Pedagogic pedantry
or
Reflections from the
classroom and archive
The humility of the archive
I THRIVE IN archives and libraries. One time when I was leafing through old education magazines with a friend in Ateneoâs Rizal Library, I cracked a joke about archival research being like thrifting. The ukay-ukay thrifter, like the historian looking for documents, scans through stacks of old material to find one or two items of note. It is a tedious process. But both recognize that half the fun is the search, and both know that success demands patience.
Archival work is a humbling and grounding experience. It is a way of communing with people from a distant culture (the past, even of oneâs own country, is a different culture) and letting them speak in their own terms. Since your respondents are dead, you cannot talk back, so you have no option but to listen. Alone, either in the scorching rooms of the National Library or in your grandfatherâs old study, you think, you anticipate, you absorb. The process becomes a form of meditation, an externally aware practice of introspection.
Over the years, Iâve seen archives and libraries as sanctuaries for ethical as much as intellectual discovery. Since I started working at Kyoto Universityâs Center for Southeast Asian Studies earlier this year, Iâve tried to schedule weekly dates with either my beloved microfilm reader or the volumes of Filipiniana in our special collection. These dates have allowed me to learn a lot about my favorite topics: early twentieth-century Pinoy intellectuals, Pinoy Marxists, and the milieus that animated them.
The dates have also allowed me to look into my own ethical weaknesses. As a former college debater, I was used to shooting my mouth about any topic, even those I knew nothing about. Ironically, as Iâve done more research, my know-it-all tendencies have waned. After all, there is no better way to remind yourself how much you donât know and how much you will never know than by looking at stacks of old books you will never get to read. There is no better way to remind yourself how fleeting knowledge and certainty are than by reading old texts that no longer make sense.
The nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke famously remarked that a historian must âextinguish the self.â Ranke was not referring to suicide (although I have met suicidal academics), but the process of taking oneâs biases out of historical research. Many contemporary historians see this injunction as passĂ©, correctly noting that any act of interpretation is filtered through oneâs personality.
None of this, however, means we should stop grappling with our biases. Maybe historiansâand anyone seeking to discover provisional truths for that matterâshouldnât extinguish the self but wrestle with it, know it, and rework it the way sculptors form layers out of rocks. This process is perhaps what Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche meant when they referred to ethics as âaesthetic.â
When uninformed polemic informs everything from our politics to our personal relationships, quixotic quests for objectivity become radical. And while these quests may be less exciting than grand claim-making for un-grand times, the humility that informs them may inspire others. Take the example of Jesuit historian Fr. John N. Schumacher, who passed away last May.
Father Jack wrote his works on nineteenth-century Filipino nationalism roughly at the same time radical nationalist historians from UP like Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato Constantino were working on similar topics. His works were always restrained, cerebral, and soberâbereft of the agit-prop value of Agoncilloâs or Constantinoâs tomes. While the Diliman historians looked at the drama of the Philippine revolution as a working-class, militant struggle, the American Jesuit priest from the âclerico-fascistâ university in Loyola never romanticized, because, as his footnotes show, he spent too much time crawling through stacks of documents in Madrid (Disclosure: I am an Ateneo historian). Many activists from the â70s claim Agoncillo and Constantino fomented the militancy of an entire generation, while Schumacher merely wrote facts. But who was correct?
As historians do more research on the Philippine revolution, we are starting to discover that the old Jesuit was more accurate than the radical polemicists (see, for instance, the introduction of Michael Cullinaneâs new book Arenas of Conspiracy). Perhaps what prevented many in my profession from seeing this was the modesty of Schumacherâs claims: He never tried to define the essence of Filipino identity (although he was a Filipino citizen), nor did he claim to have the political blueprint for a radical future. He simply wrote what he saw.
I never had Schumacherâs modesty. As a writer trained in the age of cultural theory, Iâve made grand claims of my own, regretting some and relentlessly defending others. But I drag myself back to the archive when Iâm full of myself. The dust may sometimes give me allergic attacks, but it is worth the rewards of knowledge and humility.
