I never loved reading until I became an English major. Well, frankly speaking, I didn’t actually “love” reading back then, I was just “pressured” by the fact that during our free time, my classmates would sit anywhere and read their novels (nope, not just the required ones).
When Dr. Venancio Mendiola “hired” me to become his student assistant, I became enlightened on the power and joy of reading. He always tells me that if I want to go to different places and learn their culture, I have to read books. My first “reading assignment” was to finish reading Carlos Bulosan’s “America is in the Heart” and D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”. “You’re not an English major unless you’ve read this and that!” is what Dr. Mendiola says all the time whenever you answer “No” to his question, “Have you read ____?” Later on, I realized that I’m NOT an English major (‘cause I haven’t finished reading all the books that he gave and assigned to me).
I didn’t become super smart after learning how to love reading. But I must say that it really helped me a lot in preparing myself for my profession as teacher and in becoming a better person. Lately, I lost track of how I learned to love reading, and I was anxious to know how to encourage my students to love reading. It’s just not part of the “Filipino culture”. But the good news is, culture is created by people, so we can make reading a part of the Filipino Culture.
However, sad realities pull the campaign for reading down. One of them is the book tax, and the other is the erroneous textbooks that are distributed among public schools nationwide.
It is just sad to realize that a lot of people become aloof with reading because of its high cost. My younger sister is just lucky that my Ate bought her the Twilight saga, because if she would just save from her allowance, it would take her years to buy them all. I’m saying this because I never experienced buying literature in big bookstores (i.e. National Bookstore, Powerbooks, Fully Booked, etc.) All of my books were dug from Booksale.
How in the world do you expect people to buy a book when they don’t even have food to eat? How in the world do you expect our country to progress if the “passports” to learning are merely displayed in bookstores?
The government argues that books like “Twilight” are not under the category of “educational” so they must be taxed (around 1%-5%). But the question is, how do they categorize “educational”? I think this is one of the misinterpretations of the government about books (and learning). Not everything is learned through overt presentation of facts and information. Some facts and realities in the world are learned covertly by “experiencing” them through literature and other art forms.
For example, textbooks would teach you how to love the nature, the parents, the classmates, etc. But afterwards, it would tell you to use the correct rules of subject-verb agreement, which makes you forget the lesson on “love” because the quiz is going to be about subject-verb agreement!
On the other hand, literature opens the minds of the readers to delve deeper and search for life’s meaning.
This has been the perennial problem of our country’s education. We have been too textbook-based, making our people shallow in analysis, poor in comprehension, and weak in decision-making.
Speaking of textbooks, how do you suppose will our students learn if textbooks are flooded with errors (not just typographical, mind you) but with “facts, concepts, logic, grammar and usage”? (PDI, Editorial, 6/9/09)
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I always tell my friends that education is really the answer to all of our country’s problems. Give the people quality education and everything else will follow. Peace will follow (because educated people know how to respect different cultures; my friendship with Sir Ali proved this); Economic Advancement will follow (because people will learn how to get and maintain a good job or business); Poverty and Overpopulation will be lessened (because people will realize how important family planning is) et cetera… et cetera.
Our leaders are readers, and the readers today will be the leaders tomorrow. Ergo, if no one reads today, no one leads tomorrow.
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