REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES

BICOL UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF EDUCATION

STUDENT : REMENDADO, NATHANIEL O.

COURSE : BSED-Social Studies
PROFESSOR : PROF. LYRA RUTH P. NASAYAO, MAEd
TERM : 1st Semester, AY 2019-2010
DATE :

“Benedicite!: St. Agnes’ Academy, 100 Years of Grace in the story of Five
Centuries of Christianity.”
Intellectual activity and academic development is one of the foundational
institution of the civilized world. It is the core and home of the civilized
environment an ecology of the human world. Schools, universities, and even
classrooms play a vital role to the space and place of the human world. They
give breath and reason, life and thought—literally—to the core of the human
world and to human life. The academic and intellectual exercises of the human
race show the civilized advancement of the species in the context of human life
in the backdrop of time and circumstance. The advancement of human life and
academe is only an apparent shower of the context of human life through the
evolution of our collective advancement into the future. Academic development is
the foundation of the civilized world, and its consequence and processes is that
which is essential to the core of the human life. That which grows in a community
is the growth of the human spirit, and that spirit is made new by the growth of the
human intellect. The growth of the human race, in its permanent and personal
level is wholly part and dependent on the core of the human mind.
Human development, incumbent on the development of the human mind,
is manifest on the educational institutions and academic hotspots present in our
time and space. The changes of the human mind is also apparent in the changes
of the human landscape. The complexities of the human person is also apparent
in the translations of physical places. When man learns to read, he truly writes a
book, and when man truly wants to grow, he builds a school. Thus, schools are
the clear and apparent manifestations of mankind’s desire to grow.
These desire to grow can only be seen through the pertinent lenses of the
evolution of intellect. The physical manifestations of these desires is that which is
the exemplar of the human race, and thus, they are seen through our physical
architecture and spatial actions.
St. Agnes’ Academy, the Benedictine Mission of Albay, is the
manifestation of that growth. Created by the time of change and by the
circumstance of society, St. Agnes’ Academy is a hotbed of intellectual
development and excellent. Its halls have become the core of the Albay District’s
intellectual, Catholic growth and have touched the hearts of the poor through
both direct outreach and scholarly endeavours. The landscape has changed over
time, and truly history has blessed its greatness. From being a humble school for
girls in the 1910s, catering to daughters of farmers, to a full grown mission center
in the 1920s, to a hotbed of battling for the democracy of the Republic in the
1940s, St. Agnes’ Academy truly has become the core and stalwart—a witness
and martyr to the waves of history and the march of progress. Her façade,
archaic Germanic-Colonial Post-Modernist, has seen the greatness and
darkness of Albay. It has been bombed and rebuilt after the war, faced three
volcanic eruption since rebirth and have seen three Philippine Republics grow
and die.
The school has been a hotbed of human development and growth. Its
history has been changed by the people who taught and learned therein. And
history has been that which has touched her cores—such as the development of
the landscape in the past centuries. The growth of its girth and the reconstruction
after the war only shows the desire of the Diocese and of the people in
continuing the story of human life.
St. Agnes’ Academy, has been blessed with time and the hands that have
contributed to its growth. These hands have been shaped by and shaped the
school in the narrative of its grand existence. She has been that stalwart not just
of intellect but history, an identity touched but not cowed by time or circumstance.