Monsieur to a convict is like a glass of water to one of the shipwrecked of the Medusa. Ignominy thirsts for consideration.

– Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

There is a kind of person we find easy to forgive: someone who made one careless mistake, admitted it quickly, apologized sincerely, and never did it again. Then there is everyone else: the person who lied for years, the friend who betrayed us, the relative who keeps repeating the same harm, or the offender whose apology comes only after the consequences become painful. It is easy to support forgiveness as an idea. It is much harder when a real person stands before us carrying the weight of what they have done. So, should everyone get a second chance?

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Pope John Paul II’s 1980 encyclical Dives in Misericordia (Rich in Mercy) do not give us a simple yes or no. Both treat mercy not as softhearted denial, but as a response that holds together human dignity, truth, responsibility, and the possibility of change. The better question may be this: Must a person’s worst act become the whole truth about them?

The man society had already judged

At the beginning of Les Misérables, Jean Valjean has been turned into a verdict. He has spent nineteen years in the French prison system: five for breaking a window and stealing a loaf of bread for his widowed sister’s hungry children, and fourteen more added because of four escape attempts. On release, he must carry a yellow passport identifying him as a former convict. It is not quite accurate to say that he is rejected by literally everyone, but the pattern is unmistakable: doors close, lodging is denied, and even the work he finds is underpaid.1

Valjean has served his legal sentence, yet society treats that sentence as his permanent identity. In Hugo, we see an interest not only in crime but also in what happens after punishment. What future does a society offer when it tells a person to reform while blocking nearly every path back into ordinary life? Valjean’s bitterness does not come from nowhere. Years of brutal confinement and rejection have deepened it. That history helps explain his conduct; it does not excuse it.

Then Bishop Myriel offers him a meal, shelter, and a bed. Valjean repays him by stealing the bishop’s silver plates. When the police return Valjean, the bishop says the silver was a gift and adds two candlesticks. After the officers leave, he tells Valjean to use the silver to become an honest man. In one English translation, he declares: “You no longer belong to evil, but to good.”2

We should not flatten this scene into a general rule that victims must conceal crimes or refuse legal help. It is one character’s radical, freely chosen act in a novel. Myriel takes a personal risk with his own property; he does not volunteer someone else’s safety or erase someone else’s loss. Nor does he simply announce, “Nothing happened.” He knows that Valjean stole from him. His gift changes what can happen next. The silver becomes both material help and a moral demand: build a different life. Here, a second chance is not a prize for innocence. It is an invitation to become responsible for freedom.

Mercy does not mean that harm was harmless

This is where Dives in Misericordia offers an important correction to the idea that mercy is merely being nice. Reflecting on Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son, John Paul II does not deny that the son has wasted his inheritance and hurt his father. The son himself recognizes what he has done. Yet the father sees that something fundamental remains: his son’s humanity and dignity. The son has acted badly, but he has not become worthless.3

Mercy, then, is not pretending that an injury caused no harm. It does not erase victims, cancel every consequence, or require trust to return on command. As the encyclical puts it, mercy differs from justice but is not opposed to it.4 Later, it states plainly that generous forgiveness does not cancel “the objective requirements of justice.”5 That question is uncomfortable because punishment can feel final, while restoration is usually slow. Restoration may include restitution, treatment, supervision, changed behavior, and limits that last for years. In some cases, safety may require permanent separation.

John Paul II warns that a world stripped of forgiveness would become a world of “cold and unfeeling justice.” He also calls forgiveness a basic condition for reconciliation.6 Read in context, this is not a call to abandon boundaries. It is a warning that justice alone cannot create healed relationships or a humane society.

Our language can work against that possibility. We say that someone is a thief, a liar, an addict, a criminal, or a failure. Such words may point to real acts or patterns. But when a description becomes a person’s permanent name, it can deny even the possibility of change. The label becomes a second prison, one with no release date.

Valjean changes, but not all at once

It would be easy to make Valjean’s story too neat: the bishop forgives him, Valjean sees the light, and from then on, he is a different man. Hugo does not make transformation that simple. Soon after leaving the bishop, Valjean encounters Petit-Gervais, a young traveling chimney sweep from Savoy. When the boy drops a forty-sou coin, Valjean plants his foot on it and drives him away. Only afterward does he fully grasp what he has done. He calls for the boy and searches for him, but cannot find him.7

Before we get lost in the succeeding events of the novel, let us pause before the scene because it matters. Valjean is not instantly perfected. He is a man caught between an old, hardened self and a new moral possibility. Mercy has opened a door; it has not carried him through it.

Years later, under the name Monsieur Madeleine, he has become a successful manufacturer and the mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer. He creates jobs and uses his wealth generously. Yet even his good intentions cannot prevent every injustice: Fantine is dismissed from his factory by a supervisor without his knowledge, and Valjean realizes too late how badly she has been failed. He then cares for her and commits himself to rescuing her daughter, Cosette.8

Later still, he risks his safety for other people, including Marius, the young man Cosette loves. His life does not become spotless or simple, but its direction changes. Valjean’s second chance matters because mercy does not stop with him. Mercy received becomes mercy practiced. That may be one of the clearest signs that change is real: not a dramatic promise, but a sustained difference in how a person treats other people.

What if the person does not change?

Not every life follows Valjean’s arc. Some people apologize and repeat the harm. Some use the language of forgiveness to avoid accountability. Some demand the same access to our lives without doing the work required to become trustworthy. No one is morally required to make themselves, or anyone else, unsafe in order to prove that they are merciful.

Forgiveness, reconciliation, and trust overlap, but they are not the same thing. Forgiveness can mean giving up revenge or refusing to let hatred govern one’s life. Reconciliation rebuilds a relationship and requires participation from both sides. Trust concerns what it is reasonable and safe to rely on; once broken, it must be earned through consistent conduct.

These distinctions are a practical interpretation of mercy, not definitions supplied word for word by Hugo or the encyclical. They matter because careless talk about “second chances” can pressure victims to resume contact, restore authority, or ignore danger. Yet Christian mercy cannot be reduced to keeping one’s distance and then forgetting the person who caused harm. Mercy must remain joined to charity: the steady desire for that person’s good, conversion, and restoration to a life of truth, even when prudence requires separation.

A person may therefore be forgiven without being welcomed back into the same role and treated as fully human without being given the same access. Refusing revenge does not require pretending that trust has been repaired. Love may take the form of prayer, honest correction, fair treatment, help offered through safe channels, or support for genuine reform. It does not mean shielding someone from the consequences of what they did; those consequences may be part of how responsibility and change become possible.

In that sense, a boundary need not be the opposite of mercy or charity. It can protect the wounded, restrain further harm, and leave room for the wrongdoer to seek a better path. The aim is neither easy reinstatement nor cold abandonment, but a love governed by truth, justice, and concern for the good of everyone involved.

The risk and discipline of hope

The bishop’s mercy is risky. He has no guarantee that Valjean will change. Valjean has just stolen from him. That is what makes the scene unsettling. The bishop acts before he has proof of reform. Most of us want the proof first: an honest account, restitution, treatment, years of changed behavior. Often, that caution is wise. Yet people also need some real way to demonstrate change. A society that demands rehabilitation while permanently excluding people from work, housing, community, and civic life creates a contradiction: “Become different, but we will never treat you differently.”

This tension lies at the heart of a second chance. Hope says, “You can become more than what you have done.” Accountability says, “You must still face what you have done.” Without hope, justice can harden into vengeance. Without accountability, mercy can collapse into indulgence. In Dives in Misericordia, mercy restores a person “to value” and helps draw good from evil without calling evil good.9 Hugo turns that idea into a life. Bishop Myriel not only spares Valjean from arrest; he confronts him with the possibility, and obligation, of becoming someone new.

So, should everyone get a second chance?

Everyone should be regarded as more than their worst act. That does not mean everyone is owed the same kind of second chance, from every person, in every setting. For someone leaving prison, a second chance may mean a fair opportunity to find work and housing. In a damaged friendship, it may mean one honest conversation—or respectful distance. In a workplace, it may involve supervision and a gradual return of responsibility. After abuse or repeated harm, it may mean recognizing the wrongdoer’s humanity while maintaining a firm, even permanent, boundary.

A second chance does not make the past disappear. It means the past need not dictate the only future available. Jean Valjean is not transformed because someone tells him that theft does not matter. He begins to change because someone sees that theft is not all he is, and then calls him to live according to that larger truth. That may be the hardest form of mercy: not excusing a person, not trusting them blindly, but leaving room for accountability, repair, and moral growth. Second chances matter because none of us is only the sum of our failures. We may not be innocent or untouched by consequence, but we are still unfinished. In Christian theology, that unfinishedness rests finally in God: like the loving father in the parable, he keeps open the way home, calling the sinner to repent and receive mercy again.10

Kabilang sa mga isinagawang aktibidad ang Natatanging Kasuotan, Tagisan ng Talino, at Timpalak sa Pagsulat ng Tula, na nagbigay ng pagkakataon sa mga mag-aaral na ipamalas ang kanilang pagkamalikhain, kaalaman, at pagpapahalaga sa kulturang Pilipino.

Isinagawa ang seremonya ng pagpaparangal noong Setyembre 16, 2026, kung saan kinilala ang mga mag-aaral na nanguna sa iba’t ibang patimpalak. Lalo ring naging makulay ang programa sa pamamagitan ng mga musical number mula sa mga mag-aaral ng Grade 11, na tampok ang mga kontemporaryong awitin at Original Pilipino Music (OPM).

Binigyang-pugay ni Dr. Moreal Camba, Vice Dean for Faculty and Student Affairs ng College of Arts and Sciences, ang sama-samang pagsisikap ng mga guro, hurado, kawani, at higit sa lahat, ng mga mag-aaral na naging bahagi ng pagdiriwang.

Sa kanyang mensahe sa pagtatapos ng programa, binigyang-diin ni Mrs. Elerosa Caparas, Direktor ng Junior College Program, na ang tunay na diwa ng Linggo ng Wika ay higit pa sa isang linggong pagdiriwang.

“At ’yan naman talaga ang dahilan ng pagdiriwang ng Linggo ng Wika. Hindi lang ito tungkol sa pagsusuot ng Filipiniana o Barong. Hindi lang tungkol sa pagbigkas ng ‘Mabuhay!’ o pagsali sa isang programa. Sana hindi lang siya isang Linggo o isang Buwan.

Dahil ang dapat araw-araw na isinasabuhay ang pagnanais nating ipagmalaki kung sino tayo at ang diwa ng pagiging Pilipino.

Ang tanging hiling ko: saanman kayo makarating, huwag kayong maging sobrang global na makalimutan ninyo kung saan kayo nagmula.

Maaari kayong maging world-class at manatiling pusong Pinoy.

Maaari kayong maging mahusay at manatiling mapagpakumbaba, at kilalanin nang may pagmamalaki ang tatak Pinoy.

Maaari kayong mamuno—at marunong pa ring maglingkod.

Sapagkat ang pagiging Pilipino ay hindi isang bagay na iniiwan natin kapag tayo ay umaalis sa Pilipinas. Bahagi ito ng kung sino tayo, at dala-dala natin ito saanman tayo mapunta.”

Sa pamamagitan ng mga gawaing ito, ipinamalas ng UA&P community na ang pagpapahalaga sa pagka-Pilipino ay hindi nagtatapos sa isang programa o pagdiriwang. Sa halip, ito ay isang pagpapahalagang patuloy na hinuhubog at isinasabuhay—kasabay ng paghahanda sa mga mag-aaral na makibahagi sa isang pandaigdigang lipunan nang hindi kinakalimutan ang kanilang pinagmulan.

Sa UA&P, ang pagiging world-class ay maaaring sabayan ng pagiging pusong Pinoy—mahusay ngunit mapagpakumbaba, handang mamuno, at higit sa lahat, handang maglingkod.

Every so often, it is worth returning to the word education itself.

Education is easily associated with schools, classrooms, teachers, lessons, and degrees. Understandably so. But the work of education extends well beyond the classroom.

Two Latin words are often associated with its meaning: educare, to nurture or bring up, and educere, to lead or draw forth. Taken together, they offer a compelling way of thinking about what an educator is called to do.

To educate is, in part, to nurture what is already there. A child comes into a classroom with interests, questions, relationships, a temperament, and a particular way of making sense of the world. A university student does, too. So does a teacher who has been in the profession for twenty years. Education does not begin with an empty person waiting to be filled.

But education also asks that something be drawn forth. There is always the possibility of becoming. Young children make this particularly visible. Watch a child spend a surprisingly long time trying to balance blocks, negotiate with a classmate, make something work, or explain an idea that is still taking shape. An adult may know how to fix the tower. A teacher may already know the word the child is searching for. It is tempting to step in.

Sometimes, though, the better act of teaching is to wait.

There is something of educere in that moment. The educator does not always need to stand in front, pulling the learner toward a predetermined answer. Sometimes the work is to create the conditions, pay close attention, ask a good question, and trust that there is something worth drawing out. This also gives fuller meaning to the idea of holistic development. It can easily become a list: intellectual, physical, social, emotional, moral. But that is not how development is experienced. A person does not develop one domain at a time. Each aspect influences, and is influenced by, the others, all within the development of the same person.

A child learning to take turns is learning much more than a social skill. A university student struggling through a difficult project is learning about the subject, certainly, but perhaps also about frustration, judgment, responsibility, perseverance, and grit. An experienced teacher returning to graduate school brings years of practice into conversation with new ideas. An employee learning to lead a team is also learning how to understand people.The years spent in school are only one part of a much longer life of learning and growth.

This understanding has long been part of the work of the UA&P School of Education and Human Development. As SED marks its Foundation Anniversary this September 15, the occasion offers an opportunity not only to look back on the years that have passed but also to return to a basic question: What does it mean to educate a person?

SED works with children and families. It forms future teachers and accompanies practicing educators. It studies human development and prepares people who will lead learning in schools, communities, and organizations. The settings change. The learners do, too. Yet underneath these different forms of work is one conviction: the human person remains capable of growth throughout life.

Perhaps this is what it means to form leaders of learning across the lifespan.

A leader of learning need not always have a classroom. It may be a preschool teacher who knows when to intervene and when to observe. A parent learning to see a situation from a child’s point of view. A school leader creating the conditions in which teachers can do good work. A human resource professional thinking carefully about how people grow within an organization. Or a university professor who understands that teaching never removes the need to remain a learner. There is something worth noticing in the word educere. To lead out suggests movement. Education should take a person somewhere. Yet educare reminds us that how a person is accompanied along the way matters just as much.

Nurture and draw forth. Care for the person who is here now, while recognizing the person who is still becoming.

Good education can take many forms, and there will always be debates about methods, curricula, and what learners ought to know. Beneath these questions, however, lies something more enduring.

Education begins with seeing the whole person, both as one who is and one who is still becoming.

And, perhaps, that is also where it must always return.

There is a growing paradox in education: Schools must teach students how to use artificial intelligence because they will need it in the workplace. But if students become too dependent on AI, they may fail to develop the very skills employers will need most — critical thinking, creativity, judgment and the ability to solve problems independently.

For the Philippines, getting that balance right is important.

The country continues to lose ground in the global competition for talent. From 54th place in 2022, it slipped to 64th out of 69 economies in the 2025 World Talent Ranking of the Switzerland-based International Institute for Management Development (IMD), scoring just 34.72 out of 100.

Industry leaders and human resources practitioners have long complained about the mismatch between what schools teach and what employers need. Curricula simply cannot adjust fast enough to rapid changes in technology and the workplace.

AI has made that challenge even more urgent.

Schools are now expected not only to teach AI but also to use it in teaching. At the same time, concerns are growing that excessive dependence on technology could weaken, rather than strengthen, learning. Some countries have already reconsidered heavy reliance on digital devices in classrooms and restored greater use of paper, pencils and physical books.

The issue becomes more complicated as AI evolves from generative systems that produce text and images to agentic AI capable of carrying out increasingly complex tasks.

For educators, the question is no longer whether students should use AI. They already do. The real question is how to prepare them for an AI-driven workplace without allowing technology to undermine the skills that education is supposed to develop.

The debate concerns something more fundamental than technology: the role of the human person.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the landmark encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” emphasizing human dignity, the dignity of work, social justice and the common good. On May 15, 2026, Pope Leo XIV issued his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” bringing those concerns into the AI age.

Nowhere is this more relevant than in education, where AI has already become part of everyday academic life.

The 2026 Lumina Foundation-Gallup State of Higher Education survey found that 57 percent of US college students use AI for coursework at least weekly. Students in business, technology and engineering are among its most frequent users.

They use AI to understand difficult lessons, check assignments, improve their writing, summarize lectures and notes, generate ideas and conduct research. Some also use it to write papers.

