(Published in ENRICH magazine, 2022)
EDUCATION IS NOT MERELY the acquisition of rote knowledge. Neither is it a tool for ruthless political or material gain. At its loftiest, education is an arsenal of ideas -- and ideals -- wielded by informed citizens that must advance freedom, democracy and the liberal values girding them.
It presupposes critical thinking, moral values and a capacity for action. An educated person realizes his hard-won knowledge must ultimately be used for the good of society. He knows he must do something that keeps his country a haven for freedom and democracy.
All these words are majestic concepts. They have to be. Patriotic Filipinos have died for these ideals throughout our tumultuous history.
“Ignorance is servitude, because as a man thinks, so he is; a man who does not think for himself and allowed himself to be guided by the thought of another is like the beast led by a halter," admonished our National Hero, Dr. Jose Rizal.
He believed freedom from ignorance can be had through education. His dream was to see a class of educated Filipinos lead his country in its fight for political reforms and equal human rights.
"Without education and liberty, which are the soil and the sun of man, no reform is possible, no measure can give the result desired," declared Rizal.
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| Filipino ilustrados in Madrid, Spain, 1890 |
Rise of the Ilustrado
In Rizal's time, the class of intellectual Filipinos were the "Ilustrados". "The enlightened ones" or "the erudite" launched the Propaganda Movement in 1872. Written words, both scathing and uplifting such as those published in “La Solidaridad”, were the Ilustrados’ chosen weapon in their fight against Spanish tyranny.
The Ilustrados of the 19th century consisted of well-educated young men from the elite or landholding class of native Filipinos ("Indios") and "mestizos" such as Rizal, and were roused to action by the liberal ideals of the Age of Enlightenment during their studies in Europe.
Among the demands made by the Ilustrados was for Spain to establish an educational system in Las Islas Filipinas independent of the rapacious Spanish friars or “frailes”. The Ilustrados demanded Spain grant Indios basic human rights, which would accrue once their Motherland was a Spanish province with representation in the Spanish Cortes.
"There can be no tyrants where there are no slaves," asserted Rizal.
While ultimately futile, the Propaganda Movement inspired the founding of the Kataastaasan, Kagalanggalangang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan in 1892 by warrior-patriots under Andres Bonifacio, an ardent devotee of Rizal. Revolution followed in 1896 and independence from Spain in 1898.
“A nation need not be the colony of a foreign power; it can be the colony of its own leaders.”
Salvador de Madariaga, Spanish writer and historian
The New Ilustrados
The Ilustrados were an intelligentsia. They were an educated class of intellectuals and university-educated men regarded as the country's vanguard in political, artistic and social thought.
Like Rizal, a number of Ilustrados were scholars, academics, journalists, literary writers, scientists, artists and teachers. More broadly, an intelligentsia consists of the educated and intellectual people in a society or country. Our intelligentsia today also comprises young adults whose intellect is being honed by their exposure to the immense amounts of truths on the internet.
The fight against Spanish tyranny in the late 19th century was ignited by the first Filipino intelligentsia. Today’s young Filipino intelligentsia -- which I call the “New Ilustrados” -- also has to confront grave social challenges but a revolution against imperialism is not one of them. They face a new antagonist.
“A nation need not be the colony of a foreign power; it can be the colony of its own leaders”, noted the late Spanish writer and historian, Salvador de Madariaga, at his Jose Rizal Lecture in Manila in the 1960s. De Madariaga was one of the principal authors of the Oxford Manifesto on liberalism that details the basic political principles of the international Liberal movement.
The imminent danger facing this country stems from leaders wedded to ambitions at odds with the noble aim of seeking always the common good. In Roman Catholic social teaching, acting in the common good means respecting the rights and responsibilities of all and sundry.
This is not the case among segments of this country’s political elite that covet absolute power and brook no dissent in their quest for personal empire.
Endemic poverty, stubborn income inequality, the devastation wrought by climate change and social upheavals in Philippine society are some of the more intractable challenge the New Ilustrados must confront.
But where is this young Filipino intelligentsia?
Does this collection of gifted intellectuals and knowledge workers exist as a distinct level of Filipino society? Is it at the forefront of intellectual thought in science, the arts, culture, technology, the academe and politics?
Or must we hunt for these beings with the intense zeal of astronomers searching for extraterrestrial intelligence? Do they gather in secret online chat rooms for fear of persecution by the jaded masses, there to revel in their shared knowledge among others of their kind?
