The Horizon

      I have been relieved from my duties of being a teacher due to the conflict of culture. I am guilty of not following the syllabus but I redefined it to give students a breather from the mechanized structure of the educational system. I am guilty of cursing inside the classroom and I am proud of it, since I curse when I needed to and to give emphasis. I am guilty that I discussed sex in class, but that I am legitimizing it through Freud, Russell and Alain de Botton. Why do I discuss these in the Humanities? Is it not because it is one way to liberate students from thought control? Thought control from conservatism and tradition? I applied Nietzsche and some of the critical thinkers inside the classroom. I even imbue that kind of philosophical trend through my art. I had very negative feedbacks about that, but in equal I have positive feedbacks to those who understood me. Yes, I failed in the rubrics of the administration and even caught their attention through student’s personalized comments, but nonetheless I am successful of being truthful to my heart and to the creed of liberalism and the propagation of new culture inside the school. In fact, those anti-normative persons are those special figures in history, being hated and contested in their time of existence (although there is too support from his circle), but at the moment of death he is then elevated to a god-like status of being a genius. But then again, it is his consolation to see himself glorified from beneath the grave. But while he yet lives, he is plainly misunderstood and this is what Ralph Waldo Emerson would say, “to be great is to be misunderstood”.

       Have I been the propagator of enlightenment? Wherein I am but a voice in the wilderness crying out aloud to awaken people in their dogmatic slumber set by the claws of tradition? Yes, although the school gave me a two year chance to propagate these anarchistic yet beautiful thoughts but they never saw the beauty in my resistance, or in the revolution and that I say they manufacture their students to being mindless civilians in the future. Yes, they would try to argue in the form of making my trend the trend, well I would say, “so be it”, let us just see when that becomes the norm then what norm are we to derive out from the current situation so that we can transcend and re-evaluate norms so that society will not be static but all the more dynamic, active and every growing. Yet, I understand their dogmatism and conservatism, but two years was one good project for me to shower this liberalism to my students wherein I could ever hope that my name remains an echo, a spectre that haunts the walls of the school. But not as a cry of vengeance but as the cry of the students who are hungry for freedom and a new world.

       Have I opened the floodgates to the critical world? They may criticize that all of these will lead to anarchy, but isn’t that what is the most glorious of all epitomic events in history that we love to discuss in our rooms? Let the students create history, not the administration who but furnishes them into pieces of cogs for the industrial set-up. But how can they create history when there is no leader to bring them those thoughts? And that was my purpose in teaching, and that is my mission.

       So sad to know that I am leaving the school but there is one great treasure that I have garnered from that institution and that is my ever loving Johannah Joy Batiancila. The very lotus flower in the murky waters. Amidst that institution I made a whole lot of friends and students who are willing to embrace a new culture of standard and dignity for the Philippines. Yes, I lost the contract, but the seed has been planted to those hearts whom the message of emancipation has been touched. We will see a new world, free from control, those who does not only live in the system, but can be critical inside of it, and to those who can re-evaluate the system by destroying what is needed to be destroyed in order to build a new. The school will never be forgotten because I am with my Joy because of that, and I did plant a seed to some concerned students. Evangelization at its finest and finding love within that mission.