Why Teaching — and Learning — History Matters
I love history. Wait, let me rephrase that. I love learning history.
In my experience, history is not so much the process of memorizing facts as it is the journey through time, space, and cultures connecting these facts. Some of the most satisfying moments for me as a history enthusiast has never been about figures and statistics but rather about living the lives of those who came before us: journeying with travelers and explorers as they risk life and limb through leagues of desert and jungle, living the motivations and fears of men and women during periods of war and turmoil, finding the tiniest cracks in our historical records to listen to the stories of the unheard and oppressed. To learn history, in its best, is to learn about the human condition.
Unfortunately, most of my passion for history never came from formal education. My historical interest was built over the years by YouTube, scholarly books, and podcasts — resources a majority of Filipino students will never come by.
In the public school system, history has always taken a backseat, never sharing the same prestige as science, the languages, or mathematics. My personal experience of history classes was one of droning student reports and fact memorization. This lack of interest in the subject has lead to a general neglect to the curricula of social studies, and in this world of historical revisionism, propaganda, and fake news, the need to reexamine the way we learn history has never been more urgent.
The Story of Great Men
“The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”
— Thomas Carlyle, historian, The Hero as Divinity
My earliest recollections of learning history was about memorizing the names of our Philippine heroes. Even our youngest grade schoolers might be familiar with the names of Gat. Jose Rizal and Lapu-lapu. Other faces may become more familiar as we progress through the historical narrative: heroes of the revolution such as Tandang Sora and Diego Silang, the familiar faces in our coins and bills like Mabini and Aquino, former presidents such as Aguinaldo and Quezon. In many of our public classrooms and in the collective mindset of many Filipinos, history is simply a string of decisions and feats by great men and women.
This “Great Man” approach to history, first recognized by the historian Thomas Carlyle, is a common theme in many Filipino history textbooks. In fact, my freshman high school textbook’s chapter on the Katipunan is simply a list of biographies of its most famous members. Up to this day, this approach continues to dominate our education system, and with good reason. The Great Man Theory of History is simple, clean-cut, inspiring, and teaches us a simple lesson: our history is shaped by great men, and in order to leave our marks in history, we must strive to be one of these great men.
This approach to history, while convenient, often leads to oversimplification, and as a result, many students of history miss the forest for the trees. Take for example the way we talk about the Katipunan. For many, the only thing we remember about the revolutionary organization is its leading member, Andres Bonifacio. The Father of the Katipunan is face of the movement and is shown as the common man’s hero, rising from the mires of poverty as he sold canes and paper fans for his siblings. He is often portrayed as the fighting man, leading the Cry of Pugadlawin that sparked the revolution, and eventually met his early demise at the hands of his rival, Aguinaldo. Bonifacio’s story is both inspiring and ultimately tragic.
What is often left out of the story is the fact that Andres was born of a partially Spanish mother and a mayor as a father, and until their death at age 14, Andres and his family was living a life a majority of Filipinos could only hope for. Andres was a freemason and a founding member of La Liga Filipina, and despite never finishing his studies was a well read individual exposed to the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Andres Bonifacio, like many of his peers, was part of the local intellectual community, and has a completely different worldview compared to a majority of the more or less 30,000 members of the Katipunan that came from the lowest classes of society.
Now, for the historian and the teacher, showcasing the story of Bonifacio is often the simplest way to tell the story: Andres’ life was well documented, and due to his legacy an abundance of research and analysis has been conducted on his life. What this does, however, is it misses the opportunity to discuss what drove ordinary people to the Katipunan, and why it succeeded where all earlier attempts failed.
In his essay The Cause of The Philippine Revolution, Vicente Pilapil gives us a fuller picture on why the revolt of the Katipunan succeeded. He details to us how the years leading to the revolution was actually an age of improvement for the colony. Manila was opened for international trade in 1857, leading to a boom in trade and new ideas in the colony, and primary education became available in every town and city starting in 1863. Pilapil argues that these early reforms were one of the reasons many ilustrados believed that Spanish rule in the islands would still be viable.
