Playground of the mind

In my first year of teaching at the University of the Philippines Diliman, some seasoned professors offered tips on how to torment my students. One dean said he would hire me if I promised to follow his pedagogical method—terrorism. I replied that I couldn’t terrorize my students even if I tried because of my cheerful disposition. Of course, I bit my tongue and didn’t explain further that I had a happy childhood.

September is Teachers Month, leading me to look back on Jose Rizal’s first teacher, his mother, Teodora Alonso, and his second teacher, Leon Monroy, a family friend who died five months after starting Rizal on Latin. Rizal’s third teacher was Justiniano Aquino Cruz, the same teacher of his elder brother, Paciano. In 1870 Paciano brought Rizal to nearby Biñan and deposited him with relatives. It was the first time Rizal was separated from his family, so the trip started with a lot of tears.

More tears would be shed in school, where the pedagogical method was not to spare the rod and spoil the child. Rizal was spanked or beaten regularly, and this made him resolve to open a school that would not be a den of torture but a playground of the mind. In my forthcoming book, “Rizal and Me,” I ask Rizal questions and his answers come from his writings. This is how he describes his early education in Biñan in the book:

JR: One Sunday, my brother took me to that town after I had bade my family goodbye, with tears in my eyes. I was then nine years old and already I tried to hide my tears. Oh, good manners, oh, shame, that obliges us to hide our true sentiments and to appear different! How much beauty, what tender and pathetic scenes the world would witness without you!

We arrived in Biñan at nightfall and we went to the house of an aunt where I was to stay. The moon was beginning to peep, and in the company of Leandro, her grandson, I walked through the town that seemed to me large and rich but ugly and gloomy.

ARO: Oh, that means you didn’t really stay in the controversial Alberto House in Biñan that was recently taken down piece by piece, transported and rebuilt in Bataan? Can you tell us what Justiniano Aquino Cruz, the schoolmaster, was like?

JR: My brother left me [in Biñan] afterwards, not without having first introduced me to my teacher who had also been his teacher. He was tall, thin, long-necked, with a sharp nose and body slightly stooped forward, and he usually wore a sinamay shirt, woven by the skilled hands of those women of Batangas. He knew by heart the grammars by Nebrija and Gainza. Add to this a severity that in my judgment was excessive, and you have a picture, perhaps vague, that I remember of him.

ARO: What else do you remember?

JR: I remember only this. When I entered his class for the first time, that is, in his house, which was of  nipa  and low, about 30 meters away from my aunt’s (for one had only to pass through a portion of the street and a little corner cooled by an apple tree), he spoke to me in these words:

“Do you know Spanish?”

“A little, sir,” I replied.

“Do you know Latin?”

“A little, sir,” I answered again.

Because of these answers the teacher’s son,

Pedro, the naughtiest boy in the class, began to sneer at me. He was older than I, and was taller than I. We fought, but I don’t know by what accident I defeated him, throwing him down some benches in the classroom. I released him quite mortified. He wanted a return match, but I refused because the teacher was already awake by this time, and I was afraid of punishment.

After this I became (in)famous among my classmates, perhaps because of my small size, so that after class, a schoolmate named Andres Salandanan challenged me to arm-wrestle. He offered his arm to twist and I lost, and almost dashed my head against the sidewalk of a house.

[From] my classmates, I got more sneers, nicknames, and they called me [a name I won’t share with you anymore, as a matter of fact I crossed this out of my memoirs though in most editions the word “Calambeño” has been provided!] Some were good and treated me very well, like Marcos Rizal, son of a cousin of mine, and others. Some of them, much later, became my classmates in Manila, and we found ourselves in very different situations.

ARO: Teachers today cannot hit children and risk a charge of child abuse. So, corporal punishment was part of the system?

JR: I don’t want to indulge myself by counting the caning that I suffered or describe what I felt when I received the first beatings on the hand called palmetazo.  Some envied me and others pitied me. Sometimes they accused me wrongly, sometimes rightly, and always the accusation cost me half a dozen or three lashes called diciplina … Despite the reputation I had of being a good boy, it was unusual for a day to pass when I was not laid on the bench and whipped or given five or six palmetazos.

From these we understand the autobiographical source for Chapter 19 of “Noli Me Tangere,” where the schoolmaster got good results by sparing the rod, only to have the method reversed by the parish priest. The schoolmaster says, “I wanted to make of the cartilla or first reader not the little black book soaked with the tears of childhood but a friend who will let him discover wonderful secrets.” Then the schoolmaster wanted to turn “the school house from a place of sorrows [to] the site of intellectual recreation.”

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