The benefits are obvious. AI can save time, explain difficult concepts, and help students become more productive.

And when these students graduate, many will enter workplaces where AI will be routine. Schools that refuse to teach students how to use it responsibly risk producing graduates who are poorly prepared for the jobs awaiting them.

But unrestricted AI use presents the opposite danger.

If AI writes the paper, summarizes the readings, supplies the ideas, and answers the questions, what intellectual work is left for the student?

Middle ground

That is where the University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P) offers an interesting middle ground.

UA&P President John Philip R. Yeung recognizes that students will inevitably use AI and other technologies in the real world. The university’s response is not to ban technology outright but to protect authentic learning, higher-order thinking and active engagement. Technology should serve education rather than replace independent thought. Unless specifically permitted by instructors, UA&P’s junior college and undergraduate classes are generally gadget-free. Students refrain from using mobile phones, tablets, laptops, smartwatches, and other personal electronic devices during class.

This is not a rejection of technology. It creates periods when students must concentrate, participate in discussions, listen, reflect and interact directly with teachers and classmates.

The university still uses digital platforms and its learning management system for communication, administration and learning resources. AI also has a place, but students must acknowledge AI-generated material rather than present it as entirely their own work.

I like this balanced but cautious approach. Students need to learn how to work with AI because employers will increasingly expect them to. But they also need to know how to work without it.

A graduate who knows how to prompt an AI system but cannot independently analyze an argument, write coherently, solve a problem or defend an idea is hardly prepared for the future.

The goal of education should not be to produce humans who can compete with machines. AI will inevitably perform many tasks faster and better than we can. Education should instead strengthen what remains distinctly human: judgment, curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, communication, empathy and ethical responsibility.

AI should make students better thinkers, not do their thinking for them.

For Philippine education, that distinction could become increasingly important. If we want to reverse our decline in global talent competitiveness, embracing the latest technology is not enough.

We must make sure that as our machines become smarter, our students do, too.

This article originally appeared on 10 September 2026 in Manila Times, Campus Press

Six months into the US war against Iran which began as a joint Operation Epic Fury with Israel, the world has been plunged into severe economic turmoil, accelerating a shift in the global order. Prior to the conflict, 20 percent to 25 percent of global oil supplies and roughly one-third (30 percent to 38 percent) of seaborne fertilizer exports passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Today, those maritime flows have dwindled to a fraction of their pre-war levels.

Ironically, the aggressors appear most damaged by this military misadventure, remaining entangled in a conflict with no clear path to victory. Meanwhile, Iran’s strategic position has only strengthened.

The United States — under President Donald Trump — stands as a primary casualty of the war. Despite campaigning in 2024 on a promise to end “forever wars,” President Trump, in fact, has dragged the nation into another “no-end-in-sight war.” Operating with a casual personal style of governance that sidesteps democratic norms, the American President assumed he could intervene in Iran much as he did when capturing Maduro in Venezuela. He entered the war — initially framing it as a brief “few-weeks excursion” — without consistent strategic objectives. Over six months, Washington’s stated goals have oscillated wildly: regime change, degrading military capabilities, dismantling the nuclear program, or liberating the Iranian populace. Furthermore, rather than relying on seasoned diplomats and national security experts, President Trump delegated critical peace negotiations to trusted personal associates, Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

This unilateral approach has created a severe rift with traditional Western allies. When European nations refused direct military participation, President Trump responded with harsh economic threats. For instance, after Spain denied US forces permission to launch strikes from Spanish bases, the American President threatened a full trade embargo. When France blocked American supply transports bound for Israel from using its airspace, President Trump publicly chastised Paris for being “unhelpful.” His frustration culminated in public attacks on NATO allies, labeling them “cowards” and branding the alliance a “paper tiger” for declining to patrol the Strait of Hormuz. In social media outbursts, he warned European capitals to “go get your own oil!” and “start learning how to fight for yourselves” — raising fundamental questions about the future of the once impregnable Western alliance and the rise of American isolationism.

While official figures remain undisclosed, the financial toll on the US could be staggering given the immense depletion of munition stockpiles and sustained operational costs — further pressuring an economy already burdened by rising energy prices. Though Washington can claim tactical superiority through relentless bombing, its lack of an exit plan means it is losing strategically.

Iran appears well-prepared for a prolonged war of attrition, aiming to draw the US into a quagmire reminiscent of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. Recognizing that it can win simply by not losing, Tehran has utilized effective asymmetric tactics — deploying drone swarms, striking US bases across the Gulf, and mobilizing its regional proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis).

This strategy has transformed the conflict into a broader regional crisis affecting key Gulf states — including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, and Oman. Highly dependent on oil exports, fertilizer trade, aviation hubs, data centers, and tourism, these nations face severe economic disruption. Doubting Washington’s security guarantees, several are quietly seeking bilateral accommodations with Tehran; Oman, for instance, has already initiated independent negotiations. Furthermore, Iran’s effective leverage over the Strait of Hormuz has exposed the limits of the American naval blockade. Domestically, the foreign invasion has consolidated the power of the hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), rallying even Iranian moderates around a nationalist defense, solidifying Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, and permanently damaging US diplomatic credibility.

Globally, the war’s geopolitical fallout is widespread. With the US heavily involved in Iran, Russia continues its destructive military campaign in Ukraine, and could actually justify its actions by citing Washington’s war. China has adopted a high-ground posture, presenting itself as a neutral mediator advocating for diplomatic resolution while continuing its expanding aggressions in the South China Sea at the same time. Pakistan has elevated its global standing by mediating between both sides, emerging as one of the few diplomatic bridges trusted by both Washington and Tehran.

The global order is shifting rapidly, and one man is at the center of the fracture.

This article originally appeared on 5 September 2026 in Dr Alviar’s Manila Bulletin column, “Inciting Insights.”

The views expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the Publication and the University.

This article was a homily delivered during the Mass for athletes before the pep rally, September 11, 2026, at the Sancta Maria, Stella Orientis Oratory.

Good afternoon to everyone.

I greet all the varsity players of UA&P who are present here. This mass is being celebrated on the occasion of the pep rally to usher in a new season of competition.

The first reading of today’s Mass, from the first Letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, is quite fitting for the occasion.

He writes, “All the runners at the stadium are trying to win, but only one of them gets the prize. You must run in the same way, meaning to win. All the fighters at the games go into strict training; they do this just to win a wreath that will wither away, but we do it for a wreath that will never wither. That is how I run, intent on winning; that is how I fight, not beating the air. I treat my body hard and make it obey me, for, having been an announcer myself, I should not want to be disqualified.”

I would like that we reflect on St. Paul’s words which are applicable not only to sports, but also to life.

Before anything else, I would like to say that I also am a fellow athlete. I was in the varsity track and field team for one year in high school and two years in college. In high school, I ran the 1,500- and 3,000-meter races. In college, I ran the 1,500- and 5,000 meter races. Me and my other teammates running the long-distance races would also regularly run 20 km for training, as well as a mix of other distance runs. I can identify with you athletes and what I will say comes from my experience of competing.

“You must run...meaning to win.” We have to have the attitude of a winner. We may not win all the time, but we should want to win. Anyone who enters competition with the fear of losing won’t cut it. However, we should not be out to win at all costs. We need to compete honestly and gentlemanly, with great respect for our competitors. We are sportsmen who see the need to live virtue.

Life, too, requires a winner’s attitude. We should want to win heaven, our final goal. God has given us this capacity to be holy and we should treat life like a race towards our heavenly goal. This is the “wreath that will never wither”.

“That is how I fight, not beating the air.” Athletes need a strategy, not only in team sports, but also in individual sports. In a team, they need to coordinate with their teammates in order to put a play into effect. Runners need to plan out their race. Players have to plan their game.

In life, we have a clear goal, namely, heaven, holiness. We should live our lives with that goal in mind and never lose sight of it during our day. We ought to have a strategy, which means planning how we will grow in virtue and remove our defects.

“I treat my body hard and make it obey me.” Athletes train for their sport and that requires sacrificing the time they would have spent doing other things. An athlete cannot live a comfortable life. He or she will need to sacrifice for the sake of the game and their teammates. This requires discipline.

Reaching for heaven requires sacrificing what will prevent us from coming closer to God each day. One needs to sacrifice to overcome temptations. We need to sacrifice to help others.

Remember the advice of St. Paul as you train and compete. Have it in mind also as you live through the day. Don’t lose sight of the “wreath that will never wither”, that is union with God in heaven. Do everything for God’s glory.

This present essay was highly edited by the author to meet the standards of Universitas and be more relevant to the UA&P community. The original, simpler version was presented in the 59th UNIV Conference in Rome in April 2026.

A generation that hesitates to speak

People born from the late 1990s up until the early 2010s are collectively referred to as Generation Z or “Gen Z.” They are a generation that has spent all their life in the age of the digital revolution accentuated by smartphones, social media, and internet from childhood. Currently, it is the largest cohort in history, accounting for about a quarter (26%) of the world’s population (Wandhe, 2024). Gen Z has shown a unique set of values and priorities, such as taking more interest in social justice, environmental sustainability, and inclusivity than the previous generation. These concerns are shaped largely by their experiences amidst rapid changes in technology and fluctuations in the economy. In addition, rising violence and social justice movements have consistently populated their social media and thus significantly defined their upbringing (Seemiller & Grace, 2017).

However, Gen Z’s most defining characteristic is their digital ecosystem and dependence on technology. Unlike previous generations, Gen Z does not know a world without the Internet and is constantly accompanied by their smartphones. They use social networks as their main communication tool, mainly Instagram (Martínez–Estrella et al., 2023), and define this generation by the rule of the ‘four i’s’ first coined by Vilanova and Ortega (2017). In the original Spanish, that would be internet, irreverencia, inmediatez, incertidumbre; in English: internet, irreverence, immediacy, incertitude (uncertainty).

This connection to the internet and consequent immediacy of information have given rise to a greater global awareness – and this is perhaps a good thing. Ironically, however, the upshot has not been a stronger sense of community but rather of individualism. This would have something to do with the smartphone – the main source of information – having become an extension of oneself, i.e., a very private and personal tool. The resultant phenomena are more enclosed echo chambers and greater polarization, as the digital ecosystem often filters out dissenting and diverse youth voices. As noted in the Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti, “Persons or situations we find unpleasant or disagreeable are simply deleted in today’s virtual networks; a virtual circle is then created, isolating us from the real world in which we are living” (Pope Francis, 2020).

This virtual isolation brought by technology, combined with a volatile and increasingly political climate, leads Gen Z to continually seek digital safety through the comfort of their screens while observing a “safe and sure” level of anonymity. Because of issues deemed unsafe, combined with the lack of readiness to confront them, they have learned to use technology to build a wall of privacy. One student in a study by Seemiller & Grace (2017) shared, “There is considerable comfort behind a computer screen ... as long as I am being very careful of the information I divulge” (p. 22).

Causes: Social climate, psychological fear, digital environment

Gen Z’s preference for digital safety and controlled self–presentation affects their approaches to communication in both the academic and social contexts. It is most probably not a big surprise that the practice of curating one’s presence online, in which one is assured of comfort and protection, has made young people more averse to the risks of speaking openly in public or face–to–face settings. These situations don’t even have to be externally adversarial, just those in which one is not in full control of everything. Research on the so–called “spiral of silence” shows that these environments encourage caution, selective expression, and a heightened awareness of potential social consequences (Noelle–Neumann, 1993). The following subsections examine three interrelated dimensions of this phenomenon.

The (Un)social climate

Recent research shows that a lot of Gen Z students hesitate to participate in discussions involving controversial topics, particularly in the university/college setting. According to the Campus Expression Survey 2022, for instance, 58.8% of students reported being reluctant to discuss at least one controversial issue presented in the survey (Zhou & Barbaro, 2023), a hesitation that appeared closely connected to their perceptions of their social environment. In that same study, 63.2% of respondents agreed that the campus climate discourages people from expressing their beliefs because others might find those views “offensive” (Zhou & Barbaro, 2023).

When asked why, students often attributed their silence to anticipated negative peer reactions. Many admitted to censoring themselves during classroom discussions for fear of negative responses or even retribution from fellow students. The most common reason was the prospect of other students criticizing (or “bashing”) their comments among each other after class (Zhou & Barbaro, 2023). The practice of speaking openly, therefore, comes to be perceived as a good that comes at such a high social cost, discouraging open and easy participation in discourse.

Interestingly, though, the data suggests that these fears may in fact be exaggerated. Findings have shown that students tend to overestimate their peers’ negative reactions by approximately three times, which means that more than the actual hostility, it is the perceived social risk that plays a greater role in students holding themselves back (Zhou & Barbaro, 2023). Nevertheless, the climate is set: one in which students anticipate criticism and therefore limit their participation in difficult conversations.

These communication patterns spill over beyond the university setting. Research likewise shows that even Gen Z professionals feel a pressure to conceal or modify their personal beliefs in the workplace to maintain professional relationships and career stability (Humphrey, 2024). As a result, habits of cautious communication, developed during university years, may continue into early professional life.

Psychological fear: Cancel culture and conflict avoidance

If the previous subsection talks about social factors to explain Gen Z’s hesitation to engage in contentious discussions, this subsection explores psychological reasons to explain this risk avoidance. Humphrey (2024) talks about “leery conversationalists” in her study on Gen Z communication styles. She defines these as individuals who frequently choose to be silent rather than risk being caught in controversial dialogue. The behavior reflects a mindset that Humphrey describes as “protecting, not persuading,” in which individuals prioritize safeguarding relationships and reputations (theirs and others) instead of attempting to influence others through debate.

The main driver of this mindset is the perceived risk of social cancellation or ostracism, already mentioned above. This means that when the possibility of being criticized publicly or excluded from social circles goes up, so does the perceived cost – and the consequent fear – of expressing unpopular views (Humphrey, 2024). In other words, the more socially dangerous participation in open discourse feels, the worse psychological patterns of conversational restraint get.

External factors as well contribute to these negative psychological tendencies. Perhaps because Gen Z grew up in an era characterized by social instability and global uncertainty, they have developed a heightened level of risk aversion in social interactions. Some scholars have noted that Gen Z perceives emotional discomfort as comparable to physical harm, even as they consider adult social interactions even more threatening. Such an attitude explains, at least partially, why this generation prefers to avoid situations that could provoke confrontation (Moscrip, 2019).

The response of not a few universities has been to design “safe spaces,” supposedly to provide environments where students can express themselves without judgment (Moscrip, 2019). Critics of this approach, however, have argued that while such spaces may offer psychological support for the short term, they may inadvertently harm students in the long run since they reduce students’ exposure to the challenging exchanges necessary for robust intellectual discourse in the university that in turn prepares them for responsible interaction in the outside world (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018).

The screenvironment

Lastly, what may be considered Gen Z’s “reluctance for dialogue” also has an “environmental” explanation. Being the first generation raised with smartphones and social media as constant features of daily life, Gen Z is the generation that grew up in a “screenvironment,” a portmanteau term that we are proposing to mean a setting that privileges digitally mediated communication in place of face–to–face interaction (Gawda & Kosacka, 2025; Kuss & Griffiths, 2017).

One consequence and/or manifestation of having been brought up in this digitally saturated environment is what has now come to be known as “phubbing,” the act of ignoring people physically present in favor of engaging with smartphones (Katta & Jain, 2025). Phubbing, in turn, is explained by yet another phenomenon connected to social media, FOMO, the fear of missing out, i.e., on what may be happening with one’s peer group behind the screen. These behaviors have been associated with reduced relationship satisfaction and increased social withdrawal (Kuss & Griffiths, 2017; Katta & Jain, 2025).

In addition, overconsumption of digital media is considered a main negative factor in cognitive engagement. Researchers have linked the declining attention spans and reduced information retention of Gen Z to short–form, high–stimulus online content (Martínez–Estrella et al., 2023), which they frequently consume. The popular term “brain rot,” later recognized as the 2024 Oxford Word of the Year, reflects concerns about the intellectual effects of excessive exposure to trivial online material (Owens, 2025).

One last concern along this environmental line is that screens are arguably not the optimum environment for human communication. Text–based exchanges lack nonverbal cues such as tone, gestures, and facial expressions, which are part and parcel of a human message. Without these, the risk of misunderstanding a message and “context collapse,” where messages are interpreted without sufficient context (Sernett et al., 2021), increases. It is true, of course, that many Gen Z individuals acknowledge the importance of face–to–face communication for building relationships, but digital interaction and the habits that follow in its train remain deeply embedded as a way of life.

