Mindanaotoday.com | Local history, collecting the periphery
RAI Bollozos Sanchez
HI there!
Last week, I discussed with my students the importance of “history as a method” in studying Philippine history.
However, as a history teacher, I admit that “one aspect” is pretty much challenging to teach, especially when the professor is a non-history major.
In educational institutions, history classes are pre-determined through textbooks written by authors whose backgrounds are concentrated more on developing a grand narrative—only a few or none for the history of the periphery.
History as a subject (emphasizing tertiary education) is just re-reporting what is already reported. A distinguished Jesuit historian Rev. Fr. Jose S. Arcilla, S.J., once said in his essay Reappraising Philippine History (and to quote), “History is not a popular subject in schools… unless forced; no student will sign up for it.”
Most students at present have an inclination towards history as an uninteresting subject with tons of dates, names, and perhaps trivial facts to memorize.
Unfortunately, this mentality has brought the need to understand history in a regressed timeline that killed the value of “curiosity” — the one word that makes every person seek the fundamental truth!
Or perhaps, it even killed the proverbial word Kasaysayan — one that has meaning and sense and a purpose that could change the aspect of humanity.
It should be taught in a collective but local sense to prevent boredom with history.
The history of the Philippines is not confined to one major faction. Still, it is inspired by the movement of its people vis-à-vis brought by circumstances of mutual reaction to what its environment has to offer.
Philippine history is not a homogenous history concentrated at the center’s heart. But a collective history of the distinctiveness region and the unbinding individuality of the regions is the wealth the Philippine heritage and nation have to offer.
In this case, the value of local history, such as the history of Mindanao, deposits to what is supposedly its contribution to the making of a united archipelago — collective history!
I call for the teaching of Philippine history should be interpretative and progressive—not centric. Narrating Historical accounts should be relational and not substantial.
The meaning of the objects, events and individual actions lies not in the events but in the relationship that a historian constructs between them.
When a historian describes and changes its narrative, it is no longer a monotonous history.
According to Fernand Braudel, a French historian, time does not flow at an even rate. Still, it goes at a thousand different paces—either instantaneous or unhurried to which it does not relate to the typical chronicle narrative or definitive history.
Therefore, history as a discipline, in a sense, can be scientific. Because history immerses spatially and describes the world or perhaps the locality through a web of relationships between objects, situations, circumstances, and people.
The relationship between history and the other fields of social sciences in the historical study goes beyond politics—structures and institutions never enable, but it is constraining.
I just wish that my fellow educators realize the dynamism and passion of a modern day history educator, and justly equipped with a tool to guide human awareness, the importance of collective history could come in handy—like a pill quickly drawn to cure coughs and colds.
It makes lessons easier, but this does not hinder the student in critically analyzing the facts—the fruit of the unbearable and yet desired TRUTH!
Next time, I will write history as a method away from the grand narrative. (MT)
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