However, the crowning of the new conservative king, Amadeo of Savoy, and his appointed governor general, Rafael de Izquerdo, crushed this spirit of reform. Izquerdo reinstituted the polo, a system of manual labor in the country. He also imposed harsher sentences and increased taxation, widening the gap between the native Filipinos and Spanish. These abuses led to the Cavite Mutiny of 1872 and the consequent execution of the GomBurZa who were accused to be part of the failed revolt. As Pilapil puts it, “the people had already tasted the blessings of liberty… in time, they would look back to those days and crave for its return,” and for many Filipinos, the Katipunan was the only way this craving would be satisfied.
Now, let’s look at the Katipunan in another way. Lukas is a middle aged panday, a local blacksmith who helps make nails for the Cavite docks. You remember how in your youth saw the docks burn as the guardia civil quelled a failed revolt of the shipbuilders. Now, you’re headed to the shipyard to conduct repairs without pay as part of your polo, something that was already abolished in your youth. On your way home, you heard that Father Vicenzio, a native and a close family friend, was arrested for investigation due to his correspondence with the executed Father Burgos. Finally arriving home, you take your meal with your family, and your son who just came home from Manila discreetly tells you of a new organization he has joined called the Katipunan.
For thousand Katipuneros who served as the literal foot soldiers of the movement, this was their story. However, the lack of personal accounts and historical records, the sheer difficulty of tackling such issues, and the presence of a more convenient and simpler story often leaves these stories of thousands of Filipino patriots unheard. Instead, these stories of the masses and everyday men and women often end up simply as a couple of bullet points in a neglected section of an Araling Panlipunan textbook.
Perhaps the stories of Rizal, Bonifacio, and Mabini will resonate more with you, but for a majority of Filipinos, our stories will be more like Lukas, and the countless others who lived and became part of our nation’s continuing story. Yes, “great men” may shape history, but so does everyone else, and that includes you and me.
“…relentlessly focusing on the actions of Funny-Hatted-People who ruled us makes us forget that we also make history.”
— John Green, YouTube educator, Crash Course World History #18
War and Peace
“War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.”
— Thomas Hardy, English novelist and poet, The Dynasts
A common trivia many of us has learned during our history classes is that the Spanish occupation of the Philippines lasted for more than three hundred years. Compare that to two years of the Philippine Revolution or the three years of Japanese occupation of the country. Ironically, many of us, myself included, know more about these few years of war than the three centuries of our nation’s formative years.
Even historians are not immune from this bias of focusing in military history. My college textbook on Philippine History has only has two chapters covering this timeframe, sandwiched between the chapters “European Incursions” and “The Dawn of Nationalism”. What’s worse is that these chapters are titled “The Subjugation of the Filipinos” and “Threats to Spanish Supremacy”, suggesting more of those sweaty, manly, testosterone-pumping military history.
Historians and history teachers love to talk about history in terms of war. Wars start and end at definite dates, with clearly outlined sides, and often has a concise list of causes and effects. Wars capture the imagination, with its charismatic heroes and loathsome villains, their brilliant maneuvers and strategies, and their greatest victories and tragic falls. Moreover, and perhaps more important, dates, names, and facts can be easily formed into tests and exams. The lens of military conflict (despite the many flaws it has that I am not going to delve in here) continues to be popular in presenting history because its simple, easy, and convenient.
This overemphasis on conquest and revolution, however, undercuts the fact that a majority of Philippine history occurred not in wars but in peace. Trade, cultural, social, scientific, and linguistic history never had the same love military history had, for several reasons. The bias towards written records over sociology and anthropology, the patriarchy embedded in historical societies, and the fear to muddy up an already established concrete history all plays a part in the over-militarization of our history, and we’re all at a loss because of it.
