so that the gamblers, instead of going to the cockpit or sitting down at the panguingue (card game) table would come to the gymnasium to watch the exercises or join them. Through this means also some ailments were cured.”

In Dapitan, he also heavily incorporated PE in his students’ daily routine, and included activities like gymnastics, boxing, wrestling, stone throwing, swimming, boating, and perhaps arnis, anticipating the attention to PE brought by the Americans decades later.

Likely, he was influenced by emergent European ideals at the time of training the body (it is worth noting that many of the team sports that are popular today emerged in their current form in the 19th century). Whether or not, as León Ma. Guerrero suggested, Rizal’s short stature made him pay more to his body, it is clear that his health-conscious uncle Manuel played an influential role, being his fitness mentor at an early age.

Scholars interpret his attention to fitness as also fitting his anticolonial positionality. By espousing the idea that the “indio” body can be cultivated to be at par with those of the Europeans, he was challenging racial ideologies at the time. As Perez (2020) wrote: “Sports afforded ilustrados like Rizal and the Luna brothers a means to defend Filipino honor, but it did so beyond mere posturing or image building. Excellence in sports became an active and dynamic form of counterdiscourse, given the then prevailing assumption that no savage or barbarian was expected to have the necessary traits to become good at them. One’s skill with a blade or physical strength at the gymnasium built a reputation that was hard for witnesses to ignore, especially among those who felt the bitter taste of defeat at the hands of their colonial subjects.”

More than a practice that is consistent with his political goals, however, I believe that PE was part of his idea of human development: of cultivating body, mind, and spirit. His idea of PE was also heavily linked with his embrace of nature: He involved the forests and rivers of Dapitan in teaching his boys; and his pursuit of mountain climbing was rooted in his love for both nature and culture (e.g., Mariang Makiling). A discoverer of different species who referred to Darwin in his books, he’s the last person who would not care about the natural sciences, but he surely would have rejected relegating PE in the name of other subjects.

Rizal probably did not take too seriously PE either, in the sense that he had fun doing it. In “El Filibusterismo,” there is a scene that perhaps evokes this sentiment:

“During the boarders’ recreation hours, from the lower hallway of the spacious entrance up to the main floor, there was a bubbling of laughter, shouts, and movement. Boys in scanty clothing played sipa or practiced gymnastic exercises on improvised trapezes, while on the staircase a fight was in progress between eight or nine armed with canes, sticks, and ropes, but neither attackers nor attacked did any great damage, their blows generally falling sidewise upon the shoulders of the Chinese pedler who was there selling his outlandish mixtures and indigestible pastries.”

But he saw physical activity as an important part of everyday life—and so should we.

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