A NEWS article VoxPop Davao came out with to explain what incident President Rodrigo Duterte was referring to when he said that at the turn of the 20th century, US soldiers killed 600 Moro people in Jolo continues to be read and shared and commented on two days hence.
It has gathered 435 comments and threads as of 3:25 p.m. Wednesday in the VoxPop website (www.voxpop.com.ph). It also reached 943,143 people, got 21,903 reactions, comments and shares, and generated 123,691 post clicks in the VoxPop Davao Facebook page.
Still, majority are admitting it was a part of Philippine history that they never knew about. Yesterday, September 7, VoxPop Davao ran a follow-up story, this time with regards the absence of awareness about Mindanao history all because Mindanao history has never been mainstreamed, a conclusion two respected anthropologists agree to: Redemptorist Bro. Karl Gaspar and Jesuit Fr. Albert Alejo.
“If history teachers have only relied in DepEd authorized textbooks and have not done supplementary readings from specialized scholarly materials made available since the 1970s and articles in prestigious international and local journals, their students would not have learned anything about Mindanao's history,” said Bro. Karl, who is the Academic Dean of the Theology Program , a consortium of the St. Alphonsus Theological and Mission Institute and the Ateneo de Davao University, and Professor of Anthropology at ADDU.
“(It’s an) urgent call to produce education materials that serve peace and development. Not debate or complaints but production of materials and disseminated nationwide,” Fr. Alejo said.
Fr. Alejo was the one who spearheaded the Righting Mindanao project in 2012, which sought to produce teachers’ modules from Grade One to High School on Mindanao history, facts, and figures, as supplement to the black hole that Mindanao is in mainstream school textbooks and correct historical errors that have been committed in just about every edition of Sibika at Kultura textbooks.
This project, however, was shelved when it ran out of funds for production after work had to be redone following findings that some of the modules up of publication cannot be copyrighted.
With a Mindanaoan as President, and with President Rodrigo Duterte often referring to the historical injustices committed to Mindanao and its people, it should be high time for government and academe to work as one to correct all the wrongs in school textbooks as well as include all that has been conveniently excluded, specifically Mindanao.
We cannot continue educating generations upon generations of children with nary an idea about the history of Mindanao and its people, even those in Mindanao themselves. The absence of knowledge and acknowledgement of a dark past, the conflict in Mindanao continues to simmer and prejudice against the people of Mindanao is sustained for yet another generation.