Considering all that has been said above, we can see that Gen Z’s hesitation to engage in open discourse has come from a combination of social, psychological, and technological forces. A perceived climate of judgment, especially in the light of woke cancel culture, has encouraged self–censorship. As well, increased awareness of social risks and fear of confrontation have discouraged more spontaneous engagements with others in conversation. Lastly, prioritizing efficiency and convenience in a digitally mediated environment has reduced opportunities for practicing face–to–face dialogue, even if only unwittingly. The question now is what the consequences have been of having cultivated a generation that, despite being highly socially aware, is, ironically, increasingly cautious when confronted with difficult conversations.

Consequences: Silos, silence, isolation

The communication hesitation discussed in the previous section has not remained confined to individual or even small group interactions. Having been replicated across digital networks and social platforms, these patterns have contributed to broader social consequences which we are now experiencing. What we seem to be witnessing now is an increased polarization and social isolation among Gen Z amidst algorithmic media environments, identity–driven communities, and digitally mediated relationships.

Ideological silos

The digital age – and now, the age of AI – has opened the world to unprecedented access to overabundant digital information. But has that produced deeper engagement with public issues for Gen Z? The answer is “not necessarily.” A significant number of Gen Z adopt what scholars call a “news-finds-me” perception, the belief that important information will eventually reach them through social media feeds, online platforms, or word of mouth. It is a passive approach that discourages active inquiry and fosters reliance on “the algorithm” (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2017). Although not an exclusive Gen Z phenomenon, this has a greater impact on Gen Z (and presumably the generation after it) as this negative phenomenon is affecting them while still in a vulnerable developmental stage. The upshot is fragmented and superficial knowledge.

This resulting type of knowledge, of course, is a feature rather than a bug of this dependence on social media algorithms. Considering that platform algorithms, bound as they are to commercial ends, are programmed to prioritize content aligned with a user’s past preferences and interactions and designed to maximize engagement by frequently promoting emotionally stimulating material that reinforces existing viewpoints rather than presenting diverse perspectives, typical Gen Z users then cannot help but be exposed over and over only to content that they prefer (content that they agree with and that please them). This is a process called “selective exposure.” As a result, contradictory or uncomfortable information is filtered out, producing what researchers describe as “filter bubbles,” i.e., digital environments in which users repeatedly encounter messages that validate their beliefs while rarely engaging with opposing views (Pariser, 2011).

This process naturally leads to confirmation bias, which is the tendency for individuals to seek information and sources that only support their existing beliefs while glossing over conflicting evidence. This is a process that eventually creates “echo chambers,” spaces – especially digital spaces – in which users circulate and affirm ad nauseam the same narratives. Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein (2018) affirms that the “echo chamber effect is dramatically higher on social media” (p. 116). No wonder that it is on these platforms that emotionally charged headlines, misinformation, and polarized rhetoric spread virally and erupt into the real world resulting in more intense hostility between ideological groups.

The upshot of the above phenomena is the formation of “ideological silos” in which individuals keep to themselves, further becoming insulated from alternative, possibly transforming perspectives. This phenomenon was seen clearly in the 2022 presidential election. Recent research on political communication in the Philippines highlights how TikTok’s recommendation algorithm reinforced the formation of these echo chambers and ideological silos. During the campaign, users who watched partisan political videos were increasingly shown similar content, creating distinct online communities supporting rival candidates and limiting exposure to opposing perspectives that only deepened social division in the country (Ong et al., 2022).

The spiral of silence

One of the most significant consequences of the rise of ideological silos is the sharp rise in youth’s sensitivity to social risks that accrue to non-conformity and dissenting opinions. Since users inevitably need to venture outside of their digital comfort zones to other virtual or physical environments that do not necessarily share their same opinions, ill-equipped with the needed openness or resilience to handle contradictions within these environments (Nguyen, 2020), many users adopt strategies of self-censorship to avoid stress or discomfort. For instance, approximately 63% of students report withholding their opinions online due to fear of negative reactions or social backlash (Weintraub, 2025).

Yet such dynamics can extend beyond digital spaces. For example, students whose online environment is consistently bombarded by only one ideological position are hardly prepared to voice alternative perspectives during classroom discussions. The upshot is a failed opportunity for meaningful dialogue and, ironically, an increased possibility for division despite the original intent to avoid conflict (Getreu, 2022, p. 17).

This pattern reflects the well-known “spiral of silence” (Noelle–Neumann, 1993), a phenomenon in which individuals refrain from expressing opinions they perceive as unpopular to avoid social isolation. The term is not gratuitous since the “vicious cycle” of silence does not remain on one plane, but rather directs itself inward and deeper: hence, a “spiral.” Moreover, this silence reinforces itself because when dissenting views remain unspoken, the actual extent of “dominant views” is externally exaggerated, which in turn further discourages open disagreement. In these cases, the “external majority” may not be the “real majority.”

Eventually, these patterns contribute to a broader cultural shift toward tribalism, i.e. first, virtual or digital tribalism; then, actual or socio-political tribalism, no thanks to the human being’s natural tendency (Greene, 2018). While this natural “groupish-ness” may have served the human species to progress from individualism to community (Haidt, 2013) political identities being increasingly tied to online communities and group affiliations produce ideological silos, which pose a true peril to social cohesion when they eventually make their way into actual society as they are wont to. Indeed, social media facilitates political engagement and identity formation, but they can also trap individuals within polarized communities that rarely interact constructively with opposing viewpoints, virtually or in the real world.

Connected yet isolated

The principle of double effect just mentioned, as applied to social media, brings us to what researchers call the “alone together” paradox: the same technologies that promise constant connectivity have also been associated with growing social isolation. Research by Kuss & Griffiths (2017) has shown that when individuals are continuously connected through digital platforms, they experience a declining emotional intimacy and social support. Yet the more they lose social connection, the more time they spend on the screen. In fact, the paradox is also another vicious spiral, a spiral of isolation.

How does this harmful spiral begin? Ironically, perhaps with something quite natural and otherwise benign: the tendency of the human brain to process social rejection with an intensity like physical pain, which then encourages individuals to avoid situations where they might experience criticism or exclusion (Bowler, 2020, p. 4). However, when this phenomenon is paired with the lure of online communication that allows rapid but relatively stress-free interaction as a readily accessible consolation from or, worse, a simple substitute for complex face-to-face relationships, the insidious dynamic begins. Because online connections often lack the embodied cues – tone, gesture, and shared presence – that sustain deeper interpersonal relationships, the user feels more vulnerable to rejection. The spiral then goes deeper.

Furthermore, as if handing users an extra spade to dig deeper into this tendency, digital platforms provide convenient alternatives to what otherwise could have been communal activities. For example, one can now order food online, join in online fitness sessions, or attend virtual gatherings, all of which promise to ease the loneliness of solitary living without the trouble of coordinated social interaction. While apparently harmless, over time, these conveniences encourage habits of withdrawal, and shared communal experiences are gradually replaced with solitary digital routines. They reinforce what Zaki (2025) describes as “social inertia.”

The above dynamic contributes to what some scholars describe as a “loneliness crisis.” Indeed, studies indicate that with their digital engagement often replacing time spent in face-to-face interaction, Gen Z reports higher levels of social isolation and loneliness, heightened anxiety, reduced social confidence, and greater vulnerability to depression than previous generations (Bowler, 2020, p. 1).

Solutions: Rebuilding dialogue

So, what now? Amidst the daunting psychological fear of cancellation, the “spiral of silence,” and isolating effects “ideological silos” is there a way out for Gen Z from digital alienation to authentic participation? We propose a “dynamically composite” framework that combines Karol Wojtyla’s Personalism and Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics (Cortes, 2026) since we understand that personal cognitive agency and virtues are key for young people to make that first leap in cultivating a positive counterforce that overcomes negative habits accumulated from overexposure to the “screenvironment.” However, since reversing the inertia of the “screenvironment” and reclaiming physical encounter are tasks impossible for individuals to do on their own, the framework also recognizes the necessity of interpersonal and institutional aspects.

The personal tier: subverting algorithmic agency

Because Gen Z’s hesitation to engage is deeply linked to the “curated comfort” of digital zones, any effective remedy must begin with individual awareness. Reclaiming personal agency requires transforming the passive “news-finds-me” perception mentioned above into a practice of proactive, critical media literacy (Li et al., 2025). What does it look like in practice?

To answer the question, we begin with Wojtyła’s (2008b) distinction between the “transitive” effect of an action (its external result) and the “intransitive” effect (how an action shapes the person inwardly) and draw out practical applications from the dynamic that exists between these two. For instance, when Gen Z users mindlessly consume content, the intransitive effect of this action is the reinforcement of cognitive passivity, personal biases, and tribalistic tendencies. The transitive effect is withdrawal from engaging with those who do not share one’s same ideas on the one hand, or violence against them on the other.

Subverting this algorithmic control requires exercising the classical intellectual virtues of prudence and temperance. On a practical level, we suggest the following concrete practices to cultivate these virtues:

• Diversifying one’s data consumption: Deliberately seeking out reliable, opposing perspectives on controversial issues and engaging with arguments based on logic rather than emotional reaction (utilizing services like Ground News to facilitate objective balance) even if they make one feel uncomfortable.

• Pausing to engage properly: Practicing temperance by reading an opponent’s online posts in full before reacting and pausing to verify if shared articles come from authoritative sources.

• Reconnecting with nature: Setting strict daily phone limits and actively replacing “doomscrolling” - spending excessive amounts of time watching short-form content or watching large quantities of user-generated content or news (Leskin, 2022) – with 30-minute walks alone or with a friend to “touch grass” and commune directly with physical reality.

Reclaiming personal cognitive agency is a prerequisite for dialogue, but human fulfillment cannot be achieved in isolation. The individual must step outward, applying these cultivated virtues to direct, face-to-face relational encounters.

The interpersonal tier: Face-to-face workshops and interpersonal communio

Once the person commits to dismantling the “screenvironment,” the second step is to engage in direct human relationships, already alluded to in the last practical suggestion above. As Stanford researcher Jamil Zaki (2025) proposes, this requires an intentional “leap of faith” back into face-to-face connections. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle suggests that the truest form of friendship requires “living together and rational converse,” as the virtuous person relates to his friend as “another self”.

To facilitate this practice, communities and organizations can organize structured dialogue workshops in which participants turn off the “inner debater” and learn to see opponents not as “morally flawed adversaries,” but as persons with valid underlying concerns. A highly effective tool, used by some organizations, is the L.A.P.P. (Listen, Acknowledge, Pivot, Perspective), which actively reduces affective polarization by teaching participants how to navigate tense verbal disagreements constructively (Forde, 2024).

A perfect complement to the principles above is Karol Wojtyła’s personalism, which views dialogue as a communio personarum (community of persons) – a mode of acting where individuals mutually affirm each other’s dignity (Wojtyła, 2008c). Thus, to enhance the effectiveness of these workshops, we suggest prioritizing “breaking bread” before discussing contentious issues. We thus create a relational context where the “other” is experienced as a person rather than a representative of an opposing ideology (Wojtyła, 2008a).

Beyond formal structures, simple, practical gestures are a powerful way of reinstating face-to-face interpersonal connections that remain the “gold standard” of human relationships. One example is inviting one’s classmates for coffee after class – especially those with whom one is not particularly familiar.

The institutional tier: The UA&P setting as exemplar

While resisting the screenvironment begins with personal and inter-personal remedies, institutional support is vital to sustain these efforts. By designing physical environments that decisively privilege face-to-face interaction over screens, schools and universities offer a solution to the problem that address a massive portion of a student’s day.

The policy and culture of the University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P) serves as a compelling exemplar of this institutional approach. UA&P has strengthened structural measures that not only align closely with the personalist and virtue-ethics frameworks required to rebuild dialogue but also directly reinforce its educational philosophy of prioritizing the “formation of the whole person” and cultivating “unity of life” through a strong liberal education curriculum.

Specifically, UA&P’s “Policy on Authentic Learning in the Age of AI” serves as an objective case study in disrupting digital isolation and “social inertia.” Central to this is establishing “gadget-free learning environments” as a general classroom rule. Despite potential resistance, intentionally carving out device-free spaces is a step in the right direction as they cultivate “sustained attention, meaningful conversation, and authentic human interaction.” This prompts students to develop habits of “careful listening” and “thoughtful dialogue” (University of Asia and the Pacific, 2026) otherwise eroded by “phubbing” and social media distractions.

Furthermore, UA&P counters Gen Z’s conversational risk aversion and the “spiral of silence” by privileging “direct classroom engagement” and “authentic assessment.” Emphasizing interactive, face-to-face methods – such as oral examinations, presentations, in-class writing, case discussions, and supervised exercises – simultaneously shifts students away from passive information consumption and strengthens academic accountability.

On one hand, these back-and-forth pedagogical approaches immerse students in constructive, face-to-face academic disagreement, teaching them that perceived social risks are exaggerated and that sharing their perspectives and listening to others is an act of self-fulfillment (Wojtyła, 2008d). On the other hand, supervised, interactive settings compel students to articulate their reasoning and defend conclusions in real time, making it far more difficult to rely on mindless, AI-generated outputs.

Ultimately, UA&P does not merely regulate technology; it actively preserves the conditions for authentic learning and interpersonal communio. By requiring students to take full responsibility for their intellectual output while engaging in embodied discourse, UA&P’s institutional culture provides a practical pathway for Gen Z to subvert algorithmic passivity, reclaim personal agency, and rediscover dialogue as a meaningful and “disinterested gift of self” (St. Pope Paul VI,1965).

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With the theme of “Building a Water-Secure Future: Local Solutions for Long-Term Water Security,” the forum focused on a simple but powerful idea: that national water problems are best solved through collective action at the local level. The forum showcased real-world success stories where local governments took charge of their water security: creating an effective and evidence-based water security plan as shown by the Provincial Government of Negros Occidental in partnership with the local communities; establishing a local economic enterprise to improve the service and sustainability of LGU-run water utilities in the Municpality of Narra in Palawan; and accessing innovative financing models to develop new water sources and construct water systems that will increase household access to safe drinking water, as shown by the Municipality of Sibonga, Cebu.

The forum gathered 150 participants from across 50 local government units (LGUs); national government agencies such as the Department of Economy, Planning and Development (DEPDev), the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG), the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), the Subic-Clark Alliance for Development (SCAD); the private sector; academia; and the international development community.

“National water security is ultimately achieved through local action,” stated DEPDev Assistant Secretary Erik Planta, who noted that while there are many national policies and international agreements on water security, LGUs remain in the best position to create long-term solutions due to the unique needs in specific communities. “A whole-of-community approach is required to make any gains and to sustain them in the long-term. This is the only way the Philippines can meet its targets under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal No. 6 for clean water,” Planta said.

The event also marked the official start of a new partnership between the CRC-ILD and the Union of Local Authorities of the Philippines (ULAP). ULAP is the primary national umbrella organization representing provinces, cities, municipalities and barangays in the Philippines, and works to champion local autonomy and good governance. “CRC and ULAP are working together on many fronts, including making this water security forum a success. We are looking forward to collaborating with ULAP and its network of LGUs across the country to unlock the full potential of local governments with the right knowledge, tools, and support, and make LGUs the key driver of growth for the Philippines,” said Dr. Bernardo Villegas, co-founder and research director of CRC.

(From L-R) UA&P and CRC President Atty. Philip Yeung; CRC Trustee Francis Sebastian; ULAP Secretary General and Batangas Vice Governor Hermilando Mandanas; and ULAP National Executive Officer and Philippine Councilors League Chairman Hon. Benjie Abalos present the Memorandum of Understanding between CRC and ULAP.

Over 150 high-level participants from national agencies and local government units, academia, private sector, civil society, and international development partners joined the Fourth Forum on Local Governance and Development to discuss local solutions that advance water security DEPDev Assistant Secretary Roderick Planta emphasized the importance of aligning local development plans with the Philippine Water Supply and Sanitation Master Plan (PWSSP), underscoring the critical role of LGUs in advancing water security across the country.

DEPDev Assistant Secretary Roderick Planta emphasized the importance of aligning local development plans with the Philippine Water Supply and Sanitation Master Plan (PWSSP), underscoring the critical role of LGUs in advancing water security across the country.

Mr. Albert Felizarto, Municipal Economic Enterprise and Development Officer (MEEDO) of the Municipality of Narra, Palawan, shares their LGU’s experience on implementing utility reform and operating an LGU-managed water supply enterprise during the Local Governance Forum.

They never taught us how to prepare for war.

We were taught how to prepare presentation decks, rehearse a thesis defense, and duck under our desks during an earthquake drill. But nobody stood at the forefront of a classroom and taught us what to do when a missile strikes your hometown.