Take, for example, the early colonization of the Philippines. We’re all familiar with the story of the Spanish conquered the island with the cross and sword, but there’s one more tool that the Spanish used that is perhaps more important than any of the two combined: the plow.
Pre-colonial Philippines was sparsely populated, and many communities, especially inland ones, supported themselves through the swidden (kaingin) agriculture of yams and taro. Today, swidden agriculture is often considered as destructive and environmentally degrading, but modern archaeology shows that the way our ancestors practiced this kind of farming was far more sustainable compared to modern agriculture. For one, the swiddens (areas where trees have been burned) that are farmed have already been used for several generations, and virgin forests are rarely touched. Moreover, the regular burning of an area reduces the frequency of wildfires and ensures that the soil remains healthy. This way of life, however, is labor intensive and could only support low population settlements, which explains why the Philippines never had large states and instead was structured through small settlements called barangays.
The arrival of the Spanish would change all of that. The introduction of the plow and the use of the carabao in the Philippines led to the rise of established farming and a significant increase in food surplus, and it allowed the Spanish administration to construct larger cities and support a larger army. A growing class division between Spanish-allied local elites and the peasantry also began to emerge, a stark contrast to our country’s egalitarian roots. This gradually led to the encomienda system and eventually culminated in the haciendas, which today continues to play a role in the struggle of Filipino farmers.
What I’m trying to say here is that the Spanish military might often gets the credit for the success of colonial rule, but it was the way western agriculture was structured that allowed the Spanish to dominate the country.
Sadly, we rarely hear about this in class because explaining colonization through the tale of dashing explorers and native warbands sounds so much more exciting than, well, farming. We still don’t know much a lot about precolonial agriculture, and most of the studies done on the topic have been from foreign academics. Moreover, discussing the history of agriculture as a tool of oppression becomes more complex as it begins to interfere with the other narratives we’ve been taught about innovation and social structure.
To deny this truth, however, is to disenfranchise the experience of our ancestors. The men and women who toiled in our fields are as much a part of history as those who fought in the front lines, and to to tell anything else is to lie about our history. History, above everything, should be honest, and the truth is that our history is shaped both by the conflicts that arise in times of war war and the systems that move in times of peace.
“The history of the land is etched in the faces of the farmers who till it.”
— Michael Pollan, American author, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey
Final Thoughts
“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it”
— George Santayana, philosopher and writer, Reason in Common Sense
Aside from the rustling of manila paper and the smell of permanent markers, I don’t really remember a lot about my Araling Panlipunan classes in high school. Sure, I remember the broad strokes of it, the balangay, the Spanish colonization, the heroes and their struggles, but most of it felt distant and irrelevant. My experience with history in high school has become that of aloofness: what am I going to do with knowing the date of Rizal’s birthday?
Sadly, many of you might have the same experience, which is such a shame. Despite not remembering much about it, the way I was taught history left its mark on how I view the world today, and I think it did so too on a majority of Filipinos.
In fact, the problems we tackled earlier are beginning to manifest itself on our political discourse. Our focus on “great men” in our history classes reflect on the cult of personality we have developed on our politics. One only needs to see how much of our political discourse revolves around the two highest officials of our land.
Our use of the military lens in viewing our past is also making itself prevalent in how we view our current issues. Defending our claims on the South China Sea are often viewed as a choice between peace and war when the truth could be so much farther, and the use of the word “War” in our government policies have become prominent, even when it isn’t appropriate: on drugs, on activists, on human rights lawyers, on the opposition.
History is the only subject in our curriculum where all are a part of. By learning history, we understand how those who came before us viewed their world, and by learning from their successes and mistakes, perhaps we can understand how we view our world, too. The actions and decisions of our ancestors shaped the world that we are currently living in, and we are shaping the worlds of our children would someday live in. We learn history because we are making history, and perhaps its time we learn history better so that we can make our history better.
“Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”
— The New Yorker, in one of its iconic comics
