Núm. 53 – Especial de Filipinas I, publicación de marzo del 2001
Educadores y sabios adredemente olvidados
Artículo por Guillermo Gómez Rivera
Para aquellos colegiales filipinos que, entre 1970 y 1985, fueron inspirados a objetar y manifestarse en contra de las leyes de la enseñanza del idioma español como una asignatura regular de lengua y literatura filipinas, la oposición de sus antepasados a la más amplia imposición compulsoria del idioma inglés sobre su misma educación, que entonces era más filipina y autónoma que la suya en el presente, pudiera ser una bonita lección sobre el maquiavelismo y el sectarismo usenses además de una muy instructiva historia filipina.
Decimos esto porque sabemos que el lavado de cerebro que se les perpetró, a guisa de educación en idioma inglés, ha sido tan completa que los dejaron totalmente ignorantes en cuanto a su pasado y en cuanto a la identidad nacional, a la cultura y a la libertad personal y colectiva que debieran sentir y vivir en nombre de su dignidad como pueblo libre.
Es por eso que casi nadie de ellos, de entre los filipinos supuestamente educados en inglés, los que recuerdan, a la manera de un José Rizal a grandes filipinos como Modesto Reyes, Macario Sacay y De León, y a tantas grandes mujeres filipinas como lo son Librada Avelino y Rosa Sevilla de Alvero.
Y estos grandes filipinos quedan borrados de la lista actual de filipinos ilustres porque todos pertenecen a esa pléyade de héroes que se resistieron a la científicamente cruel conquista usense y de sus sectarios WASP.
De hecho, en la lucha filipina por la libertad en el terreno de una verdadera eduación que se compagina con su originaria identidad nacional y su verdadera cultura, bastará recordar, aunque sea por solamente empezar, el caso singular de Doña Librada Avelino que, afortunadamente, cuenta con suficiente documentación en forma de un libro y unas referencias publicadas.
1. FORGOTTEN FILIPINO SAGES AND EDUCATORS
For college students who, between 1970 and 1985, were “inspired” to protest against the laws for the teaching of Spanish as a regular subject, the protest on the part of their ancestors against the eider imposition of compulsory English in the Filipino funded educational system, which in the early decades of 1900 was more Filipino than the Anglicized colonial that it is now, could come as a surprise if not a trauma of sorts aside from being a beautiful lesson on U.S. WASP machiavellian and sectarian agenda over the Philippine of today.
This is why nobody among the Filipino youth of today who are supposedly “educated” because they supposedly speak and think in Americanese, can
remember, even in the vague manner that they are made to remember Rizal, such other great Filipino Freedom fighters like Macario Sacay y De Leon such great Filipino women like Librada Avelino and Rosa Sevilla de Alvero.
For, indeed, those who have been deliberately mis-educatedver in English today aside from having been deliberately misled with regard the history of their own country during the American military regime, the idea of having Filipinos that were definitely against the imposition of English as the medium of education and as an official language of these islands can become a real rediscovery.
We say this because we know that the brainwashing that has been perpetrated, brainwashing in the guise of “education” in English, has been so successful that it has left almost every other Filipino with nothing but total ignorance about their personal and collective past, their own national identity and distant from the culture and the ture freedom and liberty that they should feel and live in the name of their own dignity as a people that has the right to be free and respected in its sovereignty.
And these great Filipinos have been deliberately been erased from the actual list of illustrious Filipinos worth remembering because they belong to that Spanish-speaking pleyade of national heroes who resisted the scientifically and sectarianly cruel U.S. WASP invasion and conquest. Thus, in the Filipino´s struggle for liberty in the sphere of education, (an education that should connect with his original national identiy and true culture, it is enough to remember, even if only as a new beginning, the singular case of Librada Avelino, wose life and work is fortunately and sufficiently well documented in the form of a book and other published references.
Spanish and Tagalog were the official languages of their 1898 República de Filipinas and they must have somehow learned that this first expression and symbol of freedom and independence of their fathers was cruelly destroyed by an English speaking neocolonialist enemy and tormentor; the invading American forces between 1898 and 1907.
The ordinary Filipino as well as the well-to-do Filipino of those times were never asked what they had as their common language. The conquering Americans of that era would, anyway, ignore whatever opinion they may have had in the matter of medium of instruction in the public and private schools and in the matter of official languages to be used by the military government that would extract taxes from them.
The Americans, with nary a by-your-leave simply imposed, in the most unilateral and cruel means, the use of English upon Filipinos who would want an education or a job in their own country. As a matter of fact, those Filipinos upon whom English was unilaterally forced upon, were a virtually stateless people when they lost their own Primera República and unfortunately fell under the military yoke of American rule over these islands. What American Governor-General or Commisioner would bother to ask them in, say, a plebiscite, if they wanted English to be their language in lieu of Spanish and their principal native languages like Tagalog, Cebuano and Ilocano?
Aside from Modesto Reyes, the labor leader that published and edited the bi-monthly review ISAGANI in 1924, who questioned the right of the American neocolonizers “to erase Spanish and force upon them their English language”, there was another prominent Filipino personality, this time a woman educator in Librada Avelino and the founder of the Centro Escolar de Señoritas, who defied the American Director of “Education” in these Islands that ordered her school closed down because it continued using Spanish as its medium of instruction in almost all subjects.
There were, indeed, many other educators like Librada Avelino that defied the sectarian imposition of English upon their schools. Some of them were the President and body of eminent professors of the famous Liceo de Manila, headed by the reknowned botanist Dr. Leon María Guerrero and seconded by educators like Enrique Mendiola (after whom Calle Mendiola was called).
Then, there were the founders of the Colegio de Manila (Manila U., today) and the Instituto de Mujeres in the persons of Don Mariano Jhocson and Rosa Sevilla de Alvero.