On March 16, 2026, an Iranian missile struck the streets of my hometown, Abu Dhabi, killing a Palestinian expat, not too far from my father’s home.1

Until recent events, Abu Dhabi was simply home. It was the walk with friends from school to the nearest baqala (a local convenience shop) after our last period, complaining about the homework we had yet to start. It was the Lebanese bakery my dad would stop by every morning to get my siblings and me fresh manakeesh (Middle Eastern flatbread with cheese and toppings) before class, where the owner knew our orders by heart. It was the comfort in ordinary routines—the way a home is supposed to be. What’s deemed an ordinary life is fueled almost entirely on an assumed future; you build routines you’d never imagine losing.

My father, an overseas Filipino worker (OFW) of over 14 years, moved my family to Abu Dhabi to give us a better life—an act built on that assumed future. In many ways, it worked. Those very streets shaped who I am, molding my primitive years and embedding the very principles I carry with me today: to respect cultures unlike my own, to adapt alongside upbringings different from mine, and to see customs that once felt foreign as simply someone else’s normal.

Those were the very streets that shaped who I am—the Corniche I strolled along on the weekends, Arabic slang I picked up from classmates, and getting groceries at Al Wahda with my family after church. I thought I knew the roads like the back of my hand, knowing every corner of the very city that raised me. Yet after all those years, I never once questioned where the nearest safety shelter was.

Last June of 2025, Iran targeted the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, rattling the Arabian Gulf and shaking the lives of everyone in it.² I was in Abu Dhabi that summer. Weeks before the strike, I watched my childhood friends walk across the graduation stage in perfectly tailored dresses and suits, holding four years of academic life in a single diploma. After the ceremony, we talked in the venue’s lobby about what college might bring us in the next four years. The future still felt certain.

That was the last time our conversations belonged to the future.

After the strike, our group chat changed. Conversations shifted from the future to the present. A group chat once filled with memes, life updates, and heaps of inside jokes now opens to screenshots of news alerts, stretches of silence, and a friend asking how we’re holding up. Looking back, I don’t think this shift is merely about the news itself—it’s about what stability can give in places its absence cannot. Stability lends peace; it’s what allows one to think ahead: about the future, and for us, about college. Without stability, time turns into a luxury you can’t afford; and everything else collapses into the now.

The reality of everything—the Gulf states closing into open conflict—only started seeping in when the UAE and neighbouring countries closed their airspace, halting my family’s flight back to Manila and almost costing me UA&P’s freshman orientation program. My friends, on the other hand, had to rethink their move-in dates and campus tours. Even our very futures, it turned out, were only ever one closed airspace away from altering the plans we’d looked forward to.

Talking about evacuation plans with your family is something no lecture ever warns you about. And yet it is not uncommon. Families in Sudan, in Ukraine, across Gaza, and the wider Middle East don’t read about this in a headline—they live inside it, a constant present. Their realities are recalculated one day at a time, with almost no room to plan far enough ahead.

In the Philippines, most of us have never had to trade the future in for the present so directly. If anything, most students have grown up with enough stability that their futures were always assumed—a set major, a five-year plan, a life to build without first asking whether there’d be a country left standing in the first place. Not long ago, I was the one who couldn’t take that future for granted. Now I sit in a lecture hall assuming one, while my father is left calculating evacuation routes back home. It’s easy to forget that security is, in part, held up by familial sacrifice—in a parent, a sibling, a Tito or Tita who traded their own nearness for ours so that stability can exist at all. My father sacrificed birthdays, holidays, and simple Sundays, so we could plan our lives without flinching. That is his trade: his present for our future.

And even that trade of life is a privilege of its own compared to what “today” demands of others. For a mother in Gaza, it can mean wondering whether there will be enough clean water to feed her children before nightfall. For families displaced across Sudan and Congo, it’s the next meal, the next safe hour, and a comfortable place to sleep. Some of us worry about missing a flight home; others are only ever worrying about whether there will be a home at all.

War is not a distant concept—not for a country that has so many of its own out and in it. Filipino families don’t often make it into global headlines about war; we’re rarely the ones the world pauses for. But our spirit remains in nearly every crisis zone of the earth because we are the ones who left our homes to make other countries run—to keep hospitals staffed, homes cleaned, oil fields working, children raised. And when those countries catch a flame, it’s Filipino families who quietly tally the math: which flight still flies, which relative can quickly wire money, which embassy will actually pick up the phone.

That’s what the headlines don’t capture.

War is not just close for some of us—Filipinos have learned and grown, generation after generation, how to survive in other people’s wars because not all of us were given the luxury of staying within our own borders for a better life. It’s the sudden phone call in the middle of the night. It’s the group chat that goes eerily quiet, then suddenly floods all at once. It’s a father calculating which route out of the city is fastest—and a daughter, thousands of miles away, waiting to hear if he is alright.

We were never taught to prepare for war, but maybe that’s because no one has figured out how to prepare a person to lose their future tense. Maybe the least we can do is to stop assuming that it only happens to people far away, in some other headline someday, and start recognizing it as our own in the sacrifices of our kababayans.

In relatively recent years, the Japanese concept of ikigai or “reason for living” has been making its rounds in the public consciousness thanks to social media. From my rudimentary knowledge of the popular Venn diagram of the ikigai, is that we should find our purpose in the intersection of what we love doing, of what we’re good at, of what the world needs, and what we can be paid for.

A deeper dig into the history of the diagram would reveal that the diagram is inaccurate and misleading insofar as the original Japanese concept is concerned. The Venn diagram itself originated in 2009 from astrologer Andrés Zuzunaga, and it was originally called the Venn Purpose Diagram.1 His diagram was eventually adapted by business coach Marc Winn in 2014 in his blog post, where Winn replaced the word purpose with ikigai.2 Winn admitted later on in a 2019 podcast interview that he did not do a deep dive into the concept of ikigai and he was quite surprised how his diagram suddenly became viral.3

Even so, the Venn diagram is not wrong altogether in terms of finding purpose. If there’s anything worth highlighting, it’s the self-interrogation that the diagram invites us to do. That said, asking the right questions becomes crucial in this endeavor.

What I do want to propose is some further refinement from my own lens as a humanist, writer, teacher, and citizen: as a humanist, because it is my discipline; as a writer, teacher, and as a citizen, because those are the roles I play in our community. I do so because these are the circumstances where I attempt to walk the walk. For if we are to talk about life’s purpose, we must talk about life and living, not in a vacuum, but in the middle of the world and through time. And although I may use examples from life as a writer and teacher, I encourage everyone to think of your own circumstances, your disciplines, and the roles you play in our community. This way, despite our differences in our respective particulars, I believe that we will find that commonality in the broader strokes.

A Humanist’s Way of Facing Things

In a world that prefers the path of specialization, it is baffling for many why anyone would choose our brand of Humanities, the area where History, Philosophy, Literature, and Art intersect. Students and parents ask, “What career does this lead to?” and other specialists raise the concern that this interdisciplinary approach can leave the humanist raw in all four disciplines. On one hand, cases may be made for these concerns. On the other hand, it is also this interdisciplinarity that allows the humanist a firmer grounding for purpose. After all, History, Philosophy, Literature, and Art never exist in a vacuum either; it always has to be a History of something, a Philosophy of something, a Literature on something, and an Art on something. And it is in the intersection of these disciplines where we develop that opportunity to be better grounded.

Consider, for example, your own life: what is your history? What are your present circumstances? What are your aspirations? What are your means? These questions refer to the four pillars of the Humanities and, personally, these four pillars also move me to have my own spin on the Venn diagram earlier.

What you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you will get paid for are worthwhile considerations. At the same time, the articulation of these questions discounts the passage of time. Love, for example, is more than just willing the good; it is, in fact, preceded by the recognition of good. This reflects the classical Thomistic and Salesian principle that “nothing can be willed unless it is first recognized as good.”4 How can you will the good of something that you cannot first recognize?

And whatever you’re good at—without the context of history—is a reduction to innate talent; what about the skills that you hone and retool over time? And the world’s needs change constantly; will our purpose end once we’ve filled that particular need? Wasn’t that the great anxiety during the Industrial Revolution, or even now, at the age of AI? And is monetary compensation the only transaction that gives value to the pursuit?

Taking my inspiration from the philosopher Julián Marias, I find it helpful to ask about what we’ve been through and what our present circumstances are.5 Awareness of our history allows us to do a proper accounting and contextualization of our present circumstances, especially insofar as resources, opportunities, and limitations are concerned.

Back when I taught Philippine History, one of the first lessons I would teach my students was the Lesson of the Glass: is the glass half empty or half full? Optimism or pessimism has nothing to do with this, as this is a question of history: what was the glass before? If full, now it’s half empty; if empty, now it’s half full. And, while we’re at it, we should also ask: where did the water come from? How long has the glass been this way? Questions like these allow us to know what to do with the water and the glass.

It is this historical mindset that allows us to envision a reasonable future. As an example, it is a common mistake of many aspiring writers to start but not finish an ambitious project such as a novel. The general reason: a poor grasp of their own circumstances as opposed to what the project demands. Skill, in this case, may have nothing to do with it. Does one’s schedule and responsibilities permit the scale of such an ambitious project? Many times, the aspiring writer doesn’t even ask this question.

As we may intuit from Aristotle,6 we do not criticize a building under construction the same way we would a condemned building, any more than we would uniformly have the exact same expectations from both a budding professional and a professional past their prime. As circumstances develop over history, so do aspirations.

Insofar aspirations go, the role of literature is crucial. The stock and trade of literature is largely the irreal: here, we follow people that may have never existed, going through events that may never have happened. But towards what appeal? As what we can glean again from Aristotle,7 the irreal gives us the glimpse towards possibilities, both the exhilarating and the terrifying.

What possibilities open up given our present circumstances? While literature tends to be reduced as mere leisure or a source of wisdom, I find in my practice—more than just being a writer—that literature is a good way to develop one’s sense of future-orientedness. History and Philosophy will tell us that no earthly circumstance ever really lasts: no victory, defeat, prestige, or humiliation is forever; Literature gives us a sense of what can be beyond our present, and that the utopia and dystopia of our future largely rests on the decisions that we make. If Plot is indeed “character in action,” then our action allows us to calibrate away from distractions and towards our purpose.

And action does lead us to discuss the Arts. While the Arts have a much larger scope in the Humanities, what I find important in the reflection of one’s purpose is the aspect of Arts that focuses on craftsmanship. Upon further reflection,8 art is what makes irreality become real: the idea that becomes a poem, the vision that becomes a painting, the insight that becomes a performance.

I’d like to dwell on Art as Craft a bit longer, as I find this the bridge between History and Literature. A pleasure and bane I have as an artist is the general ignorance of the consumer to what goes on behind the craft process. Rarely, if at all, does a reader wonder how many drafts it took for a text to become a pleasant, coherent read; rarely do viewers pay attention to the time and community it takes to build a single film; or for a community to ask what it takes to coordinate a single school year.

“A haiku is just three lines with seventeen syllables,” someone might say. But a haiku has to be the right combination of seventeen right syllables in the right order. And that is just putting it lightly. The Japanese scholar Haruo Shirane was able to write a whole book on the haiku of Bashō,9 and this testifies to the possible richness in such a tight constraint. The practice isn’t easy. And even if there are some of us who can be prolific in our craft, such as writing, it helps to consider our history and our circumstances: a history of repeated practice and failures has helped us refine our process. And anyone who starts off trying to get everything right the first time usually ends up finishing nothing at all. This is true for writing and, I believe, for any practice.

This then leads us to Philosophy, without which we wouldn’t be even talking about purpose. While there are many angles from which we can approach purpose-finding, it helps to even just ask the basics of Aristotle’s four causes: How did it come to be? What is it made of? What is it for? What is it?10

Further reflection cements the contribution of History, Literature, and Arts in answering these questions: “How did it come to be?” is something History can answer; Art addresses the question, “what is it made of?”; and Literature opens the possibilities of answers to the question, “what is it for?”

These pillars together make for a robust contemplation on the question, “what is it?” What is “it”?

Definitely “it” can refer to purpose. But I’d rather think of “it“ as referring to our lives. And if we answer the questions about our lives in the order of History, Art, and Literature, we get a clearer understanding of our circumstances, the means and resources at our disposal and, from there, the possible trajectories that our circumstances, means, and resources can lead us to. All this gives us an idea of what we are… in the present.

Because, through time, our history continues to grow as we achieve and fail in our aspirations, as we wax and wane in our means and resources. As we live, our circumstances are bound to change, and it is important to remember: our actions move us to our victories and losses, and these further add to our history, thus further evolving our aspirations and our means to take action.

Given this, it is clear that we cannot just simply ask ourselves these questions, just lock in to our answers, and solve our problem of purpose once and for all. We ask these questions regularly and recalibrate regularly.

And, if we’re empathetic enough, we pay attention to how those around us answer these questions regularly as well.

An Account of Shakespeare in UA&P

With all the abstractions out of the way, I will, with my remaining time, demonstrate the way this purpose-finding works in a concrete fashion, mainly with a life in UA&P, with William Shakespeare as the throughline.

My first experience of Shakespeare was when I was still in elementary grade, when I would watch performances of Shakespeare by college students in Dizon Auditorium. The event, back then, was called Shakespeare Week. The impact of these student productions still lingers in my memory: a production featuring the crossover of various female leads in Shakespeare; or a production involving a live snake; or a Julius Caesar production featuring a Mercedes-Benz driving by what we now call The Nest. While I will never know the full context of what drove these students to be this intense in their productions, I believe that nobody can get to this intensity without an authentic love forShakespeare. And, as you can clearly see, these students had a profound influence in my younger years that echoes to this day: thanks to UA&P’s Shakespeare Week, I learned to approach Shakespeare even before I stepped into high school.

Unfortunately for me, Shakespeare Week disappeared when I entered UA&P as a student. But the enthusiasm for Shakespeare has not waned for some former students who stayed to work for UA&P. Thanks to them, I had a taste of performing Shakespeare myself, even in minor roles in The Comedy of Errors and Much Ado About Nothing. This extensive exposure to Shakespeare shaped my craft and understanding of theatre, of writing, of teaching, and of leadership. This shaping then influenced my career trajectory. And by career trajectory, I am not talking about how I won the Don Carlos Palanca Awards eight times, among my other accolades.

Instead, I would like to highlight something more important. It is through Shakespeare and his UA&P fans that I appreciated that there is more to language than just its meaning, and that there’s more to theatre than just being a performance art. The joy of reading text out loud, feeling the words in your face: your ears, lips, tongue, throat, and lungs evokes an empathy difficult to replicate in any medium outside literature. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s text goes beyond mere literature, as it steps into areas of Philosophy and History in such a level that one must admire his craftsmanship.

As for theatre, its very nature of being live and collaborative made me more serious about the physical, educational, economic, managerial, and civic considerations: for everyone involved must learn the material; be practical and innovative in the allocation and use of one’s means and resources; and be clear that, more than just the dopamine hit, a production must leave everyone better than before they encountered the project. This transformative experience has led me to deploy various innovations in the classroom. One of them is the 10 Minute Shakespeare Program, which resulted in 10-Minute abridgments of Shakespeare’s scripts done only through deletions. Another is the 10-Minute Scriptwriting activity.

The 10 Minute Shakespeare Program—or 10MinSh—worked two ways: first, with students racing to abridge Shakespeare to a stageable 10-Minute version that keeps to the original text and the main plot. Then, with classes being divided into groups to perform 10MinSh to the UA&P community. 10MinSh taught these students more than just Shakespeare’s wisdom: it taught them to take care of each other as performers, of their audience, and of their rehearsal and performance spaces.

Thus, when they did the 10-Minute Scriptwriting activity, many of them applied what they learned in writing their scripts. Their scripts exercised care for their readership, for their collaborators, and for their audience.

I mention this because what I will show you next is, for me, quite notable:

Eleven of these scripts from the Scriptwriting activity made it to the 2015 and 2017 Short + Sweet Manila Theater Festival. At least three made it as far as to become crowd favorites, with two becoming finalists, and one getting nominated for best script and best overall production. From what I am aware of, at least one still gets staged from time to time in college and community theatre productions beyond UA&P.

10MinSh itself is even more notable. After the first UA&P staging of 10MinSh in 2014, we did the first abridged Shakespeare in the same year for Fullybooked and in the following year for UA&P. In 2016, we launched the full-brand Compact Shakespeare, with 10MinSh and four-actor and one-actor variants in UA&P. In 2017, we launched the website. Fast forward to 2026: as of

the end of May this year, after nine years, we’ve had over 188 inquiries requesting permission to use across 22 countries in 6 out of 7 continents. These abridgments reach performers, and these performers reach their community.

