By Atty. Jijil Jimenez
Banning books from schools, like some administrators of our state colleges reportedly just did, is like an act of intellectual self-castration. It is anathema to the secular spirit of free inquiry upon which the idea of an institution of higher learning is founded. And yet, invoking grounds of public order, public good and public morals, or private sectarian values or other, we do it all the time.
When we were kids, we used to smuggle and read brightly colored picture books on how to become a werewolf in class amid the droning lectures of kindly grade school teachers who were none the wiser. We’d memorize the correct incantations down to the last comma and make solemn pacts to each other to try it at home when the moon is right. What if we did become werewolves!
By our first year in high school, we were already done with the entire row of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew novels in our school library, we chewed up on the Bobsey Twins as well. One day, I found Her, by Anonymous, in our library. I picked it up, browsed through the pages quickly and found sex, so much sex. I was to have more later in life but at that time, it was the most about sex I had, ever.
Until now, I still don’t know why the book was there in the library of a Catholic sectarian high school, but it was, and I wasn’t supposed to read it. What I did was pick up a Max Brand Western lying close by and chucked Her in between its pages – it’s a thin volume – and repaired to a seat at the remotest corner of the library and started to read, all of it.
Then, overcome by the proselytizing impulse like one who just had a mystic epiphany, I secretly spread the word. One by one kindred spirits at age 14 took turns doing the same as I did until a few days later, the book was no longer there. We were found out.
I realized later that we were reported to our principal, a kindly, erudite woman who most probably ordered the book quietly withdrawn from the shelf and did nothing more. Or so I thought, because a few days later, I suddenly received a copy of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus from another high school principal, who scribbled a personal dedication for me – I already lost the words – on the inside cover page of each.
Until today, I swear, having read those books, I still see elephants inside the boa constrictors of life, and still wonder at airports where all these people are going; and see hope, faith and love amid the revolutions of growing up.
Our high school principal taught English literature in college. When I was eight, she gave me a copy of her favorite poem, William Cullen Bryant’s Thanatopsis, to read. It was beyond the ken of my early understanding, but she simply said to read it for the sound and rhythm of the English language. More importantly, she was an associate professor of Biology, and clearly understood what battering raging hormones can do to adolescents, like me then.
Here were two high school principals, both traditional educators in an economically backwater city in Mindanao, taking up the case of the growth of my mind. One was my mother, Florencia, the other, my favorite godmother, Crisanta.
I was already reading Harold Robbins’ The Betsy, raided from a locked bookshelf of another kindred spirit’s parent when these two women intervened, and probably just in time cut a dangerous descent to sexual fiendship, although I doubt if simply reading can do that. But they knew, formally and instinctively, that we can only fight an idea with another, better idea, and that it is better to prepare young minds to think on their own than to engage in futile acts of removing books from shelves.
Today, I cannot find anything more self-defeating than to counter the spread of so-called dangerous ideas than taking books off the shelves of our public schools’ libraries.
Over five hundred years have already passed since Gutenberg invented the press and Martin Luther and his allies among the German princes used it to mass produce his German translation of the bible. While the spread of literacy led to the rise of German nationalism and sparked religious wars that eventually ended the Holy Roman Empire of the German states in Luther and Gutenberg’s time, and make the current government understandably skittish today, such literacy is now driven increasingly by digital media, not print.
I am not sure what these supposedly “subversive” materials were that Kalinga State University, Isabela State University and Aklan State University were reported to have surrendered to the authorities but they were described in the news as “books on peace negotiations between the Philippine government and National Democratic Front.”
If these were so, then research-minded scholars of these schools and UP Diliman’s Office of the Chancellor’s Executive Committee, most vociferous in protesting the withdrawal of these materials, need not worry about availability, if that is their only concern. We can all safely bet they are all over in their atom forms lying around, and in their byte forms, readily searchable in the internet, too.
However, we all know that the concerns of our friends in Diliman goes beyond that. To them, academic freedom, like the very idea of freedom, is non divisible. It’s not about whether you have more or less of it, but whether you have it, or you don’t have it at all. And the concept of indivisibility applies not just to individual schools but to our entire system of higher education taken as whole. Their beef is with the higher principles, not practical concerns.
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Editor’s Note: Atty. Angelo “Jijil” Jimenez is Of Counsel at the Jaromay and Laurente and Associates and contributes thought pieces to various digital publications on a range of topics. He is an expert on international migration issues, having been Labor Attaché to Japan, Kuwait and Iraq and Deputy Administrator on the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA). He is also a lecturer on Philippine overseas employment laws at the UP Law Center’s Mandatory Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) program. He was a member of the University Philippines Board of Regents, the highest policy-making body of the UP System, from November 2017 to July 2021. He may be reached by liking and following his blog page on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/obtuse101