Defining the Filipino through Song
By Prof. Felipe de Leon, Jr.
If the Spaniards tried to convert the Filipino to their ways primarily through religion, the Americans did it through education.
The American military regime in the Philippines never underestimated the importance of education as a colonial tool. Although the Jones Act granted the Filipinos more autonomy and Filipinos were given government posts, the Department of Education was never entrusted to any Filipino. Americans always handed this department up to 1935. And when a Filipino took over under the Commonwealth, a new generations of brown Americans had already been produced. There was no longer any need for American overseas in this field because a captive generation had already come of age, thinking and acting like Americans.
This Americanization is most profound among the elite, having had the closest contacts with the colonizers. But this kind of transformation is more or less shared by almost all adult Filipinos who have gone through formal education both in public and private schools.
A subtle but most effective medium of colonial education was music. The seemingly innocent thrust into the psychic world of Filipino children through song helped much to produce an unconscious dislike of their own culture and a high preference for American culture.
Give Wings to Our Mind
A mark of a great people is seen in the loftiness of their ideas and their expressions. When our ideas inspire a people to move forward to greater things, then we would have accomplished the goal of the written word, or a moving image, or a piece of enchanting music.
Revisiting the Cartilla
The Katipunan Code of Conduct
by Emilio Jacinto
THE LIFE THAT IS NOT consecrated to a lofty and reasonable purpose is a tree without a shade, if not a poisonous weed.
To do good for personal gain and not for its own sake is not virtue.
It is rational to be charitable and love one's fellow creature, and to adjust one's conduct, acts and words to what is in itself reasonable.
