EVERY YEAR, we celebrate the National Language Month with festivities ranging from flag raising, wearing of Filipiniana, poetry-writing, or essay-writing contests. However, no matter how long this celebration has been, it has usually been limited to schools and has not gained traction in the public, except on radio airwaves, where Original Pinoy Music (OPM) is required to be played at least once every hour.

This was a long time ago, and we do not know if this is still the case, since OPM has been enjoying its relative success along with the advent of podcasts and other social media platforms like Spotify.

There’s a reason this celebration has been restricted to schools only. Before, it used to be a weekly celebration, and from 1946 to 1953, the National Language Week was March 27 to April 2. This date coincides with the birth anniversary of Francisco Balagtas, the renowned Filipino poet who wrote Florante at Laura. However, school children could not participate in this festivity because most were already on vacation. 

Then, it was changed to August 13 to 19, to coincide with the birth anniversary of former president Manuel L. Quezon, who is dubbed the father of National Language. From then on, National Language Week, which became National Language Month during Fidel Ramos’s presidency, has been commemorated in grade schools to high schools, sometimes in college, through Filipino subjects and courses.

So naturally, if someone asks what is the relevance of Filipino subjects, one recalls fond memories of what one has done or witnessed in schools growing up, especially during the National Language Month celebration, but rarely anything outside school and in their everyday lives.

In fact, someone in one of the students’ chat groups who is seemingly frustrated with inconsequential subjects like Filipino shares, “Who even remembers Biag ni Lam-ang?” This may be a fair assessment because even I, who has been teaching Filipino for thirty years, have forgotten so many things in the epic.

But this is not the only thing that I have forgotten in my school subjects; I have also forgotten the formula for binomial expansion or how to find the area under the curve in a pressure vs. volume graph. I have forgotten how these formulas are relevant to my career as a professor, since the only computation I do in life is to compute my salary, which hardly needs a sophisticated formula like a binomial expansion, given that my salary contracts more than it expands.

But here’s the rub, someone would say that it’s not the details per se that are important, but it’s the discipline that we acquire in solving the difficult equations. The same thing goes for stories like Biag ni Lam-ang. Sometimes, what matters is not the details that you were quizzed on. Sometimes, the discipline of reading such a story itself carries more weight in life. Sadly, of all the subjects in grade school and high school, we feel that Filipino is not a discipline and a total waste of time—and this is not new.

Paulo Freire, in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, discusses that the fundamental nature of education is to be a narrative—one that puts students’ perspective first, allows them to see or identify problems in their surroundings, and actively contribute to the community in solving them. However, most education until now has been hell bent on providing skills that will make students attractive to employers.

This is an education typified by an individual reciting facts and ideas, and others who just listen and memorize everything. Freire called this form of education the banking model of education, which is closely linked with oppression. Since students just accept what they are told, they are not allowed to question the world or their teachers.

Because our education is geared to making compliant, dutiful, glorified servants of the globalized world order, Filipino as a subject or course is the least needed. It is a threat.

Why? Because Filipino is first and foremost a narrative from our own perspective, how we make sense of the world around us, how we have endured and suffered years of colonization, and how we have to deal with the vestiges of this oppression and continue to decolonize ourselves.

So, stories like Lam-ang more than fascinate us; they teach us that our journey begins with reconnecting with our parents, no matter how powerful we become. This is exactly what Lam-ang does first to search for his lost father. When he succeeded, he then continued his search for his beloved, Inez Kannoyan.

The path is never paved, like all heroes’ journeys, they are riddled with complications, and in one, Lam-ang dies. But the story never ends there. He is resurrected by his magical pets, and they continue to live and struggle. Such a story may seem to be too familiar.

It is a story arc that can be seen in most telenovelas or Korean dramas today, DC or Marvel films, even in video games, manga, or comics. That is the point, narratives are not just plain narratives, rather they contain structures or elements that animate and make sense of the world we live in.

Just recently, we were amazed by the interviews of the very rich Discaya couple, who wanted to run for public office but got lost. In the interviews, they bragged about the luxury cars they have bought, their mansion, and all that because of the contracts that they got from the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).

With the recent exposé of ghost flood control projects and the anomalies in the budget in the senate hearing, one does not need a knowledge of complex equations to make the connection that the ostentatious display of affluence of this couple is tied to the corruption in these DPWH projects.

This is where narratology or subjects like Filipino as a reading discipline come in. Questions like why flooding is perennial in our cities and why a trickle of rain is enough to suspend classes should have been asked a long time ago, and we should have demanded answers. Interviewers of these people should have also been quick to ask how it was possible to be obscenely rich in a very short time. Surely, that would put to shame even Lam-ang himself in his journey to search for Inez Kannoyan.

Rather than romanticizing this couple’s supposedly rags-to-riches story, a reading discipline that is attuned to the Pedagogy of the Oppressed would necessarily shift the perspective away from them and back to the suffering majority who have to wade through the flooded streets to go to work and school, and risk getting sick.

Another hero who is worth remembering is Emilio Jacinto and his work, Liwanag at Dilim, where he teaches: As revolutionaries, we must be able to discern true light that enlightens from a glimmer that dazzles and blinds. He makes a distinction between a commoner who walks and someone who rides in a carriage, where the commoner is true light and the rich is all glitters without essence.

Jacinto’s essay resonates with us now than ever. Pedagogy of Oppressed, in the same way, tells us that, ultimately, a narrative is not just entertaining; it must be an ethical project. To wit, between our reality of oppression and the reality of emancipation, only one remains our vocation.

We remember Lam-ang and all the countless heroes not for their fame and fortune. We remember them because our narrative of emancipation is still to be written. We commemorate the National Language Month not just for fond remembrance, but because the language that would free us all is still to be uttered.

Gary C. Devilles, PhD is an associate professor of the Filipino Department of the Ateneo de Manila University. He is the author of Sensing Manila, published by the Ateneo University Press, which won the Best Book in Literary Criticism in the 39th National Book Awards. He took up AB Philosophy and MA in Filipino Literature at the Ateneo de Manila University, and his PhD in Media Studies at La Trobe University, Australia. Gary is a film critic of Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, a film critics group that gives the annual Gawad Urian.