Archive for June 28th, 2010

Back In Place

Back In Place

* – In response to Out-of-Date by IWriteAsIWrite.  Thanks to The Greatest for pointing this out.

The beauty of the Web is exchange; that there is no need for name-calling or caustic responses.  While the author may have misspelled my thinly-disguised pseudonym, I’d like to say that I stand corrected on the many flaws he or she did point out in my previous entry, but in many ways, I do stand my ground.

I do agree, if only that I myself am founded in the same perspective that I try my best to balance out.  Yet my bone of contention, as the author points out, remains the same: decolonization.  The anecdote I started the entry with can be attested to by Filipino schoolchildren.  Race is still pervasive.  Those of us who have had the benefit of learning things at a higher level may know that race does not exist but culture does, but not to those who sit in 60-students-to-a-teacher classrooms.

By “decolonization,” I do not mean flinging ourselves back to 1520 and back.  History can only move forward, and we cannot bring the datus and the barangays as they existed, and we certainly cannot demolish the condominiums of Makati to give way to huts near the Pasig River.  To decolonize does not mean to redact or revert: it means to rediscover. To decolonize does not mean to deny, but to dispel.  To decolonize does not mean to destroy the past.  To decolonize means to undo the fabric of colonization, and to use the threads of everything – good, bad, and ugly – to create our magic carpet to a whole new world (doh).

June 28, 2010 1 comment Read More
Pre-Adolescent Lyric Poetry

Pre-Adolescent Lyric Poetry

I believe that children should use big words early in life.  They must be taught to be highfalutin, for them to be able to grasp the complexity of the English language.  Simplicity invalidates the wealth of terminologies within the paradigmatic pool, forcing us to make syntagmatic constructions that invariably result in the misconstruction of what we communicate.  Nothing can concretize the validity of this argument that the repetitiveness of so-called “nursery rhymes,” that only facilitate the continued miseducation of our children.  Without being properly acquainted with lexical possibilities during the formative phases of basic education, we ourselves give rise to the jejemon in our midst.

Poetry, taught to our offspring at such a crucial stage in development, can sometimes be devoid of the necessary elements for them to innately process and configure the algorithmic relationships between elements of language.  Language is a procedural facility; we must be able to conscienticize our children early for them to understand that simplicity is in fact idiocy.  By reconfiguring the pre-school plantilla to trigger the accelerated improvement in the Language Acquisition Device, we can mitigate the consequences of simple-minded, plebeian use of language.

June 28, 2010 0 comments Read More