0.2 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 2  (Page 10/16)

Letter to Catholic Educators on its Duty of Repair:

Stop teaching your students that their top heroic icon remained a Catholic somehow; he only fought abuses of Spanish priests, not their core Catholicism that nurtured and empowered them. In fact, as a bone-deep Masonic scientific freethinker, he relentlessly attacked both as an intertwined whole. Stop dressing up your boys, as you did a nephew years ago, in representation of Rizal at death, with the Virgin Mother of God’s medal on his chest, Her Scapular around his neck, and Her Rosary in hand, as Jesuit witnesses to his alleged retraction told. Develop their minds instead to critically investigate for themselves whether that was so, since surely it would have caused a sensation and reporters and other witnesses would have reported, photographed, and sketched it. As a parent who shared in educating an offspring all the way to Harvard, I’d like to share with you related thoughts on education’s prime goal which worked for us both. And as it relates of course to this paradigm-replacing critique of Dr. De Pedro’s Opus-Dei sponsored book on Rizal. For myself, I can say his preached and lived kind of transformative education got me into Stanford-Berkeley, even if barely as a conditionally accepted graduate student with big deficits in math, science and English proficiency. Instilling in students of independently critical learning habits for life should likewise be your schools’ prime goal. But I did not get that at all as a youth in your religious schools, more interested in propagation and defense of the faith than anything else, as it also is in Islamic schools of other lands. Precious years and resources were lost which could have been devoted to studying much more of those just-mentioned subjects, plus history and philosophy. Thanks to a few inquiring readers I met outside of high school and a few good books I stumbled upon I managed to pick up a bit of education’s prime self-transforming goals. How right Rizal was in his rationalist letter-essay to Philippine women—and their men impliedly—to ever study on one’s own, to be ever on guard for error, delusions and deceit that lie practically everywhere, in centers of learning themselves. He urged, pass everything including this through reason’s sieve. Looking back nostalgically, I say how wise was that letter-essay of his, which the Opus Dei book under review here expectedly ridiculed.

Have you ever wondered why your students’ scores in international comparisons in math, science, reading comprehension, critical writing have been normally down at the bottom of the proverbial barrel? The same goes for English skills, considering that it is our history-imposed language of advanced learning, thought, communications, and social climbing in the world, as Spanish was in Rizal’s times. Dr. Magno’s end-of-March 2010 column on our very substandard education system compared it to the bar-raising First World’s “South Koreans who are now topping every global test there is”. Dr. Poblador a month later in his column re-echoed the same observation: “basic education has degenerated through the years into … totally dysfunctional and maladaptive”. Have Catholic educators been a big part of the problem in keeping a people still generally ignorant and mired in superstitious faiths, as Rizal exposed and deplored in his times? Consider as just one indication of terrible teaching on your part: your very big role in the continuing cover-up of the real historical Rizal. You have been hiding from your students and the public his core-identity as a church-and-theocracy martyred scientific humanist of individual freedoms in a regime of church-state separation. Don’t keep covering this up by blaming his death mainly if not exclusively on Spain, his alleged chief enemy which killed him as a political revolutionist. All this rampant misinterpretations to suit your retraction-influenced nationalistic paradigm. Before going further, why don’t you stop reading this and consult Dr. Frank Laubach’s 1936 classic book on his arrests, trial, death, priestly manipulations behind the scenes and see its overall agreement with my findings and claims, except that I’ll be building up the case much farther with more evidence. Don’t say it’s out of print. Google it, lazy bones!, if I may use the expression.