Today, as my current circumstances render me away from Shakespeare classes, I am happy to say that a junior colleague has picked up from where I’ve left off and, for the first time, someone from Ely, Nevada has followed what my students started: before the end of this year, we’ll be uploading his contribution of a 10MinSh abridgment of The Tempest. While I am hesitant to say that my Shakespeare journey is close to its end, it is still an honor to witness how others pick up from where I’ve slowed down.

If anything, I hope that this story repeatedly demonstrates what an intense and authentic pursuit of purpose does: the student generation who threw themselves into Shakespeare Week; the teachers and staff who brought Shakespeare beyond the classroom and into campus life; my own attempts inside the classroom and beyond; my students with their scripts and productions; and Shakespeare himself. While most of us involved don’t necessarily have Shakespeare as intensely in our lives now as in the moments mentioned, it is in those mentioned moments that our purpose at the time was clear: we discovered something good that we were compelled to share.

This echoes to me two things: The first is Pope Leo XIV’s statement in Magnifica Humanitas, “truth is not a territory to be defended but a good to be shared.”11 The second is Pope Francis’ statement in Evangelii Gaudium, “time is greater than space.”12

The expression of love for Shakespeare that I had the honor to witness and participate in over these decades was largely from a sincere impulse to share the good and not to protect Shakespeare because he is male, white, and dead. Furthermore, many of whom I got to witness did not have career, wealth, or prestige in mind in their pursuit of purpose. The UA&P College students and their teachers were not thinking of me when they did Shakespeare Week back then; nor did my students have an idea how their works would go way beyond the classroom; and Shakespeare probably had no idea of the reach he would have over time. Like true artists, we all focused on the aspiration of bringing form to the truth, the good, and the beauty we discovered.

The Bigger Picture

And the example I only have time for is our Shakespeare culture within UA&P. The bigger reality is, in the same way that my circumstances go far beyond Shakespeare, so too do your own lives go beyond your respective specializations and professions. We don’t just love one thing, as we recognize the good in many things over time; we are not just good at one thing, as we lose, acquire, and develop means over time; the world’s needs also change over time, as we address its needs and discover new ones; and getting paid for pursuing purpose, isn’t really so much the criteria, as it is making each endeavor sustainable for as long as it needs to be. While money may sometimes be a factor of sustainability, so are relationships, environment, and culture. I would argue that relationships, environment, and culture are greater factors than money.

Honestly, I am excited to hear each of your stories over time insofar as the discovery and pursuit of purpose is concerned.

Again, why limit purpose to profession? A good citizen would know that being a good professional is also paramount. The same cannot necessarily be said for good professionals. Examples of good professionals who are bad citizens abound.

We are more than our jobs: we are citizens of our families, our neighborhood, our workplace, our country, the communion of saints. In each, we all have our respective calling that calls for some unity of life. The calling in one area is also the calling in another. And it is not so much the ends achieved that will measure us, but our authentic fidelity, grit, and manner in which we exercise our purpose. It is about us faithfully ordering the goods of our life, throughout our lives.

To end, I would like to read to you this beautiful composition by John Henry Newman, who perfectly captures what I’ve been trying so hard to explore. This is entitled, “The Mission of My Life”13:

“God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.

He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments.

Therefore, I will trust Him; whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.

“Long, till the shades lengthen and the evening comes,
And the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over,
And our work is done.
Then in his mercy may he give us a safe lodging, And holy rest, and peace at the last.”

Thank you.

References

Aquinas, Thomas. 1948. Summa Theologica. Translated by the Fathers of the English

Dominican Province. 5 vols. New York: Benziger Brothers. https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/1225-1274,_Thomas_Aquinas,_Summa_Theolog iae_%5B1%5D,_EN.pdf

Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by W. D. Ross. The Internet Classics Archive. https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.html

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W. D. Ross. The Internet Classics Archive. https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html

Aristotle. The Poetics of Aristotle. Translated by S. H. Butcher. Project Gutenberg, 2008. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1974/1974-h/1974-h.htm.

Francis. Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium: On the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World. Vatican City: Vatican Press, 2013.

Kemp, Nicholas, host. “Marc Winn on Merging Ikigai with the Venn Diagram of Purpose.” Ikigai Tribe (podcast). Audio, December 29, 2019. https://ikigaitribe.com/ikigai/podcast05/.

Kemp, Nicholas, host. 2020. “Interview with Andrés Zuzunaga.” Ikigai Tribe (podcast). Audio, January 29, 2020. https://ikigaitribe.com/ikigai/podcast07/.

Leo XIV. Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. Vatican City: Holy See Press Office, 2026.

Marías, Julián. Metaphysical Anthropology: The Empirical Structure of Human Life. Translated by Frances M. López-Morillas. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971.

Newman, John Henry. “Hope in God—Creator.” In Meditations and Devotions. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1893. Accessed July 23, 2026. Newman Reader, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/meditations/meditations9.html#doctrine1.

Shirane, Haruo. Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Winn, Marc. 2014. “What is Your Ikigai?” The View Inside Me (blog). May 14, 2014.https://theviewinside.me/what-is-your-ikigai/.

Winn, Marc. “Marc Winn on Merging Ikigai with the Venn Diagram of Purpose.” Interview by Nicholas Kemp. Ikigai Tribe (podcast). Audio, December 29, 2019. https://ikigaitribe.com/ikigai/podcast05/.

Maituturing ba nating intelektuwal ang wikang Filipino? Isa ito sa mga tanong na minsan kong ibinato sa aking klase. Hati ang sagot ng mga mag-aaral. May buong kumpiyansa at malakas na sumasagot ng “Oo!” Mayroon namang mariing nagsabi ng “Hindi!” At mayroon ding nanatiling tahimik, nakatingin lamang at tila naghihintay kung ano ang magiging sagot o marahil ay hindi pa talaga nakabuo ng sariling pananaw tungkol dito.

Ngunit kung ikaw ang tatanungin: Maituturing ba nating intelektuwal ang wikang Filipino? Sa unang tingin, maaaring sabihin ng ilan na ang Filipino ay simpleng wika lamang ng pang-araw-araw na pakikipag-usap. Ginagamit natin ito sa tahanan, sa palengke, sa pakikipagkuwentuhan, sa social media, at sa karaniwang pakikipamuhay. Samantala, kapag pinag-uusapan na ang siyensiya, teknolohiya, batas, pilosopiya, pananaliksik, at iba pang larangan ng akademya, tila mas madaling lumipat sa Ingles.

Marahil ay dito tayo nagkakaroon ng problema. Hindi ba’t ang isang wika ay nagiging intelektuwal hindi dahil sa pangalan nito, kundi dahil sa lawak at lalim ng mga kaisipang naipapahayag nito? Kung kayang gamitin ang Filipino upang talakayin ang batas, ekonomiya, kasaysayan, agham, teknolohiya, pilosopiya, pananaliksik, at maging ang mga bagong usapin tungkol sa artificial intelligence, bakit natin ito ituturing na mababa o kulang? Ang tunay na tanong marahil ay hindi kung intelektuwal ba ang Filipino, kundi ginagamit ba natin ito sa mga gawaing intelektuwal?

Ang Filipino ay higit pa sa pangngalan, pandiwa at pang-uri

Minsan ay may nagtanong sa akin kung bakit maging ang Konstitusyon 1987 ay pinag-aaralan sa aking klase. Ang sagot ko ay simple: “Bakit hindi!” Ang Konstitusyon ang pinakamataas na batas ng ating bansa. At bagama’t gasgas na marahil ang kasabihang “Ignorance of the law excuses no one,” nananatili itong mahalagang prinsipyo na hindi maaaring gawing dahilan ang kamangmangan sa batas upang takasan ang pananagutan.

Ngunit bakit ito nauugnay sa Filipino? Sapagkat ang wika ay hindi lamang instrumento ng pakikipag-usap. Ito ay instrumento ng pag-unawa. Ang mga batas, karapatan, tungkulin, patakaran, at prinsipyo ng ating lipunan ay kailangang maunawaan ng mamamayan. At paano natin mauunawaan ang isang bagay kung hindi natin ito kayang ipaliwanag sa wikang nauunawaan ng nakararami?

Maging ang wika mismo ay kinikilala sa ating Saligang Batas. Kaya hindi kataka-takang maging bahagi ng pag-aaral ng Filipino ang mga konseptong may kaugnayan sa lipunan, batas, kultura, kasaysayan, komunikasyon, at iba pang larangan ng kaalaman.

Marahil ay nagtataka ang ilan kung bakit sa isang “simpleng” asignaturang Filipino ay pinag-aaralan ang mga batas, teorya, isyung panlipunan, kasaysayan, kultura, at maging mga usaping pandaigdig. Nasanay kasi tayo sa tradisyunal na pagtingin sa Filipino na pinag-aaralan lamang ang simpleng gramatikang aralin tulad ng pangngalan, pandiwa, pang-uri, pang-abay, simuno at panaguri, ayos ng pangungusap, at wastong paggamit ng mga salita.

Mahalaga ang mga ito. Ngunit hindi dito nagtatapos ang Filipino. Ang Filipino ay hindi lamang pag-aaral ng estruktura ng wika. Ito ay pag-aaral kung paano ginagamit ang wika upang mag-isip, mangatuwiran, magsuri, makipagtalastasan, lumikha, magpahayag ng saloobin, at higit sa lahat - bumuo ng kaalaman.

Sa katunayan, minsan ay tayo mismo ang nagiging dayuhan sa sarili nating wika. Nakapagsasalita tayo ng Filipino ngunit nahihirapang gamitin ito sa mga diskursong akademiko. Mas komportable tayong magsulat ng isang konsepto sa Ingles kaysa subukang ipaliwanag ito sa Filipino. At dito natin kailangang baguhin ang ating pananaw.

Ang Filipino bilang de facto at de jure

Mahalagang maunawaan ang kalagayan ng Filipino sa pamamagitan ng konsepto ng de facto at de jure. Ang de jure ay tumutukoy sa kung ano ang kinikilala at itinatakda ng batas, samantalang ang de facto ay tumutukoy sa kung ano ang aktuwal na umiiral at ginagamit sa lipunan. Sa usapin ng Filipino, mahalagang pag-isahin ang dalawang ito. Hindi sapat na kinikilala lamang ng batas ang Filipino bilang wikang pambansa. Kailangang makita rin ang tunay at malawak nitong gamit sa buhay ng mga Pilipino.

May tiyak na gampanin ang Filipino bilang wikang pambansa, wikang opisyal, at wikang panturo. Malinaw ang batayang konstitusyonal nito. Ayon sa Artikulo XIV, Seksyon 6 ng 1987 Saligang Batas: “Ang wikang pambansa ng Pilipinas ay Filipino. Samantalang nililinang, ito ay dapat payabungin at pagyamanin pa salig sa umiiral na mga wika sa Pilipinas at iba pang mga wika.”

Samakatuwid, ang Filipino ay hindi isang wikang dapat manatiling nakapirmi. Ito ay buhay at dinamiko. Isang wikang dapat na patuloy na nililinang, pinayayaman, at pinauunlad.

Kung gayon, hindi sapat ang mababaw na pagpapahalaga rito. May mahalagang paalala ang Bibliya sa Mateo 23:27–28 tungkol sa mga mapagpaimbabaw na inihalintulad sa mga pinaputing libingan, maganda sa labas ngunit marumi sa loob. Bagama’t ibang konteksto ang tinutukoy ng talata, maaari itong maging makabuluhang metapora sa ating pagtingin sa pagpapahalaga sa wika. Hindi malilinang ang Filipino kung hanggang pagpapakitang panlabas lamang ang pagpapahalaga natin dito.

Hindi sapat ang pagsusuot ng katutubong kasuotan tuwing Agosto. Hindi sapat ang pagdaraos ng paligsahan sa pagsulat, pagbigkas ng tula, o pagsayaw. Hindi sapat ang pagsasabing mahal natin ang Filipino kung nililimitahan naman natin ang pag-aaral, paggamit, at paglinang dito. Higit sa lahat, magiging malaking suliranin kung unti-unting mawawala ang puwang ng Filipino sa mga paaralan at unibersidad.

Ang mga paaralan ay hindi lamang lugar kung saan ginagamit ang wika. Ang mga ito ay mga institusyong lumilikha, nagpapalaganap, at nagpapanatili ng kaalaman. Kung aalisin natin ang Filipino sa mga espasyong ito, saan natin ito gagamitin upang maging ganap na wika ng intelektuwal at diskurso?

Kung nais nating makamit ang tinatawag na intelektuwalisasyon ng wika, kailangang magamit ang Filipino sa mas mataas na antas ng pag-iisip at sa iba’t ibang larangan ng kaalaman at hindi lamang sa karaniwang pakikipag-usap.

Hindi lamang Tagalog ang Filipino

Mahalaga ring linawin na ang Filipino ay hindi simpleng katumbas lamang ng Tagalog. Ang Tagalog ay nagsilbing mahalagang batayan sa pagbuo ng wikang pambansa, ngunit ang Filipino bilang wikang pambansa ay patuloy na umuunlad at pinayayaman ng iba’t ibang wika sa Pilipinas at iba pang wika sa bansa.

Sa tala ng Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, kinikilala ang malawak na bilang ng mga katutubong wika sa bansa. Ang mga wikang ito ay hindi dapat ituring na kalaban ng Filipino. Sa halip, maaari silang maging bukal ng kayamanan ng wikang pambansa. Ang mga salita, konsepto, ekspresyon, pananaw, at karanasang nagmumula sa Iloko, Waray, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Bikol, Kapampangan, Pangasinan, Maranao, Tausug, at marami pang ibang wika ay bahagi ng mas malawak na yaman ng ating bansa.

Maging ang mga wikang dayuhan ay maaaring makatulong sa pagpapalawak ng Filipino. Sa globalisasyon, natural lamang ang panghihiram at pag-aangkop ng mga salita at konsepto. Ang mahalaga ay ginagamit natin ang mga ito upang higit na mapalawak ang kakayahan ng Filipino bilang wika ng kaalaman. Kung gayon, ang pag-unlad ng Filipino ay hindi nangangahulugang paghihiwalay nito sa ibang mga wika. Sa halip, ito ay pakikipag-ugnayan sa mga ito.

Dito natin higit na mauunawaan ang konsepto ng intelektuwalisasyon ng Filipino: ang paghubog sa Filipino bilang wikang may kakayahang magpahayag ng masalimuot na kaisipan at magamit sa iba’t ibang disiplina tulad ng agham, teknolohiya, batas, medisina, edukasyon, ekonomiya, pananaliksik, pilosopiya, at iba pa. Ang Filipino ay hindi kailangang maging sarado upang maging matatag. Ang isang buhay na wika ay lumalago dahil marunong itong tumanggap, umangkop, at lumikha.

Tagalog, Pilipino, at Filipino

Kung babalikan ang kasaysayan, makikita nating ang wikang pambansa ay dumaan sa mahaba at masalimuot na proseso. Noong Disyembre 30, 1937, pormal na ipinahayag ni Pangulong Manuel L. Quezon, sa pamamagitan ng Kautusang Tagapagpaganap Blg. 134, na ang Tagalog ang magiging batayan ng wikang pambansa. At sa paglipas ng panahon, nagkaroon ng pagbabago sa katawagan nito. Noong 1959, sa pamamagitan ng kautusan ni Kalihim Jose E. Romero, tinawag na Pilipino ang wikang pambansa.

Samantala, noong Marso 26, 1954, nilagdaan ni Pangulong Ramon Magsaysay ang proklamasyon na nagtakda sa pagdiriwang ng Linggo ng Wika tuwing Agosto 13–19. Kalaunan, binago at pinalawak ang panahon ng pagdiriwang. At noong 1997, sa bisa ng Proklamasyon Blg. 1041 na nilagdaan ni Pangulong Fidel V. Ramos, itinakda ang buong buwan ng Agosto bilang Buwan ng Wikang Pambansa, na higit na nakilala bilang Buwan ng Wika.

Sa ilalim naman ng 1987 Saligang Batas, malinaw na itinakda na Filipino ang wikang pambansa ng Pilipinas. Ang kasaysayang ito ay nagpapakita na ang Filipino ay hindi isang wikang bigla na lamang lumitaw. Ito ay produkto ng mahabang proseso ng pagpili, paggamit, paglinang, pagbabago, at patuloy na pakikipag-ugnayan sa iba’t ibang wika at kultura.

Kaya ang Filipino ngayon ay hindi lamang dapat tingnan bilang bunga ng nakaraan. Ito ay isang proyektong patuloy nating binubuo, nililinang at tutulungan upang maabot ang tunay na kakayahan nito.

