Towards a New Narrative of Philippine General History
- Dr. Paul Dumol
- 1 day ago
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By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol
The Department of Education of the Philippine government prescribes a syllabus for a course on Philippine history in Philippine high schools that is probably the closest we get to an official history of the Philippines. The narrative of this official history presents a thrice-repeated pattern of freedom lost and freedom regained. The first time the pattern appears is with Spanish colonization followed by the proclamation of Philippine independence 333 years later; the second time, with the American conquest followed by the granting of Philippine independence 48 years later; the third time, with Ferdinand Marcos’s declaration of martial law followed by the first People Power Revolution 14 years later. The Japanese Occupation followed by liberation three years later, which would certainly fit the pattern, is referred to as a delay in the attainment of freedom.
The problem with this narrative is its silence on what should be a primary concern for Filipnos: How did the independent villages in the Philippines, bereft of unity among themselves for centuries even when they belonged to the same ethnic group, develop into the nation the Philippines claims to be today? The official narrative gives no answer; in fact, I do not know of any attempt to date to answer this question methodically. It is clear, however, from the official narrative that this is not a question expected to vex the ordinary grade school and high school student, because from the way the official narrative is written, the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands were already a nation long before the Spaniards came. This is the unarticulated assumption of textbooks of Philippine history, and the manner of its communication is simple: the islands that make up the present-day Republic of the Philippines are referred to as “the Philippines” and their inhabitants as “Filipinos” even before the coinage of the name “Felipinas”
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