Rizal always considered education as a medicine or something that could cure the

problems of Colonial Philippines. He believed in education that is free from

political and religious control. He asserted that reform can not be achieved if
there is no suitable education, a liberal one available to Filipinos. Rizal was not
happy at the University of Sto. Tomas compared with his student days at the
Ateneo Municipal. At least, he enjoyed the little freedom students were given in
expressing themselves. This he could not find at the Dominican university. In
1893, Rizals idea of education as an instrument of change has not diminished a
bit. In one of his letters to Alfredo Hidalgo, a nephew, Rizal stated: Life is very
serious thing and only those with intelligence and heart go through it worthily. In
the same letter, he also told his nephew that to live is to be among men and to be
among men is to struggle He concluded that on the battlefield man has no better
weapon than his intelligence. His leaving the UST to pursue his studies at the
Madrid Central University was in conformity with the ideas of Fr. Jose Burgos, one
of the three martyred priests of 1872. Fr. Burgos strongly advocated that Filipinos
should study abroad because overseas education was considered an essential
step to achieving reform. And this thinking he shared with his only brother,
Paciano Rizal. Why all these reactions? Was Rizal not over reacting? Was he
reasonable? Let us look into one of his works to find some answers. Specifically
his The Indolence of the Filipinos, an essay he wrote in 1890 which described the
education of the masses under the Spanish regime. Rizal said the education of the
Filipinos from birth until the grave is brutalizing, depressing, and anti-human.
During the same period, majority of student have grasped nothing more than
what the books say, not even what their professors understand of it. In other
words, Filipinos were not allowed to think. Students were subjected to the daily
preaching that lowers human dignity, gradually or brutally killing their self-
respectthat eternal, tenacious, persist effort to humble the native, to make him
accept the yoke and to reduce him to the level of an animal. In the same piece
Rizal talked of the situation in detail. He said, since childhood, they have learned
to act mechanically, without knowing the purpose, thanks to the exercise
imposed upon them very early in life to pray for whole hours in an unknown
language, of worshiping without understanding, of accepting beliefs without
questioning, of imposing upon themselves absurdities, while the protests of
reasons are repressed. This condition, he continued, made the Filipinos accept the
ideas that they belong to an inferior race and this assertion has been repeated to
the child and became engraved in his mind and finally seals and shapes all his
future actions. To ensure that this orientation retained in the childs mind, Rizal
observed that the child who tries to be anything else is charged of being vain and
presumptuous. The curate ridicules him with cruel sarcasm, his relatives look
upon him with fear, and strangers pity him greatly. There was no chance to go
forward, just follow the faceless crowd, was the order of the day. It is through this
scenario that we could better understand why Rizal was clamouring for a different
education, a new idea of teaching the Filipino youth. Rizal believed that even
modest education, no matter how rudimentary it might be, if it is the right
education for the people, the result would be enough to awaken their ideas of
perfection and progress and eventually, change would follow. This is the situation
how education was acquired during that period. Rizals idea of education was
therefore the most enlightened. His concept of education was felt as early as
when he was only 16 years old. In one of his poems, Education gives luster to the
Motherland, he dwelt on the excellent conception of education as a means of
instilling enchanting virtue and raising the country to the high level of immortality
and dazzling glory.