Kapangyarihan ng wika

May kapangyarihan ba ang wika? Ito ang isa sa mga tanong ko sa aking klase sa tuwing tinatalakay namin ang usapin at sitwasyon ng wika sa bansa. Sasagot sila ng “Yes! Oo! May kapangyarihan ang wika! Ang wika ay may kapangyarihan sapagkat ito ang daluyan ng kaisipan. Sa wika rin nabubuo ang pagkakakilanlan ng isang tao at ng isang bayan. Sa pamamagitan ng wika, nagagawa natin makapagpahayag, naipararating natin ang ating saloobin, ideya, maging ng ating nararamdaman. Ngunit kung dadalumatin ang tanong na ito, may kapangyarihan ba talaga ang wika? Ang sagot ay wala! Akala mo lang meron pero wala, wala, wala talaga itong kapangyarihan. Kung babalikan ang kahulugan nito, ang wika ay instrumento. “Nagsisilbing instrumento ng isip. Sa pamamagitan ng wika ay umuunlad ang kaisipan. Sa pag-unlad naman ng kaisipan ay umuunlad ang wika.” (Constantino, 1996).

At tulad ng isang gamit, kung hindi natin ito gagamitin, hindi nito magagawa ang kanyang layunin. Sa kasaysayan, bago dumating si Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, mahusay lamang ang Aleman para sa barbarians. Bago dumating si Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, ang Russian ay mahusay lamang at ginamit sa pag-toast ng vodka. At bago dumating si William Shakespeare, ang Ingles ay mahusay lamang sa isang sakop. (De Quiros, 1995) Tinahak ng mga wikang ito ang intelektuwalisasyon at ginamit sa gawaing intelektuwal na luminang dito. Samakatuwid, ang husay ng lengguwahe na nagsisilbing kapangyarihan ay nasa mga taong gumagamit nito.

Huwag din natin palagiang gawing dahilan na wala tayong panumbas o salin sa Filipino. Ang malaking tanong ay bakit? Sa ika-89 na paggunita natin ng ating wikang pambansa, hindi natin pwedeng idahilan ito palagian. Malaki rin ang pagkakaiba ng: paghango at pagpapalit, at paghihiram at pangongopya. At kadalasan nasasanay tayo sa panghihiram at pangongopya. Sa tuwing ginagawa natin ito, hindi natin namamalayang nababansot at nalilimot natin ang ating wikang pambansa na dapat nating bigyan ng pansin at pahalagahan dahil sumasalamin ito sa ating pagkakakilanlan at bansa. At kung gagamitin natin ito ng tama hindi malayong maaabot din natin ang ginawa nina Pushkin, Goethe, at Shakespeare sa kani-kanilang mga bansa sa usapin ng paggamit ng kanilang wika.

Filipino sa unibersidad: Wika ng kaalaman at pananaliksik

Ang Filipino ay hindi lamang tumutukoy sa isang asignatura sa unibersidad na kailangang kunin ng isang mag-aaral upang pumasa. Kung tunay ring ipinagdiriwang at lubos na pinahahalagahan ito, walang Pilipinong dapat na magsabing Filipino lang yan! At walang mangangahas na Pilipinong nag-iisip na tangalin ito sa kurikulum ng edukasyon sa lahat ng antas ng pag-aaral. Dahil malalim na nakaugat dito ang ating pagkakakilanlan. Isang simpleng salita ngunit higit na malaki ang ipinapakahulugan, lampas pa sa kakayahan ng isip ng tao upang higit itong maunawaan.

Mas malaki rin ang hamong kinakaharap ng mga unibersidad at kolehiyo sa bansa salig sa DO #52, serye, 1987 na nagsasabing “Tertiary level institutions shall lead in the continuing intellectualization of Filipino. Malinaw, lantad, at mapanghamon ang tungkulin ito – ang intelektuwalisasyon ay dapat isinusulong at ginagawa sa mga unibersidad at kolehiyo. Ang unibersidad ay nagsisilbing balon ng tubig na panggagalingan ng mga intelektuwal na tutulong upang umunlad ito. Sa antas ng unibersidad, higit na kailangang palawakin ang ating pananaw tungkol sa Filipino. Kung ang Filipino ay para lamang sa mababang antas ng pag-aaral, kailan natin ito magiging ganap na wika ng kaalaman? Ang unibersidad ay lugar nang malalim na pag-iisip, pananaliksik, pagsusuri, debate, at pagbuo ng bagong kaalaman. Kaya nararapat lamang na ang Filipino ay magkaroon ng espasyo sa akademikong diskurso.

Hindi nangangahulugang kailangang alisin ang Ingles. Mahalaga rin ang Ingles bilang pandaigdigang wika ng akademya at pananaliksik at pangalawa at opisyal na wika . Ngunit hindi rin nangangahulugang wala nang puwang ang Filipino sa akademya.

Kung babalikan, mula nang ito ay naitalaga noong 1937 at sa ngayon ay 88 taong gulang na ito, maituturing pa rin itong bata kumpara sa mga wika sa daigdig kaya marapat lamang na tulungan natin itong linangin upang umunlad at maabot nito ang buong potensiyal nito. Nagpapatunay rito ang patuloy na adaptasyon ng mga salitang Filipino sa pandaigdigang diksyunaryo ng Oxford (2015) tulad ng baranggay, pasalubong, sando, KKB, mani-pedi, videoke, lumpia, kababayan at marami pang iba (2015). At ang bagong salitang dinagdag ang kilig (2016) at gigil (2025) ng Oxford English Dictionary. Nagpapatunay lamang ito nang maaaring kontribusyon ng Filipino sa pandaigdigang wika ng mundo. Taong 2023, ginulat din tayo ng mundo matapos magbukas ng kursong Tagalog (Filipino) ang Harvard University (2023) at sinundan pa ng Yale University. Patuloy ring pinalalakas ang Tagalog (Filipino) courses sa iba’t ibang unibersidad sa mundo. Nakikita nila ang Filipino, bilang potensiyal at mayamang wika na mag-aambag sa pandaigdigang salita o wika. Sa mga kaganapang ito, mapapasabi ka na lamang ng ‘Sana all’ ganito nakikita ang wika! Dahil sa Pilipinas kung saan ito nagmula ay pilit inaalis ang pag-aaral ng Filipino.

Sa halip, dapat tayong maging bilingguwal o multilingguwal sa pagbuo at pagbabahagi ng kaalaman. Maaari tayong magsaliksik sa Ingles, Filipino, o iba pang wika. Maaari nating basahin ang mga pandaigdigang literatura at pagkatapos ay ipaliwanag ang mga ito sa Filipino upang mas maraming Pilipino ang makinabang. Dito nagiging mahalaga ang Filipino: ginagawa nitong mas abot-kamay ang kaalaman lalo na sa mga unibersidad.

Bakit may pagdiriwang? Anong mayroon?

Kailangan pa ba talaga nating ipagdiwang ang Buwan ng Wika at kailangan talagang isang buong buwan upang ipaalala sa atin na mayroon tayong pambansang wika? Kung tunay natin itong pinahahalagahan, hindi ba dapat ay ginagamit at iginagalang natin ito araw-araw? At kung dadalumatin at lalapatan ng may kritikal na pag-iisip may punto ang ganitong tanong.

Sa katunayan, tayo lamang sa buong mundo ang nagdiriwang ng Buwan ng Wika. Tila ipinapamukha sa atin nito taon-taon na tayo ay may pambansang wika at ito ay ang Filipino. Ang tanong bakit nga ba kailangang ipaalala ito sa atin? Ang buwan ng Agosto ay tila nagiging isang pagdiriwang lamang at pagpapamalas ng husay sa pagsulat ng sanaysay, tagisan ng talino, pagbigkas ng tula, sabayang pagbigkas, sayaw, at iba’t ibang palaro at pakulo sa klase. Oo! Tamang ipagdiwang natin ito ngunit hindi lamang dapat dito nakakahon ang tunay na kahulugan nito.

Walang masama sa mga ito. Ngunit hindi dapat doon nagtatapos ang Buwan ng Wika. Kung ang pagdiriwang ay natatapos kasabay ng huling paligsahan sa Agosto, maaaring hindi natin tunay na nauunawaan ang kahulugan nito. Ang Buwan ng Wika ay dapat maging pagkakataon upang tanungin natin ang ating sarili:

Paano ko ginagamit ang Filipino sa pagkatuto?

Paano ko ginagamit ang wika upang ipahayag ang aking pananaw?

Paano ko ginagamit ang Filipino upang maunawaan ang aking kapwa?

Paano ko ginagamit ang wika upang pangalagaan ang ating kultura?

At higit sa lahat: Paano ko ginagamit ang Filipino upang makabuo at makapagbahagi ng kaalaman?

At kung totoong mahalaga sa atin ito, hindi ba dapat araw-araw o buong taon nating kinikilala ang mahalagang papel nitong ginagampanan sa pagpapatibay ng ating pagkakakilanlan, kultura, at naging daan sa pagkakaisa at lingua franca ng bansa.

Isang hámon sa tunay na kahalagahan ng buwan ng wika

Mahalagang balikan ang kasaysayan ng pagdiriwang ng Buwan ng Wika. Ang paggunita sa wika tuwing Agosto ay may kaugnayan sa pagkilala sa ating pambansang wika at sa paggunita sa mga mahahalagang yugto sa kasaysayan ng wikang pambansa.

Ang kasaysayang ito ay nagpapaalala na ang wika ay hindi basta-basta nabuo. Ito ay bunga ng mahabang proseso ng pakikipag-ugnayan, pagpapasya, pagbabago, at paghubog ng isang bansa. Kaya ang Agosto ay hindi lamang panahon ng kasuotan, palamuti, paligsahan, at programa. Ito ay panahon upang balikan kung sino tayo, saan tayo nagmula, at kung paano natin gagamitin ang ating wika upang harapin ang hinaharap.

Hindi masama ang pagdiriwang. Ngunit higit na mahalaga ang pagpapatuloy. Kung tunay na mahalaga ang Filipino, hindi ito dapat manatili sa silid-aralan. Dapat itong marinig sa mga talakayang akademiko, makita sa mga pananaliksik, magamit sa mga pampublikong impormasyon, mapakinabangan sa teknolohiya, at maging bahagi ng ating pang-araw-araw na buhay.

Ang tunay na tagumpay ng Buwan ng Wika ay hindi nasusukat sa dami ng paligsahang napanalunan kundi sa lawak ng paggamit, pagpapahalaga, at pag-unawa natin sa ating wika.

Kaya, intelektuwal ba ang wikang Filipino? Ang sagot ay hindi pa! Sa pagpapalanong pangwika ni Haugen (1966) kailangan nating gamitin at linangin ang ating wika at gawin ang propagasyon at elaborasyon ng wika. Kung nais nating maging intelektuwal ang wikang Filipino, kailangan nating maging seryoso at dagdagan pa ang pagmamahal dito. Higit pa, kailangan lamang tayong maniwala na kaya ito ng ating wika upang tuloy-tuloy nating mapalitan at makalikha ng mga salita tungo sa intelektuwalisasyon ng wikang Filipino.

Ngunit ang pagiging intelektuwal ng Filipino ay hindi dapat manatiling isang pahayag lamang. Kailangan natin itong patunayan sa pamamagitan ng paggamit nito sa intelektuwal na gawain. Gamitin natin ito sa pananaliksik, pagtuturo, pagsusuri ng mga isyung panlipunan, batas, agham, teknolohiya at iba pang larangan ng kaalaman, at pakikipag-usap sa ating kapwa upang maging mabisa ang ating komunikasyon.

At sa panahon ng artificial intelligence, gamitin natin ito upang mas mapalawak ang access sa impormasyon habang nananatiling mapanuri, responsable, at makatao. Hindi kailangang maging sarado ang Filipino sa ibang wika upang mapatunayan ang halaga nito. Sa halip, dapat itong maging bukas sa mga bagong salita, bagong konsepto, bagong teknolohiya, at bagong paraan ng paglikha ng kaalaman.

Dahil ang wika ay buhay. Nagbabago ito. Lumalawak ito. Nakikibagay ito. At kung nais nating mabuhay ang Filipino sa susunod pang mga henerasyon, hindi sapat na ipagdiwang lamang natin ito tuwing Agosto. Kailangan natin itong gamitin, pagyamanin, ituro, at saliksikin. At higit sa lahat, gamitin ito bilang wika ng pag-iisip, pananaliksik, kaalaman, at pagbabago.

Sa huli, marahil ay hindi na dapat itanong kung intelektuwal ba ang wikang Filipino. Ang mas mahalagang tanong ay: “Kailan natin sisimulang gamitin ang Filipino bilang tunay na wika ng ating intelektuwal na buhay?” At ang sagot ay maaaring magsimula sa atin ngayon, hindi lamang ngayong Agosto, kundi araw-araw.

Sanggunian:

Ang Salita ng Diyos & Ang Bagong Tipan: Filipino Standard Version. (n.d.). Bible Gateway. Retrieved August 31, 2026, from https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mateo%2023%3A1-36&version=SND;FSV

Constantino, R. (1996). Intelektuwalismo at Wika. Mga Piling Diskurso sa Wika at Lipunan. Lunsod Quezon: University of the Philippines Press, 1996.

Conrado, D. (1995) “Ang Kapangyarihan ng Wika, ang Wika ng Kapangyarihan” Ang Wikang Filipino sa Loob at Labas ng Akademya, p.28-33.

De Quiros, C. (2003). Ang kapangyarihan ng wika, ang wika ng kapangyarihan. Ang wikang Filipino sa loob at labas ng akademya’t bansa (pp. 28–33).

Harvard Gazette. (2023, August 30). Preceptors hired for Tagalog, Indonesian language courses. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/preceptors-hired-for-tagalog-indonesian-language-courses/

Haugen, E. (1972). Dialect, language, nation. In A. S. Dil (Ed.), The ecology of language: Essays by Einar Haugen (pp. 237–254). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1966)

Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino. (n.d.). Alam mo ba? KWF Diksiyonaryo ng Wikang Filipino. Retrieved August 31, 2026, from

http://kwfdiksiyonaryo.ph/?query=suy%C3%B2

Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino. (2014). KWF manwal sa masinop na pagsulat (V. S. Almario, Ed.). https://kwfwikaatkultura.ph/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Manwal-sa-Masinop-na-Pagsulat.pdf

Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino. (2015). In V. Almario (Ed.), Sagisag Kultura (Vol 1). Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts. Retrieved from https://philippineculturaleducation.com.ph/komisyon-sa-wikang-filipino/

Lavelle, D. (2025, March 27). Gigil: word for ‘cute aggression’ among new entries to Oxford English Dictionary. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/27/gigil-word-describing-cute-aggression-among-new-entries-to-oxford-english-dictionary

Oxford University Press. (n.d.). Kilig, adj. & n. In Oxford English dictionary. Retrieved August 31, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9050274526

Philippine Cultural Education Online. (2015). Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino. https://philippineculturaleducation.com.ph/komisyon-sa-wikang-filipino/

Rappler. (2016, April 15). ‘Kilig’ is now in the Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.rappler.com/the-wrap/129556-kilig-oxford-english-dictionary/

The 1987 Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines. (1987, February 2). Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines. https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/constitutions/1987-constitution/

The lecture aimed to equip the students with essential storytelling skills and prepare them for their careers in the entertainment industry, not just as writers and creatives, but also as storytellers capable of connecting with humanity.

The program began with a simulation of a morning talk show, featuring esteemed speakers such as TV5 actress and host-anchor Dimples Romana, News 5 anchor-documentarist Nikki De Guzman, and TV5 creative manager Ruth Peña-Padriga. Together, they emphasized the importance of storytelling as a universal medium and its humbling power when grounded in the truth, reminding students of their task as creatives.

As Romana put it, “The best stories we tell are the ones we do not own—more than the technical [aspects] but also [of] the mindset.”

Peña-Padriga shared her expertise as a creative manager for TV5, affirming the personal fulfillment of becoming a creative pillar of the industry. She stated: “When you are a writer, you are also a producer. You have to trust the process because there is beauty in waiting. Do the homework before the hard work.”

After the talk show segment, De Guzman delivered a talk on documentary storytelling, outlining the medium’s field principles and writing guidelines. Among these, she highlighted that the writer’s role is to build the human context and uncover the emotional truth through active listening and authentic trust. She closed the program with a striking reminder: “Build an archive of human dignity—one story at a time.”

After a brief Q&A session with the students, SCM Dean Dr. Jerry Kliatchko thanked the speakers for sharing their insights and reminded students of their invaluable roles not just as creatives in the entertainment industry, but above all, as humans capable of connecting through the power of storytelling.

