Culture education

ONE REASON culture is covered with too many misconceptions is that it is not fully integrated into our basic education curriculum. For obvious reasons, our present curriculum is focused on mastery of English, Science and Math.
When you speak of culture, it is lumped into a strange creature called Hekasi, which is Heograpiya [Geography],
Kasaysayan [History] and Sibika [Civics] all rolled into one. Culture is often associated with the arts, which in practical terms means drawing, music or dancing, rather than teaching children that culture is that which defines who we are and who we want to be. Perhaps we should teach children that culture shows us the nation and people we fail to be.

The National Commission for Culture and the Arts has been working on a Philippine Cultural Education Plan (PCEP) for the past five years, and when I took this as an area of concern, I was shown a cultural index in three volumes, one of them as thick as a phone directory. While I browsed through the bibliography and marveled at its content and structure as an academic, I asked myself if this would be useful to a mat weaver in Tawi-Tawi province or a "bulul" [wooden statue of native deity] carver in the Cordilleras. With some popularization, perhaps the PCEP could be implemented by the Department of Education.

The task is simple. In the six years that children are in grade school, what 10 pieces of art should they know by sight? What 10 books should they read aside from Jose Rizal's "Noli Me Tangere" and "El Filibusterismo"? What 10 tunes should they be able to sing aside from the National Anthem and "Ama Namin"? What dance movements should they learn aside from "ocho-ocho"? These seem to be basic inputs that will impart something common to all students throughout the archipelago and form a body of knowledge that will make them know and appreciate what it is to be Filipino.

I wouldn't be surprised if pre-school children today can recognize Ronald McDonald, the Jollibee mascot and Wendy's freckled mascot on sight but not know Fernando Amorsolo or Atang de la Rama were. Perhaps they know more about Mother Goose and Harry Potter than Lam-ang or Mariang Makiling. Drawing up a list of cultural icons is potentially contentious, but we have to start somewhere.

When we first presented the PCEP to a receptive group at the education department's Teachers Education Council, we insisted that culture should not be isolated in Hekasi. Culture should be taught across disciplines. When we teach students grammar, why do we allow the teachers to make clumsy examples of elementary sentences when we have a gold mine from the prose and poetry of Nick Joaquin, Amado Hernandez, Virgilio Almario and our other National Artists for Literature? When we teach children color, we can get examples from the works of Amorsolo and Jose Joya. When we teach geometric shapes, we can ask students to seek these out in the abstract works of Hernando Ocampo and Arturo Luz. Only when culture is taught across disciplines will people see culture in their everyday lives.

Culture can provide Filipinos with a context in which to see themselves. Culture will give us roots, to balance an education that presently gives us wings to soar and enables us to work abroad. We recently heard that Ballet Philippines lost their senior dancers to a headhunting expedition from Hong Kong Disneyland. While we understand that we cannot match the salaries being offered in Hong Kong, one should ask what happens to the talent honed over years of hard work and training. Trained for classical ballet, our dancers will not even be recognized as Filipinos because they will be inside a Mickey Mouse or Daisy Duck costume, like a fast-food mascot.

A generation before ours, Filipinos who went abroad to seek greener pastures aimed to make their bundle and come home to enjoy the fruits of their labor and sacrifice. What I find distressing these days is that people who plan to work overseas have little or no intention of returning. Now that is real brain drain.

It is also distressing that Nick Joaquin 50 years ago was quoted as saying, "There is so much stupidity in this country we should export it." When you look at the country today, you realize that we are exporting our best and brightest. Now that is something to worry about. When our best ballet dancers leave a vocation and the chance to perform "Swan Lake" in the Cultural Center of the Philippines to become a dancing teacup in Hong Kong Disneyland, that is terrible indeed.

The good news is that a younger generation of dancers has moved up in Ballet Philippines to wear the shoes of the senior dancers who we hope will be in Disneyland only temporarily. When the headhunters from Hong Kong made another raiding expedition, the younger ones did not bite. Their reason: "We want to dance." This is the difference when people have roots rather than wings. Maybe these young people have both wings and roots.

Furthermore, culture provides an appreciation for heritage and the environment. We leave heritage to Bambi Harper and Toti Villalon and take an example of culture and environment. Weep when you visit those imposing solid narra statues outside Barrio Fiesta Baguio. A sign proudly says, "This statue was made from a 200-year-old tree." Culture should teach us to care for the environment and see the irony of the concrete pine tree atop Session Road in Baguio City. The day that we have a live tree there in place of the concrete symbol of the City of Pines is the day when culture has taught us to see the difference between what is real and what is not.

Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu