Iskolar ng Bayan, Traydor sa Bayan
"Wherever you go, remember that we did not teach you just to be exported. The new graduates should use their skills and talents where they are most needed - right here in our own country - rather than search for greener pastures and fatter paychecks elsewhere."
- Chancellor Sergio Cao, 2006 Commencement Exercise, University of the Philippines Diliman
When one-tenth of our population have left this archipelago to work overseas and provide two-thirds of the country's hard currency in the form of their remittances, you would think the idiocy inherent in this kind of judgmental patriotism would be blown out of the water.
I want to work abroad. I want to study abroad. I want to live abroad. And that doesn't make me a bad Filipino. Or for that matter, a disloyal graduate. Chancellor Cao does a disservice to UP students and to a UP education by implying that merely pursuing opportunities outside the Philippines immediately makes us candidates for contempt.
The fact that our graduates can succeed globally, in countries where neither the Philippines nor UP are well-known or well-respected, is a cause for celebration and not dismay. It proves both that Filipinos are talented enough to challenge the best products of other nations and that a UP education, for all the wailing about its declining standards, is worth more than the faux UP diploma you can buy in Recto. It's a validation of the quality of the institution that Cao is supposed to be guiding towards world-class standards.
But the real reason I want to go abroad is because it is personally enriching. It is definitely financially rewarding, but I'm talking about more than that. The cosmopolitanism created by living in a place and culture totally removed from your own and the confidence that succeeding in such diverse and unwelcoming circumstances breeds are something that UP, and the Philippines in general, cannot give. Here we are strangled by the limitations of the familiar and the conventions of our upbringing. But abroad, more than anything, means the freedom to rise and grow beyond this small and shallow pond.
I know so many brilliant Filipinos, not just from UP, who took this path. They've been successful, and they've been rewarded. They are sharper professionaly, they are more secure financially, and they are bolder and more audacious in their choices both in careers and in lifestyles. But more than anything, in all my conversations with them, they will all say they plan to go back home.
I've always thought that the tragedy of the Philippines isn't that we lack the brilliance or the ability to progress, it's that our expectations of ourselves are so low that we always settle for the mediocre and the ugly instead of what's best and uplifting. The generation of young Filipinos sloshing around the world right now accumulating skills, resources and ideas are the antidote to this self-destructive national impulse. They know what it's like to meet the highest international standards and leap over them. When they come back, they will change the way we do things in the Philippines, in much the same way that the Indian diaspora's success in Silicon Valley and Wall Street are an incredible force for progress in their home country as they come home to invest in their own start-ups and raise their families.
Cao's short-sightedness is in not recognizing that there are many ways to give back to the Philippines. You can stay here, start from the bottom and work your way up. Or you can go abroad, come back on top and work your way down. Eventually these two currents, the self-sacrificing idealists and the self-fulfilling pragmatists, will meet each other in the middle - and when that happens, this country will finally have a set of leaders with the grassroots experience and the international outlook to actually get us somewhere.
The spirit of nationalism was never supposed to be a prison shackling you to your country to the exclusion of what the world has to offer. Instead it's the desire to give back to your home, on your own terms and in your own way. And that's why it doesn't matter if we leave, Chancellor Cao. What matters is that we come back.
I chose to go to UP because I felt it would root me firmly in this country, in its culture and its values and its social currents. It would cement a love of country, a patriotism, a sense of responsibility to give back to my home. By and large, I think my education in UP accomplished that. But going to university in Diliman was always only the first step out into the world.
- Chancellor Sergio Cao, 2006 Commencement Exercise, University of the Philippines Diliman
When one-tenth of our population have left this archipelago to work overseas and provide two-thirds of the country's hard currency in the form of their remittances, you would think the idiocy inherent in this kind of judgmental patriotism would be blown out of the water.
I want to work abroad. I want to study abroad. I want to live abroad. And that doesn't make me a bad Filipino. Or for that matter, a disloyal graduate. Chancellor Cao does a disservice to UP students and to a UP education by implying that merely pursuing opportunities outside the Philippines immediately makes us candidates for contempt.
The fact that our graduates can succeed globally, in countries where neither the Philippines nor UP are well-known or well-respected, is a cause for celebration and not dismay. It proves both that Filipinos are talented enough to challenge the best products of other nations and that a UP education, for all the wailing about its declining standards, is worth more than the faux UP diploma you can buy in Recto. It's a validation of the quality of the institution that Cao is supposed to be guiding towards world-class standards.
But the real reason I want to go abroad is because it is personally enriching. It is definitely financially rewarding, but I'm talking about more than that. The cosmopolitanism created by living in a place and culture totally removed from your own and the confidence that succeeding in such diverse and unwelcoming circumstances breeds are something that UP, and the Philippines in general, cannot give. Here we are strangled by the limitations of the familiar and the conventions of our upbringing. But abroad, more than anything, means the freedom to rise and grow beyond this small and shallow pond.
I know so many brilliant Filipinos, not just from UP, who took this path. They've been successful, and they've been rewarded. They are sharper professionaly, they are more secure financially, and they are bolder and more audacious in their choices both in careers and in lifestyles. But more than anything, in all my conversations with them, they will all say they plan to go back home.
I've always thought that the tragedy of the Philippines isn't that we lack the brilliance or the ability to progress, it's that our expectations of ourselves are so low that we always settle for the mediocre and the ugly instead of what's best and uplifting. The generation of young Filipinos sloshing around the world right now accumulating skills, resources and ideas are the antidote to this self-destructive national impulse. They know what it's like to meet the highest international standards and leap over them. When they come back, they will change the way we do things in the Philippines, in much the same way that the Indian diaspora's success in Silicon Valley and Wall Street are an incredible force for progress in their home country as they come home to invest in their own start-ups and raise their families.
Cao's short-sightedness is in not recognizing that there are many ways to give back to the Philippines. You can stay here, start from the bottom and work your way up. Or you can go abroad, come back on top and work your way down. Eventually these two currents, the self-sacrificing idealists and the self-fulfilling pragmatists, will meet each other in the middle - and when that happens, this country will finally have a set of leaders with the grassroots experience and the international outlook to actually get us somewhere.
The spirit of nationalism was never supposed to be a prison shackling you to your country to the exclusion of what the world has to offer. Instead it's the desire to give back to your home, on your own terms and in your own way. And that's why it doesn't matter if we leave, Chancellor Cao. What matters is that we come back.
I chose to go to UP because I felt it would root me firmly in this country, in its culture and its values and its social currents. It would cement a love of country, a patriotism, a sense of responsibility to give back to my home. By and large, I think my education in UP accomplished that. But going to university in Diliman was always only the first step out into the world.