As national elections approach, a continuous stream of public opinion polls seeks to gauge voter sentiment—especially regarding the race for the presidency. Among these, WR Numero’s June 2026 Philippine Public Opinion Monitor (PPOM) stands out as a trusted benchmark. Based on a nationally representative survey of 1,500 Filipino adults across diverse social classes, generations, and regions, the study provides valuable insights into the attitudes, behaviors, and preferences shaping political decision-making.

Data indicate that Vice President Sara Duterte remains a dominant force in Philippine politics, and is strongly positioned to secure the presidency in 2028. In terms of factional partisanship, 37 percent identified themselves as supporters of Duterte and her allies, compared to 18 percent for the Marcos camp and 20 percent for the Opposition (e.g., Leni Robredo and allies). Duterte’s support has remained virtually unchanged since March 2025 (38 percent). Her core support is validated by a 55 percent positive assessment of her performance as vice president. Thus, at the time of the survey, she has a commanding pre-election lead for the presidency at 39.4 percent —nearly double her nearest rival, Leni Robredo (20.9 percent). Even a combined vote share of Robredo and third-place contender Raffy Tulfo (14.2 percent) would not surpass Duterte’s base. Furthermore, fourth-place contender Bong Go (3.6 percent) is likely to consolidate his votes behind Duterte.

Voter preferences for Vice President support these numbers. The top two VP choices are both Duterte allies: Robin Padilla (21.3 percent) and Bong Go (20.6 percent), whose ratings grew by 9.6 percent and 8.4 percent since March 2025, respectively.

Similarly, the survey results in the senatorial race validate the support for Sara Duterte. According to the WR Numero data, six of the top eight senators rated for good performance are Duterte allies: Alan Peter Cayetano (24 percent), Robin Padilla (23 percent), Bong Go (19 percent), Rodante Marcoleta (16 percent), Pia Cayetano (14 percent), and Bato dela Rosa (13 percent). And if elections are held today, Duterte allies dominate the top ten, led by Robin Padilla (#1 at 39 percent), Alan Peter Cayetano (34 percent), Loren Legarda (32 percent), Sebastian “Baste” Duterte (29 percent), and Paolo “Pulong” Duterte (28 percent).

As regards the public’s perception of the ongoing impeachment process against the Vice President, 54 percent oppose her impeachment, and 42 percent believe that evidence against her is weak.

Though Duterte holds a clear advantage, viable counter-strategies exist for opposing factions. It may seem simplistic but the math for an anti-Duterte coalition can be a possibility if political strategy is designed to achieve that objective. Combining the Opposition base (20 percent) and the Marcos faction (18 percent) creates a combined 38 percent, which can challenge the Duterte machinery if unified with some of the undecided population (24 percent).

In a head-to-head scenario between Duterte and Robredo according to PPOM, the former leads 50 percent to 40 percent. A 10-point gap remains winnable for Robredo if she decides to run and successfully siphons undecided voters (10 percent) and anti-Duterte blocs. Analyzing the demographics, Robredo leads in Metro Manila (49.59 percent vs. 41.42 percent) and Rest of Luzon (55.33 percent vs. 27.81 percent) while Duterte dominates Mindanao overwhelmingly (95.04 percent) and Visayas (56.19 percent vs. 38.56 percent). In terms of socioeconomic class: Robredo leads in Class ABC (49.94 percent vs. 42.67 percent), whereas Duterte leads in Class D (57.13 percent vs. 36.05 percent) and Class E (49.01 percent vs.39.28 percent). These data provide the Robredo team valuable inputs in designing her campaign strategy should she decide to run for the presidency. Getting the active support of two senators who enjoy strong net positive standings in terms of performance in the Senate, Senators Raffy Tulfo (#1 good performer at 25 percent) and Bam Aquino (#4 good performer at 22 percent), would definitely boost Robredo’s chance.

What about the Marcos factor? Despite holding the top executive power for the past years, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. faces weak voter allegiance and declining approval numbers. Only 18 percent of survey respondents align with the Marcos camp, placing him behind both the Duterte faction (37 percent) and the Opposition (20 percent). Marcos also trails Duterte sharply in satisfaction, recording a 36 percent approval rating against Duterte’s 55 percent, while his dissatisfaction stands at 55 percent compared to Duterte’s 35 percent. Given these numbers, forming a strong alliance with Robredo and other anti-Duterte forces appears to be a necessary strategic move for Marcos to secure his political future.

It’s not solely a numbers game definitely, but numbers can suggest what to do now to achieve a desired outcome.

This article originally appeared on 15 August 2026 in Dr Alviar’s Manila Bulletin column, “Inciting Insights.”

The views expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the Publication and the University.

Between weekly ferry rides from Batangas to Romblon and long nights in session, Montojo has pushed his council toward livestreamed sessions, an official social media presence, and a still-unrealized dream of a Romblon Municipal Youth Parliament. Below, he talks about what it means to hold both a student ID and a councilor’s seat, why he thinks time is the real engine of change, and what he’d tell students who want to follow a similar path.

Wearing two hats: youth and public service

Tanya Rafanan: The Asian Pillar Award recognizes youth leadership and public service. How does your work in Romblon reflect both?

Miguel Montojo: There was already an SK (Sangguniang Kabataan) when I started, so I didn’t want to just occupy one lane meant for young people. I chose to be an all-rounder instead—a councilor, an at-large chairman, wholehearted about public service. That’s how I see youth leadership and public service tying together. We don’t want to misrepresent youth as a demographic that can only handle one kind of responsibility. As the first Gen Z regularly elected councilor, I felt I had to show that I was ready for the job and ready to excel at it.

Tanya: You’re both a UA&P student and an elected official. How have those two roles shaped each other?

Miguel: Paradoxically, they’ve made each other both harder and easier. Harder physically, I have to take the roro (boat) every week just to go home for sessions. There’s no direct flight to Romblon, so it’s a two-hour bus ride to Batangas, three hours at the port, then nine hours by roro. Twenty-eight hours of travel, back and forth, every single week. That leaves me about 5.8 days for everything else.

But it’s made easier by the fact that studying Political Economy isn’t purely theoretical for me—it’s lived experience. When a professor discussed the evolution of roro transport in the country, I wasn’t just learning it; I was living it. Being in public service keeps school from becoming abstract; it’s something I apply instantly, every day. And being a student keeps public service from becoming purely political—it keeps me grounded, reminds me how much I still don’t know, and that’s what keeps me from sitting on any laurels.

What the classroom can’t teach

Tanya: What has public service taught you that you couldn’t have learned in a classroom?

Miguel: This one’s a little controversial depending on where you sit politically. I started out as an activist—a leftist. Public service shifted me toward the center-left. Sixteen-year-old me would never have imagined ending up here.

Being a student, especially in Poleco, pushes you toward idealism, which isn’t bad in itself. Knowing what’s right and pushing for it matters. What moved me toward the center was realizing, through lived experience, that being right isn’t enough. Just because you know what’s right doesn’t mean it’s immediately possible. Youth idealism wants change done yesterday, which is strange, because we’re the ones with the most time.

Public service taught me that a lot of things that ought to be simply cannot be yet because of budget constraints, because of institutional friction. I’ve had to factor in that some staff don’t know how to use Word or Google Docs. Half the population doesn’t know how to use the internet or apps, so pushing for digital governance means accounting for that gap too. Some things, only time can solve.

Time is the greatest catalyst for change, not political will. Political will matters; we need it, but time is what allows political will to actually materialize into something real. If we stay impatient and idealistic without end, we just burn out, and we become the very people we resent—the ones who say “ganyan talaga“ and give up. So patience is what you need.

The catalyst to run

Tanya: You’ve pushed for major changes in the council. What made you decide it was time to act?

Miguel: My catalyst for running in the first place was hearing from staff that a councilor was playing Mobile Legends during a session. That angered me. A councilor’s salary isn’t a secret, and it’s substantial. In Romblon, it’s about 1.08 million pesos a year. To find out someone was gaming through a session, asleep on the job. It’s deeply insulting, especially when we keep saying “kabataan ang pag-asa ng bayan.” We rarely see that in action. It’s almost just a slogan. The youth keeps getting set aside for ceremonial roles.

When I decided to run, a lot of people assumed it was because my father—the mayor—told me to. Classic political dynasty assumption. In reality, he didn’t want me to run. His words were something like, “Wag muna, hindi ka pa nga tapos mag-college.” I told him, “Pa, your councilors suck. They’re overpaid to do nothing. Pumasok, umupo, makinig, pumirma, umalis, and then sahod na.” That position should be making change, and instead we’re spending a million pesos a year on very little.

Accountability as a discipline

Tanya: In one of your public speeches, you said, “Wala nang mauupo lang, wala nang magpapahinga sa konsehong ito.“ What does accountability look like to you in local politics?

Miguel: The full quote is actually, “Wala nang mauupo lang, wala nang magpapahinga sa konsehong ito, muling may nakikinabang.” No more MLBB during session. I wanted to show, not in a mayabang way, that things could be different. That’s also why I ran for the chairmanship of the Committee on Rules. I wanted rules that ensure we’re functioning at maximum capacity. I wanted to be remembered as someone who institutionalized transparency and accountability, not just talked about them.

It’s easy to say “transparency and accountability.” It’s much harder once you’re actually in the seat. I didn’t want to be “all talk and no action,” so the first thing I did was establish an online presence. It might be uncomfortable to admit, but social media is now the dominant channel for public information; more people will see something online than at the palengke. There was no livestream, no Facebook page before, so I started with myself.

The next step was pushing the whole council—the Sangguniang Bayan—to have its own Facebook page, so ordinances and resolutions come from an official source. Five months into office, I pushed for livestreaming every session. We already had the budget and equipment, and the staff wanted it too. The only resistance came from my colleagues. It took four months to convince them, mostly out of fear of getting bashed online.

But no matter how good an initiative is, someone will complain. The sentiment of the few isn’t the sentiment of the many. And there’s an easy fix if the comments get out of hand: turn them off, and let people share the post instead. That still creates engagement without the noise.

A youth parliament, still a dream in progress

Tanya: Tell us about your initiative, the Romblon Municipal Youth Parliament. What do you hope it can change about how young people participate in politics?

Miguel: To be transparent, the Youth Parliament hasn’t been instituted yet—it’s still a plan. Last year, I passed a resolution, unanimously approved, urging the finance committee and the executive branch to increase the Local Youth Development Council’s budget from 100,000 to 2 million pesos. I expected resistance, and there was. No increase happened at all. That extra 1.9 million would have gone a long way, especially now, toward what the Youth Parliament is meant to do.

I want to lead by example and show that the youth is ready to take on responsibility. Right now there are very few Gen Z SK officials. You can’t really learn governance through pure theory. I want young people to experience it firsthand. It’s tiring how the youth is always ceremonial—listening to talks, campaigning for candidates—but sidelined when it comes to actual governance. I want to move youth from the sidelines to the center: a youth parliament first, then a junior mayor, junior vice mayor, junior councilors, even junior accountants and treasurers, so they actually experience what running a government involves. I don’t want to do it half-heartedly. It’s a dream we haven’t given up on. This year, it was approved by the council but didn’t move forward with the executive; I’ll try again.

A message to future public servants

Tanya: What would you say to students who want to become public servants or advocates someday?

Miguel: First, congratulations, you’re already on the right path toward social change. Even if you eventually lose, even if there are dreams you can’t pursue, and even if you never become a public servant yourself, you’re still doing society a huge favor by being a good citizen. Good governance is easy to talk about and much harder to practice, and it’s impossible without good citizenship to match it. We’ll never achieve good governance without first building good citizenship.

Please don’t burn out, and please have patience. Change isn’t a new idea; every generation before us wanted good governance too. We haven’t achieved it yet, not because no one aspired to it, but because idealists tend to sizzle out. We wanted change yesterday, but we have so much time. Change doesn’t happen overnight; you don’t build Rome in a day, and we rarely apply that same patience to governance the way we would to something like baking a cake. It’s slow and painful. You’ll get tired, you’ll curse the bobotante, you’ll curse dirty politicians, you’ll lose faith. I hope that losing faith isn’t permanent, that you can sleep it off and wake up with renewed energy to keep trying, and eventually, to succeed.

We should be ready to excel, but we should also be ready to fail. To be let down, to be disappointed, even to be irritated at a world that refuses to change. “You can’t help somebody who doesn’t want to be helped” is one of the biggest reasons people sizzle out. Let’s stop blaming people for staying politically uneducated; there’s always a reason behind it. Otherwise, we risk becoming the very people we’re mad at today, because someday, we will look at the future youth the same way and say, “we tried to change it, pero ganyan talaga ang system.” That’s where political will and time collide. It takes time to nurture political will. It’s a fire that burns brightest at the start and risks dying out the longer it takes.

Keep that fire lit, but in moderation. Overdo it, and you’ll get sick of it and eventually quit. Don’t abandon it, because if you do, you become part of the problem. Let’s be the generation that finally breaks the cycle of wanting change, and wanting it, and wanting it. And this time, actually achieves it. In the end, I just want us to leave the world a little better than we found it.

Deleting Canvas from my phone was the first thing I did as soon as I left my last class for the semester. I was looking forward to spending the first few days of my long-awaited break abroad.

Once finals were over, I was invited by one of my professors to write for Universitas. He said I could write about anything under the sun. As the invitation lingered, I considered what to write. None of the ideas gave me the eureka moment that compelled me to write about a specific topic until I was on an airplane with no Wi-Fi and my brother fast asleep beside me. All of a sudden, an itch arrived, which appeared as the idea for the article.

I wanted to capture it before it disappeared completely. Before I knew it, my hands were typing into my notes app, attempting to scratch the itch, leaving behind fragments of ideas I might return to later.

The itch to create is like a mosquito bite: I only notice it by the mark it leaves behind. The mark does what it does best: bother me. I have to scratch or even slap it, or else it’s bound to disrupt whatever I’m doing.

Most of the time, I don’t scratch it—I distract myself instead. Before boarding the plane, I found myself mindlessly scrolling on TikTok, as my algorithm went from an influencer showing off a massive thrift haul to a post disguising heartbreak as a means to go viral with the caption “if he wanted to, he would,” all within the span of a minute. Maybe that’s why the itch arrived. Without anything to consume, there was room to notice what wanted to be created.

We have grown accustomed to consuming media, so creating feels like a luxury—one that requires intention. As we consume endlessly, when do we actually go out of our way to scratch the itch to create?

How often do we tell ourselves “I’ll do this tomorrow” or maybe even “Someday, I’ll do it” but end up prioritizing everything else? How many times do we procrastinate to the point that the itch to create begins to fade? One of the greatest tragedies of life is not that every itch goes unscratched, but that it disappears before we ever give it a chance to become something more than a figment of our imagination.

I had scratched the itch on the airplane, but only enough to keep it from disappearing. It was only after a week that I opened a brand new Google document and started brain-dumping rhetorical questions, excerpts I had come across both online and offline, and anything I thought could become something more. Since then, I’ve been deleting pretty sentences that don’t serve this essay, jumping between Google Docs and browser tabs.

While other tasks kept demanding my attention, this particular itch kept coming back. I’ve learned that scratching it is an action, not necessarily a conclusion.

Maybe that’s what it means to scratch an itch. It doesn’t always happen in one grand decisive moment. Sometimes you scratch it a little, leave it alone, come back to it, scratch it again, and eventually realize you’ve been answering its call all along.

I have been scratching this itch for months, but scratching hasn’t meant finishing it. It means returning to it. And maybe that’s the entire point: creation doesn’t always arrive as a finished song, novel, painting, or even article. Sometimes it remains unfinished, continuing to evolve in ways the world never witnesses.

The existence of an unfinished work is tangible evidence that I answered the itch. Blaise Pascal’s Pensées,1 for instance, survives not in spite of its incompleteness but partly because of it. The Pensées is the posthumous compilation of a notebook that contained his fragmented ideas and drafts for an unfinished Christian apologetic.2 After his death, his response to that itch produced a work that, up to this day, invites readers into a mind still at work. Though unfinished, his notebook became an outlet through which his ideas endured.

If Pascal’s thoughts found their home in a notebook, then every act of creation eventually seeks an outlet. What, then, becomes an outlet for the itch?

My notes app became the outlet where invisible thoughts became visible through words. This is ultimately where drafts, lingering reflections, and inquiries born of hunger are preserved, often riddled with typographical errors. They emerge between rush-hour commutes, location transfers, minor inconveniences, major milestones, sometimes with nothing more than 2% battery left on my phone. The outlet gave those thoughts a place to exist in their most unfiltered form, one that cannot be perfectly reconstructed later.

