By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
The Americans are cowboys. They need the space where they could swagger.
What did we benefit from that trait when they came round and went after our tons and tons of gold “under ‘em darn hills and mountains?” They got most of it and left perhaps just crumbs. For they were more sophisticated and methodical in that pursuit. They introduced foreign investments by setting up corporations where investors plunk in their money.
On the positive side, they gave us mass education and a health system that went deep down to the grassroots. Thus we came to have RHUs (Rural Health Units) or clinics even in remote areas with doctors, nurses and midwives to treat our boils, other basic infections, wounds from the hostile environment, etc. There were also basic medicines along with the corn meals, oats, bulgur, milk and cheese for our nutrition.
Most of all, they gave us mass education or miseducation depending from the angle you are looking at things. Thus, basic elementary schools were put up even in remote areas to teach us the three Rs (reading , writing and ‘rithmetic).
Such were denied from us by the Spaniards who reserved them mostly for their kin and the mestizos or the Illustrados.
The humongous monument to such education legacy is the University of the Philippines and Anglican mission schools all over the land. The UP then expanded through its units in outlying areas from Luzon all the way to Duterte land, Mindanao.
On the other hand, the Spaniards that preceded them just exploited us and wanted to keep us thinking small. Take a look at universities now that trace their origins to the Spanish times—Ateneo, UST, Letran, etc – they are small compared to the UP units. The latter have plenty of spaces which are not just for swaggering, but also for wider thinking. Do UP graduates really think in a broader way? That will take some saliva to argue but that would be for another day.
The wide spaces encourages creativity in thinking. It engenders great ideas, for which Sagittarians, or the American cowboys are. Small campuses does not do that. Well, for emphasis, the Spanish masters did not like that. They wanted small thinking, not the adventurous type. What they like is for us to stay small, cower with inferiority. Thus, Filipinos thought that way. Not to expand beyond one’s tribal environs. So for 300 years of great exploitation, we never ever successfully pulled off a successful or united revolution. For we failed to think beyond tribal considerations.
Well, perhaps that long period got so entrenched in us the inability to think beyond regions or to come up with a nationalistic fervor. Or beyond the confines of narrow campuses in honor of our Spanish heritage.**
