Miseducated by Constantino and Agoncillo 1

Miseducated by Constantino
By: John Nery - @jnery_newsstandPhilippine Daily Inquirer / 12:36 AM October 13, 2015
If Teodoro Agoncillo was the Moses of the class-conflict theory of the Philippine Revolution, the historian
Renato Constantino was its Joshua—he led their followers into the promised land. Since the late 1960s,
the rich-versus-poor theory has become mainstream fare, even conventional wisdom; despite the efforts
of the director and the cast of “Heneral Luna” to add layers of nuance to their interpretation of history, for
instance, the movie’s narrative momentum leads easily to a confirmation of the Agoncillo-Constantino
thesis. It is the frame that fits most conveniently.
If Teodoro Agoncillo was the Moses of the class-conflict theory of the Philippine Revolution, the historian
Renato Constantino was its Joshua—he led their followers into the promised land. Since the late 1960s,
the rich-versus-poor theory has become mainstream fare, even conventional wisdom; despite the efforts
of the director and the cast of “Heneral Luna” to add layers of nuance to their interpretation of history, for
instance, the movie’s narrative momentum leads easily to a confirmation of the Agoncillo-Constantino
thesis. It is the frame that fits most conveniently.
To Agoncillo’s pioneering work, Constantino added structure and consistency; unfortunately for the
Philippine revolutionary experience, it was the structure and consistency of a Marxist ideology. In
groundbreaking, icon-shattering lectures and essays such as “Veneration without Understanding” and
“The Miseducation of the Filipino,” and in forceful textbook-length arguments like “A Past Revisited,”
Constantino advocated, in the words of his most perceptive critic, “the importance of the correct
understanding of the Filipino past in order to have insight into the problems of the present.” The scholar
John Schumacher, SJ, summed up the historian’s driving impulse: “[H]e has expounded on the pernicious
role that the official view of the Filipino past inculcated by colonial historiography and the American
educational system has had in disfiguring in the minds of Filipinos the true story of their past.”
It is a profound irony, then, that Constantino sought to recover that “true story” using a Marxist framework,
which the revolutionaries themselves did not use and which the revolutionary experience disproved.
I admire Constantino’s intellectual generosity; he played a key role in the publication of documents or
publications that undermined his own research, such as John R. M. Taylor’s “The Philippine Insurrection
against the United States” and Jonathan Fast and Jim Richardson’s “Roots of Dependency: Political and
Economic Revolution in 19th-Century Philippines.” His “The Miseducation of the Filipino” crystallized a
generation’s dissatisfaction with the pro-American cast of the educational system, and his “Veneration
without Understanding” was a courageous attempt to demote Jose Rizal from the nation’s hall of heroes.
But it was a misleading attack, because, as I tried to prove in this space, it was based on a selective
misreading. In one column (“Renato Constantino’s false choices”), I focused on the historian’s use of a
“rhetoric of false dichotomies,” which allowed him to understand Rizal not only as insufficiently
nationalistic but even as incompletely Filipino. In another column (“Falling for the American trap”), I
zeroed in on what I called Constantino’s “argument from Americanization,” which ironically leads the
historian to consider Rizal precisely as the American colonial masters wished (not as Rizal was in fact,
and as perceived by the Katipuneros and the revolutionaries themselves).
To quote Schumacher again, this time in his review of Floro Quibuyen’s “A Nation Aborted”—“[The
author’s] main target is the current university textbooks represented by Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato
Constantino. They and their followers, such as Vivencio Jose in his biography of Antonio Luna, and Claro
M. Recto outside the university sphere, and lesser figures, have propagated the dichotomy between the
‘Reform Movement’ and the ‘Revolution.’ This dichotomy, oft-repeated but oft-refuted … by real primary
research, persists nonetheless. The roots of that dichotomous approach, which Quibuyen terms, using
Gramsci’s terminology, ‘vulgar Marxism’ (in the case of Agoncillo, we might better say ‘vulgar pseudo-
Marxism,’ found more in terminology than consistent ideology), he finds, ironically but correctly, in the
Spanish antifriar journalist, Wenceslao E. Retana, and the pro-American, Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera.
Each for their own reasons wished to present Rizal as a reformist, who never countenanced armed
revolution.”
 Miseducated by Constantino and Agoncillo 2

