battling ignorance

Frequent National Bookstore visitors will notice that the fiction section has grown inexcusably smaller. I find it terribly annoying that some Filipinos have very little interest in literature. Though love for books often starts at home, I think that it is also the school’s responsibility to bring their students closer to the enchanting world of words. I wasn’t blessed with a good literature teacher back in highschool, in fact I studied subject verb agreement year after year for four years. And honestly, It was a time badly wasted. (I envied my father’s kopong-kopong stories about what he learned from school, they read Edgar Allan Poe’s, Beuwolf’s and such.) I know for a fact that if we don’t do anything to stop it, the next generation will be dumber, less and less imaginative and dim-witted, thanks to the system of education, thanks to elementary and highschool teachers that teaches by the book and never by the words of Tolstoy and all them great. Back to National Bookstore, going through my usual browsing I observed that the classics, such as Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Harper Lee’s How to Kill A Mockingbird are now below 200 pesos. And I could only think of two reasons, two reasons that will either raise our hope for literacy among our unfortunate generation or prepare us for the downfall of the already sagging education. That they surprisingly lowered the prices to reach out to the financially poor lovers of a good read, or because literature is simply no longer of high value, that they are collecting dust in bookshelves full of expensive newer, sexier novels, that there is no other way to dispose them but to cut it’s real value. i would love to be able to talk to my children and hear them bragging about how they are receiving a better education that of that I received. Education should be improved by time, and yet it is always the opposite. When I was in high school, I asked one of my classmates if he has read this short story by Nick Joaquin, and he doesn’t even know him. I am ashamed of our lack of knowledge for these things, how do I expect kids my age to know H.G. Wells, if they don’t even know our national artist. People don’t feel ashamed that they don’t know about these great people and their equally great works, because everyone seems to not know it. Ignorance has become ordinary that everyone seem to think it’s cool, people who read and people who journey into the modern utopia become freaks. so I guess I’m a freak, then again so what?