Liberal arts created the nation

YESTERDAY, the De La Salle University College of Liberal Arts celebrated its centenary, commemorating the establishment of the School of Arts and

Sciences in 1918.

Also, last Thursday night at the

Manila Hotel, a new organization called Advocates of Philippine Culture and Arts — by Director Flordeliza Villaseñor of the Museo ng Maynila. Its chairman is lawyer Tranquil Salvador.

I rarely get awards, so I was so elated when I was awarded by the organization with a Frederic Caedo bronze sculpture titled “ historian, could I also be an artist?

You see, history as a subject is always placed among the social sciences because people think that art and literature are about creativity, and that the historian should write based on the method and the evidence and not on creativity: identifying sources, criticizing and fact-checking them if they are authentic or if they tell the truth.

Historian Ambeth Ocampo once received an autograph from poet Virgilio S. Almario who called him “With the separated “h,” history becomes just a story and one may interpret this as the National Artist poking good fun at the public historian. Or, was he really?

In fact, the reason people think that history is boring is because some educators and teachers may have separated it from the art of storytelling. Even our Tagalog word for history, as Zeus Salazar has pointed out, comes from the word “— story.

But of course history is also a social science. In fact, the highest national award for a historian is not the Order of the National Artists but the National Scientist Award which was previously given to Gregorio F. Zaide, Teodoro Agoncillo and Encarnacion Elzona.

The German social psychologist Erich Fromm, in the book implied that art is not the things we create and put into museums, but the way we live. He considered music, painting, carpentry, medicine or engineering, even loving, as forms of art.

And that is actually the original meaning of liberal arts: It is composed of both the arts and the sciences — the way we live.

During our last live facebook broadcast of Dulowtard History Live on the hundred years of liberal arts, my colleague Van Ybiernas reminded us that the concept of liberal arts was born out of the enlightenment to “free” us, “from the

and the King. So, the enlightenment is based on the arts with “man” as the center, instead of God, and science as the solution to the problems of man instead of waiting for miracles. Thus, the humanities.

So, both the arts and sciences are considered to be the cornerstone of the attainment of man’s full potential. To paraphrase the Lord, man does not live by bread alone, he also has a soul expressed in the arts and humanities, so that man will not just be a robot, knowledgeable of technical things but devoid of the humanity. The appreciation of liberal arts is what gives us dignity.

That is why the former De La Salle College, and other universities like UP who call it the College of Arts and Sciences, made liberal arts the foundation of their general education programs. There was a time at UP when the GE subjects were set in such a way that when one graduates from UP, one would have a wide knowledge of the humanities and sciences — thus UP — so they can fully contribute to the national development.

And then, eventually, liberal arts program was broken up, to become the hard sciences (lbiology, chemistry, physics, mathematics), the social sciences (history, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science), and humanities (literature,

in our education are being increased, along with practical courses like engineering, mathematics and medicine, many people think that we should have less humanities and less social studies because they feel that these are useless.

But artists and social scientists should be consoled with the fact that the national consciousness

“Did not Filipinos start to talk about their common misery when they heard about José Rizal’s novel Isn’t it that Filipi- Andres Bonifacio’s poem

Isn’t it that many were inspired to believe in themselves as Filipinos when they marveled at the beauty of Juan Luna’s “Spoliarium”?

It is said that art may not change the world, but it can change the way we think of the world. And maybe that it will make us love our nation more and want to contribute to its continuing story.