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CORPUZ, Daphne

I – B Landscape Architecture

English 13 THX7

Reading Response Essay (723)

7 February 2020

Reading as a Way to Learning: A Contrast of the Past and the Present

The mistakes and hardships of the past often make the present and the future either better

or worse. In the Philippines, there had been conquerors who desired to take away the country

from its citizens, and such desire required them to build “friendships” and a good reputation to

make a disguise and to cover up the main purpose of being in the country. A concrete example of

this situation happened during the reign of the Americans in the Philippines, where they used

education in order to pacify and subdue the Filipinos.

In Renato Constantino’s writing, I can infer that the purpose of education in the past was

only to pacify the Filipinos and to shift their love from their culture, to the culture of the

Americans. According to the reading, one of the media used during the American regime, where

public schools were being promoted, was textbooks. Quoting directly from Constantino’s

writing, he said, “With American textbooks, Filipinos started learning not only a new language

but also a new way of life, alien to their traditions and yet a caricature of their model”

(Constantino 24).
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Indeed, textbooks were and are still able to shape our minds – to make us choose what to

love, what to abhor, what to maintain and not to maintain. Going back to my elementary days,

we used to read only English books to test our reading comprehension, obviously in English, but

not in Filipino, which is our mother tongue. In effect, I found it challenging to comprehend both

Filipino and English books, especially when there are unfamiliar words. I also thought that I

should learn English first, in order to understand Filipino, but not the other way around. The

mode of speaking was also in English, except for Araling Panlipunan – which molded our minds

to lean more towards the Americans because they saved us from the savage rule of the Spaniards

– and Filipino subjects. Consequently, I found it difficult to express myself and explain my point

using purely the Filipino or the English language.

However, in the present, there is circulating news, printed and online, that tells of a new

method to literacy in the country. One of the news says that because of this new approach, there

had been a shift in literacy among 1.8 million young students. Polinar, a principal of San Pascual

Elementary School in Ubay, said that teaching the students in their mother tongue had a

significant difference compared to teaching in Filipino and English. She also let them converse

using their mother tongue to express themselves without barriers in communication. Polinar is

also very particular in reading, which she said to be the foundation of learning. For her, without

reading and comprehension, a student cannot learn at all. Another study showed that there is a

14-percent increase in the students’ performance on reading comprehension when this approach

was utilized (A New Approach to Literacy in the Philippines).

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Although the Philippines had to go through all of the attempts of the Americans to take

away our nationalism and identity through public education as their disguise, slowly, our eyes

are being opened to prioritizing our mainland language. It took many years of suffering for the

students and the nationalistic teachers; it took our ancestors and heroes to be being framed as

villains, but the more important thing to see here is that these misconceptions and exepriences

from the past are now the ones revealing the necessity of patronizing and reading using our

native language. Through reading and patronizing our mother tongue, we are already taking a

step to learning – learning not only our language, but also learning to appreciate our country and

its citizens; learning to see it as something that we should take care of; learning to love it the way

it should be loved; and finally, learning to put our people first. It is our own, a land that is

supposed to witness our growth as Filipino people, and not as anyone else.

References:

“A New Approach to Literacy in the Philippines.” Education Development Center, 31 July 2018,

www.edc.org/new-approach-literacy-philippines.

Constantino, R. “The Mis-Education of the Filipino”, 24, 1959.