Reflections I

A 5-part blog entry

Hello. This is my first time with a blog, so I thought I'd give a bit of a background first.

I'm a Fine Arts Student at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. We have this National Service Training Program here in the Philippines and I enrolled under the one I really wanted - the Literacy Training Service Program. We're required to make blog entries as reflections about our recent seminars and activities, so I guess that pretty much covers introductions.

It's currently Finals Week here in UP. And while I slave over my final plates I think a short break has been earned (despite being spent on less-taxing and draining academic requirements, but I digress).

My first entry will be about one of our earliest seminars, the State of Literacy in the Philippines.

In a nutshell, I can tell you that that morning started as a boring one. Sitting down in a large classroom, looking at figures and Powerpoint slides and fighting the urge to shut my eyes without anyone noticing (having your typical Chinese slits-for-eyes has its advantages), all while being lulled by the dull drone of the air-conditioner.

Something immediately snapped my attention back, though. It was the sound of my professor's voice, telling us about how, in the first year of America's education program for the Philippines (basically sending teachers to the Philippines) the Filipino students garnered scores that were at par with their American counterparts in Math and Science. Somehow, as a guy who one day wants to teach and mold minds, that little tidbit made me proud. And somehow it became a perfect example about how, under it all, we're all human, and if the colonialists had realized that centuries prior, at best all the racism-induced suffering the Filipinos went through wouldn't probably have happened, or at worst, would probably not have been so grave.

Our professor goes on about the then-inequity of literacy in the country and several American specialists going on and on about how the cultural diversity of the country made it near impossible to have a consistent literacy rate throughout the archipelago. I mean, yeah, you've got 7,107 islands and lots of different ethnicities, what do you expect, right?

Wrong.

Suddenly our professor is talking about how the specialists were approaching the entire thing the wrong way. You've got hundreds of ethnicities in one of the world's most diverse archipelagos. You can't give them all the same text book and use the same examples. It's nice to actually learn that once they spotted the flaw in their system there was actually action that followed. Passivity was out of the question. (Yes, that was just an indirect jab at the government.) And so the literacy rate steadily increased, and there's that feeling that creeps from your stomach, something akin to national pride.

So yes, that morning started out as an extremely boring one. But it ended with a hopeful note. The literacy rate of the Philippines continues to rise, and as a teacher-hopeful, that makes me both happy and proud. Education is given more attention now, and hopefully when I'm 55 and decide to finally apply for a teaching job, the state of literacy will be something to really be proud of.