With the impeachment trial over and K to 12 underway in our schools, we trust that the proposed laws marinating in Congress will be passed, especially the Reproductive Health Bill and the Freedom of Information Act. Among the pending bills in the House committee on basic education is one that seeks to include the histories of our indigenous peoples in our national history and another adding to the already crowded college curriculum a course on the life and work of Andres Bonifacio, at a time when some argue that the present Rizal course is obsolete in the 21st century. We should guard against a curriculum aimed at exporting more Filipinos rather than keeping them home to develop the country. Before we give our youth the wings to fly away, we should first give them roots to maintain a permanent link with the motherland.
More than half a century has passed since Claro M. Recto and Jose P. Laurel fought for the passage of Republic Act 1425, better known as the “Rizal Law” that makes the study of the life, work and writings of Jose Rizal compulsory in all schools in the Philippines. In the past 50 years, compulsory college courses have been revisited, reviewed, and, as in the case of 12 units of Spanish, removed when the better option was to provide for the learning of yet another language aside from English and Filipino. Today the following courses remain required and compulsory by law: land reform and taxation, national service (formerly the ROTC), and the Rizal course. Should we crowd the curriculum by adding more to these three, or change these subjects into something more useful for work abroad, like computer literacy or commercial Mandarin?
The last time the government took notice of the Rizal course was in 1994 when then President Fidel V. Ramos ordered the then Department of Education, Culture and Sports and the Commission on Higher Education to “immediately and fully implement the letter, intent and spirit of Republic Act No. 1425 and to impose, should it be necessary, appropriate disciplinary action against the governing body and/or head of any public or private school, college or university found not complying with said law…”
Ramos issued Memorandum Order 247 following reports that some schools were not delivering the Rizal course as they should. In order to appreciate the importance of RA 1425, we must remember that it originally had two versions—one from the House of Representatives, the other from the Senate—and that one had to go through the voluminous records of the two chambers for the transcripts of the heated debates that went into crafting the law as we know and have it today. There is also much material related to the law in the newspapers of the period that recorded the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church. Going through the preamble of RA 1425, we see the reason for such legislation:
“Whereas, today, more than any other period of our history, there is a need for a rededication to the ideals of freedom and nationalism for which our heroes lived and died.
“Whereas, it is meet that in honoring them, particularly the national hero and patriot, Jose Rizal, we remember with special fondness and devotion their lives and works that have shaped the national character.”
No Filipino will argue over nationalism, although in a discipline like history that is both informative and formative, nationalism requires a nuanced look. When Teodoro Agoncillo declared in the 1960s that “there is no Philippine history before 1872,” he changed the way a whole generation looked at history. Agoncillo argued that our history before the turning point, the execution of Gomburza, was written by Spaniards, and since the primary sources for our history were written largely by Spaniards, what we had before 1872 was but the history of Spain in the Philippines. It was not Philippine history. Following Agoncillo’s rewriting of Philippine history from a Filipino viewpoint came the classic nationalist works of Renato Constantino that also captured the imagination of the generation of the First Quarter Storm.
The opposition to RA 1425 had very little to do with love of country, or nationalism. The preamble states that it is the duty of schools “to develop moral character, personal discipline, civic conscience, and to teach the duties of citizenship.” On those general terms there was nothing controversial except that one of the means to that end was to make Rizal’s “Noli Me Tangere” and “El Filibusterismo,” passages of which were considered anti-Catholic, required reading for all.
We do not remember now how some members of the Catholic hierarchy found 170 passages in the “Noli” and 50 in the “Fili” offensive to the Catholic faith. They insisted that Catholics could read selected passages from Rizal’s work, but to compel Catholics to read Rizal’s novels in their unexpurgated version was to force heresy on them and violate their freedom of conscience. Some Church officials even threatened to “punish” erring legislators in future elections.
If you look at our legislative history, you will see that the Catholic Church rose to vigorously challenge a proposed law only twice: first for the Rizal Law, and now for the proposed RH Law.
As we review the curriculum, we must balance between an education of Filipinos for export and an education for citizenship and nation.
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