Teaching as truth-telling
Teaching Philippine history as a crucial bedrock of the Filipinos’ journey.” Secretary Leonor Briones states acutely the mission of education, specially in the confusion of these times.
In the post-truth era, “alternative facts,” “false claims,” “misleading content,” “fake context, and “spin”— or what is more commonly referred to as “fake news”—do not only aim for the present. They also target the past. In her Oct. 6 speech made during the First National Assembly of Education Leaders held at the Philippine International Convention Center, the Department of Education (DepEd) secretary said that the agency had already started the process of reviewing textbooks tackling martial law.
Long overdue, the process should not only focus on textbooks but also include new media, which has a greater reach and influence over youths and other netizens.
Briones did not specify what the review entailed and the plans for accomplishing these targets. Last Sept. 21, on the 45th commemoration of the first declaration of martial law in the country, street protests staged around the nation offered differing and clashing interpretations of martial law.
Democracies should be hospitable ground for ventilating and threshing out opinions and stances. However, the popularity of factually inaccurate and misleading re-tellings of martial law should disturb Filipinos out of complacence and inaction.
More than revealing abject ignorance, historical revisionism of martial law exposes a vulnerability to historical amnesia and opens citizens to political manipulation.
The classic illustration of this fatal regression of society to forget its past and manufacture memories is the science-fiction novel of George Orwell, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”
Written in 1949, the novel is set in a “future” 1984. A regime regards independent thinking as a “thoughtcrime” and creates a new normal out of government propaganda and public manipulation. The main character works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting newspaper articles filed in the archives so that these versions support the government line.
In this regime, “doublethink” refers to the “power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
Doublethink is facilitated by tearing apart language and putting it together to compose “newspeak,” which conforms to the original only on surface but is substantially altered and deformed.
Combining doublethink and newspeak, the regime accomplishes the “continuous alteration of the past” seamlessly.
Fortunately, for the country, campaigns at historical revisionism have not been without flaw. Public school textbooks have been heavily criticized for glaring commissions of errors and omissions of essentials.
The Education secretary highlights that, for one, the picture portrayed in existing school references is incomplete, failing to fairly present that resistance to martial law came from Visayas and Mindanao, not just Luzon, which is given focus in some references.
“If there is a demand that we tell them the whole story [of martial law], then the whole story should be told and it should be a story of a country – not specific groups,” Briones said during the national assembly of educators.
After the 2016 burial of President Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan nga mag Bayani, members of civil society sustained their protest of and resistance to the political rehabilitation of the Marcos family by urging the DepEd to subject to review the facile and distorted treatment of martial law in public-funded textbooks and other school references.
Correcting errors and lapses is not sufficient. Briones should lead educators in critically evaluating their personal understanding and teaching of martial law and other crucial milestones in the nation’s history.
Teachers, traditional and new media, and other stakeholders are pivotal in the role of combating the “new” doublethink and newspeak in the Philippine context.