Another humble and rigorous historian in the mold of Schumacher, Resil Mojares, reminds us that the word âarchiveâ derives from the same word as âarchonââthe ruler who watched over Greek city states. Archives watch over our political and cultural life by reminding us of past lessons. What I learned, however, is that archives and written texts also allow us to watch over ourselves.
The simple wonders of dusty paper.
GMA News, June 19, 2014
Dear Graduates,
the real world is fake
I SAID GOODBYE to my graduating students today. The farewell was visceral. Five years ago, I was in their shoes, excited about starting a career while anxious about leaving behind the comforts of university: Fifteen units, org time, college romance, perennial grade consciousness, blockmates, etc.
Graduation, as the clichĂ© goes, is when you begin the hard transition into âthe real worldââa concept I never really understood. In my mind, only MTV has defined this world adequately, fleshing it out in all its trashy grandiosity for twenty-six seasons. In that case, reality was actually fake, revealing the inherent flimsiness of the concept.
The idea of a post-graduation real world is offensive to academics. If the real world lies outside university halls, what do teachers do? Play? Act? Dissimulate?
The life of the mind may at times be solitary, and it may lead to bouts of depression, but itâs as real, if not more real, than Taylorized work. And when lived to the fullest, this life may even alter reality.
Common-sense reality refers to a specific lifestyle, rendered normal by a society that prices everything. The real world, especially for the upwardly mobile/wealthily immobile Atenistas I teach, is a nine-to-five job in a big corporation. This is a valid reality, and, though leftist, I am not crass enough to issue a blanket condemnation of this choice. But we should not conflate the choice of a moneymaking lifestyle with reality. For a lifestyle choice is precisely that: a choice, an option within an array of plural realities, each one of them wellsprings of lived complexity.
Marxâa false prophet of global redemption but a trenchant analyst of eventsâargued that work under capitalism is alienating. No matter how much your boss tells you to feel ownership for your brand, you will probably never own âyourâ brand, let alone the company. Moreover, seeking the bottom line every day of the week constitutes a kind of tunnel vision where profit precedes creativity and love. This is not to trivialize the need for material stability, only to point out that conventional notions of reality can be as fleeting as university life.
My heroes in academia have all experienced realities that demand real responses. Patricio âJojoâ Abinales continues to confront death in Muslim Mindanaoâa place subjected to systematic violence by the Philippine government. Walden Bello rendered real the rapaciousness of the Marcos regime when he obtained classified documents from the World Bank. My mother Sylvia Estrada-Claudio comes home depressed because of what she witnesses as a feminist researcher: systematic rape, domestic violence, state denial of reproductive rights. All three are fiercely independent critics who tear down conventional wisdom better than moralizing op-ed rock stars on popular broadsheets. But, more importantly, they are real.
Two years ago, I began conducting doctoral research in Hacienda Luisita. I befriended farmers feeding families with wages of P200 a day. Others had witnessed the horror of the Hacienda Luisita massacre. I shared their grief. When I wept after my first visit, I felt closer to other socially engaged academics. To me, scholarship, when done right, involves sharing experiences like these to students.
The liberal arts university provides students opportunities to dream big and to pose grand questions. Unfortunately, the scale of a liberal arts education reinforces the notion that teachers place their studentsâ heads in the clouds. I hope I am guilty of this accusation.
If I got my students to think about a life outside their careers, if I was able to show them a different world and introduce them to people, places and ideas they would not have encountered otherwise, I would have achieved my goal as an educator. Iâve never wanted to force a reality on my students; I just wanted to show them differing ones: there are start-up companies, but there are also labor unions; there are flyovers that take people to work, but there also are poor people who sleep under them; there are women heroes who break the corporate glass ceiling, but there are also those who serve as volunteers in community health centers.
Dreaming can be real when you dream in solidarity with others, especially those who suffer.
I know that after graduation, many of my students will be caught in their individual realities, and the world of my classroom will likely recede into fantasy. But I hope some of them visit me as I grow up and grow old in my cubicle. When they do, maybe we can dream together anew.
Young Star, The Philippine Star, March 2, 2012
Why you should take
a liberal arts course
MY TITLE IS phrased positively, but it could have easily been the negative: âWhy you shouldnât take a business course.â The liberal arts and commerce, after all, tend to be pitted against each other, with the former implying poverty and the latter wealth (those who donât want to sound greedy euphemize and say âstabilityâ). I am, however, not asking you to be poor. I am only asking you to make college a humanizing experience.