Are the New Ilustrados the richly educated? The religious orders steeped in arcane learning? Are they civil society? Or, were I a game show contestant, is the answer letter D, or “All of the above”?
Are they the faceless intellectuals venting their anger at the rigmarole called Philippine politics and its endemic corruption while beseeching God to “deliver us from evil”? Is the Filipino intelligentsia the imperceptible academia engrossed in scholarly pursuits while banishing all else?
Do they write for the respected daily newspapers and media that fiercely uphold the holy tenets of responsible journalism against unhinged online bloggers and vloggers?
And who are the leading lights of this invisible stratum of society? The Ilustrados had Rizal, Marcelo del Pilar and Graciano Lopez Jaena. Who speaks for the Young Ilustrados of today?
Who are the Young Ilustrados thinkers? And where can one read about their multitude of opinions, and of the invigorating clash of ideas that mark an intelligentsia? Who are these people?
Without an intelligentsia, who is there to speak out with authority on the complex issues that bedevil the Filipino? Who will wield the intelligentsia’s power of using knowledge to goad governments and corporations into positive action for the common good?
In this Information Age, why are Filipinos who know more afraid to show society they know more? Is knowledge still a Scarlet Letter?
Yes, a Filipino intelligentsia does exist, but nothing much has been heard of or from it. Perhaps it’s because intellectuals prefer to work muted in the background, as if they were merely the neurons giving life to that most vital of organs we call the human brain.
Silence, however, is not always golden. There is a ringing truth to this centuries-old comment by the English philosopher Herbert Spencer: “The great aim of education is not knowledge but action”.
The Filipino intelligentsia must take action to change this country for the better by using its vast knowledge to make sense of the world around us. It must proudly announce its existence as a force-in-being.
It must assert itself as the intellect of this nation against the strident voices of sock puppet internet trolls, bombastic amateurs, rabble-rousers and those bent on kleptocracy. Where is the Filipino intelligentsia?
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| Dr. Jose Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar and Mariano Ponce |
Resetting Democracy
National Artist of the Philippines for Literature, the late Francisco Sionil Jose, essayed an answer to this question in 1988. In his diatribe, “The Filipino Intelligentsia”, he argued that our young and culturally weak country is “bereft of a system that assures civic continuity and that we are not heirs to an ancient intellectual tradition”. The outcome: a maimed intelligentsia.
He noted the brevity of our country’s history compared with those of our Asian neighbors such as Japan and China has helped stifle the full flowering of the Filipino intelligentsia.
“Without an anchor to such a past, we cannot really blame anyone and the building of a society in which the intellectuals have failed is still the Filipinos' sole responsibility”, said Sionil Jose, who was one of our foremost writers in English.
To our New Ilustrados will fall the enormous task of building a society where the contribution of our intellectuals cannot be denied and overlooked. Like their forebears, words and courage will be their weapons.
The question now is will our New Ilustrados take action. Over time, they will, and their actions might lead to consequential outcomes.
The main challenge facing the New Ilustrados will be to forge a true Filipino identity. This identity must be anchored on our cultural values and founded on the ideals underlying a strong liberal democracy such as freedom, equality before the law, constitutional government and opposition to tyranny. Call it “Resetting Democracy” for the better.
The core values Filipinos hold dear include a strong bias towards social harmony or togetherness as embodied in the “pakikisama” syndrome; a strong love of family; a yearning for education; promoting the common good; an expansive tolerance, friendliness and hospitality, and religiosity.
Pervasive materialism, however, is corrupting many of these values. The challenge facing the New Ilustrados as leaders will be to liberate our core values from the destructive influence of money, greed, politics and patronage. No easy task given our country’s everlasting poverty. Resetting Democracy must be a key goal for the New Ilustrados.
Sionil Jose came to the stunning conclusion that the “values which we have regarded as the foundations of our culture … must now be re-examined and discarded if the country is to change”. He also challenged the intelligentsia of his time to do more to advance social reform while upbraiding them for being “more concerned with the form than the substance of democracy”.
“I measure the stature of our leaders, and the members of our intelligentsia, by how much genuine commitment they give to this basic Filipino problem”, he pointed out. Sionil-Jose died in January 2022.
Where is the Filipino intelligentsia?
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| F. Sionil Jose |
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