In other words, Constantino’s Marxist analysis of Rizal leads to the same conclusion as Retana’s pro-
Spanish and Pardo de Tavera’s pro-American interpretation.
Even more damaging, Constantino’s framework offers a simplistic view of the character of the revolution
itself. A third excerpt from Schumacher, from a third journal article, surveys the missing:
“A third point of importance is the role of classes in the Revolution and the war against the Americans.
That a large majority of the wealthy and educated classes opposed the Revolution when it took place,
that various groups or classes tried to turn it in different directions for their own ends, that most of the
more affluent and educated submitted to the Americans more or less willingly, some immediately, some
only much later, that there was a determined and long-lasting resistance on the part of some sectors of
the masses—all this is fairly clear. What is needed is to determine why some acted ‘according to their
class interests’ and others did not, and how many; to clarify the relationships between ilustrados and
wealthy, between Manila elite and provincial elite, the differences between the Tagalog provinces, or all of
Luzon, and the rest of the country, both as to leadership of the Revolution and participation of the
masses. These and other largely unexplored areas of the story of the Revolution will not be answered by
historical theories proceeding from a determinism of economic classes.”
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Miseducated by Agoncillo
By: John Nery - @jnery_newsstandPhilippine Daily Inquirer / 12:18 AM October 06, 2015
THE MOST influential Filipino historian of the 20th century was the formidable Teodoro Agoncillo, who
wrote “The Revolt of the Masses” and changed our view of history. Not all of his influence, however, was
salutary or, in truth, properly historiographical. He wrote some bad history.
As the provocative success of the historical epic “Heneral Luna” should prove, his driving idea that class
conflict defined the Philippine revolution and explains its ultimate failure has come to be so dominant, so
second-nature to any discussion of Philippine history, that it has even come to wrap one historical figure
he did not deem heroic in the one-size-fits-all mantle of class-conscious heroism.
I mean Antonio Luna, of course. In the course of a series of conversations with Ambeth Ocampo, which
Ambeth has been kind enough to recall in these pages, Agoncillo once waxed eloquent against Luna’s
betrayal of the first phase of the revolution (“Luna not only did not join the Revolution of 1896, he was a
traitor!”) before reaching a thundering conclusion: “As a matter of fact, I do not consider Luna a hero. How
did he become a hero? He never won any battle, papaano mo sasabihing hero iyan [how can you say
that’s a hero]?”
Agoncillo may have been carried away by emotion; by his severe standard, the protagonist of his own
“Revolt of the Masses,” subtitled “The Story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan,” would be no hero either. But
as the revolutionary general Jose Alejandrino testified in his memoirs, “The Price of Freedom,” Luna was
truly the revolution’s best general even though he never won a battle. He organized the Army, trained its
soldiers, imposed discipline in the ranks, prepared a blueprint for military action, built high-quality
defenses, blunted American offensives; he himself often took to the field.
But Agoncillo’s notion of Luna as unworthy of being called a hero has been overrun by the historian’s
central idea that the class struggle undermined the revolution. Because Luna, in the movie, utters such
either-or lines as “Negosyo o kalayaan? Bayan o sarili, pumili ka!” (Business or freedom? Country or self,
choose!), and because his confrontations with those who sought to negotiate with the Americans were
staged so dramatically, the narrative momentum seems to drive Agoncillo’s larger point home.
(Because the writer-director-editor-musical-scorer Jerrold Tarog is an artist of the first rank, he did not
create a caricature of Luna, or indeed of any of the major characters. In Luna’s case, the script shows his
idealized self-image; for instance, at one point he describes himself as a mere indio, but is gently but
firmly reminded by his lover Isabel that in fact he was from a wealthy family himself, part of the ruling
class. But it’s a movie. The logic of images trumps the logic of words.)
 Miseducated by Constantino and Agoncillo 3

Thus was Luna, whom Agoncillo did not include in his pantheon of heroes, rediscovered as a hero by a
new generation of Filipinos; in the movie, he embodied Agoncillo’s dominant idea of class struggle.
When “The Revolt of the Masses” was finally published in 1956, a scorching review written by the chair of
the University of the Philippines Department of History, Nicolas Zafra, and four female scholars from the
department (later to make a name for themselves), appeared in print; an expanded version ran in the
scholarly journal Philippine Studies.
The Zafra review is not unproblematic, but I will quote from it to show the kind of critical reception that met
the book—and to suggest that its warnings about Agoncillo’s lack of scientific rigor in using the Marxist
lens of class struggle were swept away by the wave of nationalism that shook the country in the 1960s
and 1970s.
“One feature of the book that the reader cannot fail to notice is the author’s obsession with the idea of
class conflict. He constantly harps on the theme that there was a sharp clash of interests between what
he calls the ‘masses’ and the ‘middle class.’ For one thing, he gives the reader the impression that the
Katipunan revolt was exclusively ‘the revolt of the masses’; that the ‘middle class’ were interested mainly
in the things that would redound to their material welfare; that not only were they unsympathetic with the
needs and aspirations of the ‘masses’ but they ‘betrayed’ the cause of the Katipunan as well.
“It is regrettable to say that the author’s presentation of this aspect of his subject is unsatisfactory,
unconvincing, unscholarly. In the first place, there is much confusion in the author’s mind as regards his
categories. What he calls the ‘masses’ for example can be interpreted in many ways…. What the author’s
criterion is by which a person may be identified with the ‘masses’ is obviously not at all clear…. The
confusion becomes worse confounded when he speaks of the ‘middle class’….
“In his efforts to underline his idea that the Revolution was a ‘class conflict,’ a ‘class struggle,’ the author
has, wittingly or unwittingly, drawn a distorted picture of the character of The Philippine Revolution.”
And this is not to speak of Agoncillo’s failure, in painting his portrait of Bonifacio, to include Hermenegildo
Cruz’s “Kartilyang Makabayan” or Santiago Alvarez’s memoirs; to verify the recollection of someone who
was not at the first uprising, Pio Valenzuela; or, irony of ironies, to question his dependence on Emilio
Aguinaldo’s version of events.
The scholarship on the demographic composition of the Katipunan and the Philippine Revolution has
progressed well beyond Agoncillo’s limited framework. Jim Richardson’s “The Light of Liberty” is, in my
view, the most important book of our time, but there are other scholars, other studies. Time to rethink
Agoncillo’s outsize influence.
Read more: https://opinion.inquirer.net/89147/miseducated-by-agoncillo#ixzz72PVIGUFO
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