I teach politics and history at Ateneo de Manila, and I usually crack a borderline offensive joke when a student tells me his/her course is BS Management: âOh, youâre taking BS College.â BS College because Management is the course everyone in college takesâthe one parents expect their kids to sign up for by default. Since studying business is becoming the norm for many students, the college experience now entails learning accounting, operations management, and âleadership.â It used to be reading Shakespeare. Or Rizal.
College is not vocational school. Contrary to the common assumption, the primary goal of institutions of higher learning is not the imparting of work-related skills. If you are going to a large college or university, consider yourself lucky, because you will be spending the next three to five years in a place where scholars examine multiple aspects of human life: from how we think, how we tell stories, to how we organize ourselves in political communities. Make the most of this situation. Donât throw it away by only learning how to work. Most of the skills youâll need for your job, youâll get on the job anyway. Employers look for employees they can teach, not employees who already know everything.
If you really want to become a manager, you have the rest of your life to crunch numbers and balance spreadsheets. For now, spend your youth devouring literature, watching movies, and writing amateur love poems that will later make you cringe when life has made you cynical.
When else, except college, will you be allowed to consume so much culture? And when else will you be rewarded for it? Do you think your boss from your prospective soap company will give you an A for writing eloquently about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? He wonât, but a film teacher might.
College carves out a space for you to figure out what kind of adult you want to become, before the tunnel vision of careeristic thinking sets in. An operations management class, which tells you the optimal way to pack merchandise into a box, wonât tell you the optimal way to treat others. For that, you need to read Aristotle.
All well and good, you say, but how does one get a stable job with a degree in English or Philosophy? Simple: One gets high grades. An English major who graduated magna cum laude is more competitive than the nth Management graduate with a mediocre transcript. Besides, contemporary economies are driven more by creativity than technical skill. I have friends who read a lot of fiction, write elegant prose, and get paid by major advertising companies.
As countries advance economically, their leaders begin to realize that development is premised on having literate, cosmopolitan, and urbane citizens. Both Singapore and Hong Kong, for instance, are investing in liberal arts universities in the hopes of producing the next Steve Jobsâan entrepreneur with the mind and the disposition of an artist. In case I havenât been clear, there is money to be made in the liberal arts.
It is true, however, that you take a risk with a liberal arts education. A commerce education is, indeed, more likely to land you a stable nine-to-five job, while a liberal arts course may turn you into a novelist, a poet, or professional pedant. Heaven forbid, you might even end up with a PhD and become an academic.
But what is wrong with low-paying jobs? Many of the jobs above donât pay much, but they give you time. And since all that we do is grafted onto time, time is life. IMHO, life is more important than money.
Besides, a country can become a sad place if its most brilliant minds prioritize profit. In the 1990s and 2000s, most of the top graduates of the American Ivy League went to big Wall Street banks, and it was these geniuses who caused the financial crash of 2008. The world would have been better off if they had done something else.
Dear High School Senior, I know most of your friends are taking the easy way out. I know most of them are ready to take BS College and join the herd. But if you think youâre special, you should take a risk with the liberal arts. It might turn out to be a better investment.
Young Star, The Philippine Star, March 15, 2013
I wish you a grim New Year
IâVE HAD A three-year tradition with two of my closest friends. Every Christmas day we get our tarot readings to divine our fates for the New Year. If youâve had a reading, you know that the reader asks you to think of an existential question while you shuffle the cards (just think, donât say).
The questions I inevitably ask concern the frustrations of the previous yearâa career-related question for when my academic writing slows down and the juicier romantic question for when dating in the god-foresaken city deteriorates even further.
The questions in a tarot card reading are existential because they impinge on oneâs happiness. This isnât the fleeting happiness created by the entries in oneâs top ten pop culture list, or the endorphin-induced happiness of exercise. The band HaimâMichael Jackson pop syncopation reborn through a band of long-haired sistersâand vigorous high intensity interval workouts gave me much pleasure in 2013. But as much as the track âIf I Could Change your Min...