Why, then, do I always somehow need an outlet for the itch? The itch itself haunts me everywhere I go and dares to interrupt me as I go about my day. Perhaps this itch is not mine alone to experience, but one that is shared. Why do we have this impulse to make the invisible visible?

One philosophical perspective begins with what is called the inner world. Each of us has a unique world shaped by our experiences, desires, and surroundings.3 Philosopher Antonio Malo describes affectivity through the Latin verb afficior, meaning “I am moved, affected”.4 In this sense, affectivity describes what happens when something outside our inner world encounters us, thereby moving us. The encounter isn’t isolated. We are in a relationship with what affects us.5 The itch is what happens when reality has already affected us. It is the felt impulse that emerges when something has affected us, and we are moved to respond.

At the psychological level, being affected is not simply a matter of feeling; we become conscious of what moved us, interpret it, give it a name, and eventually decide what we want to do with it.6 Affectivity explains why reality can move us while psychology describes what happens as we become conscious of and interpret the movement. But neither, by themselves, answer the question:

Where does the itch even come from?

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.7 He who wove an abstraction of nothing into concrete existence. God created a world worth responding to. Therefore, we create in response to Him. The itch to paint the sunset when it kisses the horizon before it disappears into the night. The itch to photograph a scenic route you always visit at golden hour. The itch to write a letter to express a love that couldn’t be fully captured in language, yet you do it anyway.

Maybe the itch doesn’t just appear for us to say that we made something, but because something within us overflowed into reality—through creation.

As my flight touched down instead of allowing my algorithm to decide what occupies my attention, I reached for my notes app: “resolve the article revisions” beside an unmarked checkbox. What you are reading is the form the itch took when I finally scratched it.

As summer vacation fades into my memory, I’ll have to install Canvas yet again. Some things may remain the same when the school year begins: the crowded hallways between classes, familiar faces across campus, and the ALB pond catching the afternoon sun.

But now I know that the itch isn’t there to distract me; it invites me to respond.

For when it comes, I must scratch it. One itch at a time.

We have heard the phrase so often that it has worn down to a stump. It sits on coffee-mug slogans, motivational posters, and book jackets, reduced to a decorative sentiment, a poetic flourish meant to comfort us when things get heavy. But what if Fyodor Dostoevsky was not offering romantic comfort? What if he was diagnosing a civilization? Perhaps the question is no longer whether beauty can save the world, but whether we still know how to see it.

The slowness of stone

You do not notice the shift immediately. You arrive in a city like Rome expecting history. You expect textbook monuments, crowded piazzas, rich espresso, and grand vistas you have already consumed a thousand times through smartphone screens. What you do not expect is what happens to your mind. It begins to slow down. Not because the city is quiet; it decidedly is not. Scooters buzz through narrow alleys like angry hornets, conversations spill out of crowded trattorias, church bells interrupt the afternoon heat, and tourists crowd every legendary square.

Yet beneath the physical noise lies a different rhythm. Somewhere between stepping across worn basalt cobblestones and sitting beneath the colossal, open-sky oculus of the Pantheon, you find yourself looking upward instead of downward. Your phone remains in your pocket a little longer. You linger over an espresso without feeling the phantom itch of unread notifications. You notice how the late afternoon light transforms ordinary travertine stone into something luminous, almost breathing. For the first time in weeks, perhaps months, you are not calculating what comes next. You are simply there. And in that stillness, a quiet, unsettling question presents itself: What if beauty is doing something to us?

The tyranny of utility

We moderns have neatly quarantined beauty, reducing it to mere preference. We speak of it as something pleasant, subjective, and ultimately optional: a weekend luxury meant for museums, vacations, or the decorative margins of life once the real work is finished. Everything else belongs to efficiency. Our cities are engineered to move us faster, our pocket devices are designed to hold our attention longer, and our digital calendars are meticulously color-coded to leave no empty spaces. Even our leisure has been colonized by productivity. Wow. We optimize our sleep cycles, quantify our physical exertion, listen to audiobooks at double speed, and congratulate ourselves on the dark art of multitasking. We have become astonishingly proficient at moving through the world, but are we still capable of beholding it?

Even before neuroscience began mapping the neural correlates of attention, Plato suggested through the voice of Diotima in the Symposium that the true lover of beauty is led upward from individual beautiful forms to universal concepts, eventually catching sight of “a beauty whose wondrous nature is finally revealed”1 , an awakening that pulls the soul away from immediate, frantic pleasures toward what is ultimately true and good. Beauty was never just about a pleasing arrangement of shapes; it was an invitation to transcend ourselves. Generations of builders understood this instinctively. Why else would humans spend centuries constructing Gothic cathedrals that no spreadsheet could ever justify? Why pour immense wealth, blood, and labor into soaring vaulted ceilings, intricate stained glass, and sacred music that echoes for miles? Because beauty teaches before words ever can. A cathedral is not merely an architectural achievement; it is theology made physical. Standing beneath the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, one senses that the stone itself is making an argument: human beings are made for more than consumption, production, and survival. They are made for wonder and awe.

The geography of insight

Have you ever noticed that your best, most clarifying thoughts rarely arrive while you are furiously clearing your inbox? They arrive elsewhere: while walking beside an endless sea, while listening to the unhurried mathematics of a Bach suite, while looking up at mountain ridges catching the morning sun, or while wandering down ancient streets that witnessed centuries rise and fall before your ancestors were born. This is no coincidence. Beauty interrupts us. Yes, it rescues us from the relentless tyranny of utility.

As the philosopher Josef Pieper observed, “Leisure is the basis of culture,” understood not as passive entertainment or idleness, but as “a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation.”2 Leisure, properly understood, is the vital condition that makes wisdom possible. Without contemplation, a civilization slowly starves of its soul. Perhaps this explains our peculiar, modern exhaustion. We possess more accumulated information than any generation in human history, yet many of us have forgotten how to truly pay attention. We scroll through thousands of pixelated images every week while truly seeing almost nothing. We communicate constantly across global networks while seldom listening to the person sitting across the room. We accelerate our lives every year, wondering why everything feels increasingly shallow. Beauty quietly rebels against all of this, because a sunset cannot be rushed, a symphony cannot be skimmed, and Michelangelo’s Pietà does not yield its emotional weight in a fleeting thirty-second scroll. Some things disclose their depth only to those who are willing to remain still.

The architecture of the soul

This may be the greatest lesson left by ancient cities: not just their history or their architecture, but their pace. Rome has outlived emperors, barbarian invasions, plagues, political revolutions, and shifting ideologies. It understands a truth our age has forgotten: what truly endures is rarely what is produced the fastest. It forces us to ask a deeper question: do our cities educate us, or do they merely manage us? A city built solely for efficiency produces efficient, anxious people, whereas a city built with beauty and proportion produces contemplative people. Architecture is never neutral, and public spaces are never merely functional. Every street quietly answers a fundamental question about what kind of human being should live here.

The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar warned of the grave cost of banishing aesthetics from public life, writing that “We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it,” adding that whoever dismisses her will soon find that “she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters [truth and goodness] without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.”3 Beauty is not a decorative bow tied around a completed civilization; it is one of the foundational conditions that keeps a civilization humane. Even contemporary psychology backs this up, as psychologist Dacher Keltner notes in his research on everyday wonder that “awe defines a distinct state of consciousness that changes how we process information, altering our sense of time and our very self-concept,”4 expanding our perspective and increasing pro-social generosity. Beauty literally changes how we inhabit our own skin.

An act of affirmation

Perhaps this is why we leave places like Rome feeling a quiet, heavy reluctance to return home. It is not simply because we enjoyed the food or the weather, but because beauty has quietly retrained our attention, reminding us of what it feels like to be fully awake. When Dostoevsky wrote through his characters that “Beauty will save the world,”5 he did not mean that a well-crafted oil painting can stop a war or that a stained-glass window can wipe out poverty. He meant something far more radical.

Beauty saves because it teaches us to love what is actually worthy of love. It reminds us that another human being is not an obstacle to navigate, but a mystery to encounter; that a city is more than a logistical grid of infrastructure; and that life itself is more than a checklist of tasks to complete before time runs out. In an age obsessed with speed, output, and algorithmic optimization, beauty performs a profound act of affirmation. It is an active choosing of depth over superficiality, a standing invitation to stop, to look, to listen, and to wonder. And perhaps contemplation is not an escape from reality after all. It is the only way we ever truly enter it.

“Thank heaven for a man who makes up his mind,” M tells James Bond in Moonraker. But clearly nations, no less than individuals, must utterly know what they are trying to achieve. The Philippines — well, at least hopefully — is doing finally that.

Mere consideration of the US-led technological initiative known as Pax Silica is an appropriate response to China’s repeated weaponization of trade, investment, tourism, and supply chains against States resisting its geopolitical ambitions. The Philippines, along with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and — of course Taiwan — have experienced varying forms of economic coercion. Reducing dependence on China is no longer merely an economic policy. It is a national security imperative.

For decades, the Philippines remained trapped in low-value manufacturing while our neighbors advanced into semiconductors, artificial intelligence, advanced electronics, and other high-value industries. Pax Silica offers perhaps the country’s best opportunity in a generation to reverse that pattern.

Government projections estimate that the initiative could attract US$40 billion to US$70 billion in investments into semiconductor manufacturing, artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure, critical minerals processing, and advanced logistics. The New Clark City component alone is projected to generate more than 130,000 high-quality jobs, while the broader Luzon Economic Corridor could eventually support as many as one million jobs across manufacturing, logistics, research, construction, and supporting industries. More than 50 multinational companies reportedly expressed interest in participating. There are suggestions that successful implementation could propel the Philippines toward double-digit economic growth.

More importantly, economic modernization and national security, for once, point in the same direction.

Yet strategic necessity does not justify constitutional shortcuts. Reports that early negotiations contemplated Economic Security Zones with diplomatic-style immunities or the application of foreign legal standards deserve scrutiny. Whether floated rumor or merely proposed is almost beside the point. The issue is constitutional principle.

Article I declares Philippine territory and with it, Philippine sovereignty. Article II.7 commits the State to an independent foreign policy in which the paramount consideration is national sovereignty, territorial integrity, national interest, and the right to self-determination. Article II.19 directs the State to develop a self-reliant and independent national economy effectively controlled by Filipinos. None of these provisions prohibits strategic alliances but all of them prohibit surrendering sovereign authority.

The Supreme Court in Nicolas v. Romulo recognized the Executive’s authority to conclude international agreements while emphasizing that constitutional limits remain controlling. Foreign corporations, technical advisers, and strategic partners operating within Philippine territory remain must subject to Philippine jurisdiction. No Economic Security Zone should become a legal enclave where Philippine labor laws, environmental regulations, tax rules, or criminal statutes cease to apply.

The same constitutional discipline governs strategic natural resources. Article XII.2 embodies the Regalian Doctrine, reserving ownership and ultimate control of natural resources to the State. Section 10 likewise authorizes Congress, when the national interest so requires, to reserve certain areas of investment to Filipino citizens or corporations predominantly owned by them. In La Bugal-B’laan Tribal Association v. Ramos, the Supreme Court sustained foreign participation in mining only because the Philippine government retained ultimate control, supervision, and management. Foreign corporations cannot determine Philippine resource policy or direct extraction solely to satisfy foreign strategic priorities.

Pax Silica should also be seen within the greater framework of Philippine international trade commitments. The Philippines is a founding member of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the world’s largest free trade agreement, as well as participant in ASEAN economic integration. And yes, international economic law has long recognized that States may adopt measures necessary to protect essential security interests.

But while sensitive technologies, semiconductor supply chains, cyber infrastructure, and critical minerals occupy fundamentally different legal and strategic categories, requiring resilience, diversification, and cooperation with trusted allies, traditional commerce in agriculture, consumer goods, tourism, and conventional manufacturing should continue to benefit from RCEP’s liberalizing framework. The challenge for policymakers is to balance the aims of trade with economic and military security.

Indeed, there are “mutual benefits of international trade and investment, enhanced and enabled by bold public investment in key sectors; bounded in rare but essential cases by principled controls on key national security technologies; protected against harmful non-market practices, labor and environment abuses, and economic coercion; and critically coordinated with a broad range of partners.” So says then US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan (remarks at the Brookings Institution in 2024).

Hence while it is obvious that the Philippines should enthusiastically embrace Pax Silica, it should do so as a sovereign constitutional republic.

Philippine courts must retain jurisdiction. The State must preserve genuine control over strategic natural resources. Because clearly the West Philippine Sea cannot be defended by military strength alone. A comprehensive archipelagic security has to include industrial strength, economic independence, and national self-respect.

Pax Silica offers the Philippines that opportunity, but it should never just be an American project in the Philippines but rather a respectful partnership by the US and other allied countries with the Philippines. In that crucial distinction lies the key.

This piece was originally published in Atty. Gatdula’s column, “Being Right,” in BusinessWorld on 14 August 2026. The views expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the Publication and the University.

A scholar and childhood cancer survivor, Sianghio entered UA&P with a strong sense of resilience and responsibility. Years after graduation, however, life led her through unexpected challenges that transformed how she understood success, leadership, and purpose. Looking back on her journey—from student leader to alumna navigating a very different season of life—she reflects on the lessons that have remained constant and the truths she continues to seek.

Learning to lead beyond titles

Tanya Rafanan: During your time at UA&P, how did your experiences as a cancer survivor and a scholar influence the kind of student and leader you became?

Michelle Sianghio: Growing up as a cancer survivor taught me resilience very early in life. By the time I entered UA&P, I had already learned what it meant to face difficulties and keep moving forward. Because of that, I never wanted people to see me as someone who needed special treatment. If anything, I wanted to contribute more than what was expected of me.

Being a scholar also gave me a strong sense of responsibility. I felt grateful to my family and to the university for giving me the opportunity to study there, so I always wanted to make the most of it.

When I became USG President, I initially thought leadership meant making things happen, solving problems, and having all the answers. But as I worked with students and the administration, I realized leadership is really about helping other people grow and succeed in their own way. That changed the way I understood what it means to serve.

The lasting influence of liberal education

Tanya: How did UA&P shape who you are today?

Michelle: One of the things that made me proud to be a Dragon was UA&P’s liberal education. At the time, I didn’t fully realize how important it would become. It wasn’t simply about preparing us for a profession. It challenged us to search for truth, to think deeply, and to ask what makes a life meaningful.

After graduation, I naturally focused on achievements, career goals, and building the future I wanted. But when life became difficult, I realized those foundations had stayed with me. The lessons I learned in UA&P reminded me that life is about something much bigger than personal success. They continue to guide me even today.

A lesson that never leaves

Tanya: What is one lesson from UA&P that has stayed with you?

Michelle: Seeking truth.

As a student, seeking truth often means being intellectually curious—learning new things, exploring ideas, and preparing for your future. But later in life, it becomes much more personal.

For me, it now means constantly asking: Is this really good? Is this meaningful? Am I still living intentionally? Is this still worth pursuing?

Those questions never really leave you. Once you’ve learned to seek truth, you begin to look at every stage of your life through that lens.

Tanya: After everything you’ve experienced, do you think the truth you’re searching for has changed?

Michelle: I think it’s still the same truth, but it appears differently now.

When I graduated, I thought I had everything I wanted. I was building my career, accomplishing my goals, and I believed that was what contentment looked like. I was searching for fulfillment through the things I was achieving.

Then, life changed.

When everything I had built was suddenly stripped away, I realized that contentment wasn’t what I thought it was. It wasn’t found in achievements or titles anymore. Instead, it became much simpler. It became the people who stayed beside me, the relationships I could depend on, and knowing that even in my current situation, there were still things worth waking up for and people worth loving.

Looking back, I realize that money, medals, promotions, and achievements can sometimes become distractions. Before, I thought they were the destination. Now, I see them as only part of the journey.

What remains are the people you’ve loved, the relationships you’ve built, the stories you’ve shared, and the lives you’ve touched.

So I don’t think the truth itself has changed. I think my understanding of it has deepened. The truth I’m seeking today is still about living a meaningful life—but now I understand that meaning looks very different depending on the season you’re in.

Redefining success

Tanya: Looking back on your years after graduation, what has been the greatest challenge you’ve encountered?

Michelle: Ironically, it wasn’t surviving cancer.

As a child, I always had my family beside me. My mom and the people around me carried me through those difficult years. But adulthood is different. You’re expected to build your own life. You’re establishing your career, becoming independent, making plans, and dreaming about the future.

Then suddenly, everything stopped.

When my prosthetic leg developed complications, I became bedridden. Many of the things I had taken for granted—working, going out, living independently—became difficult or even impossible. That was the greatest challenge I’ve faced. More than the physical limitations, it forced me to question the way I had been measuring my own worth.

Before, success meant achievements. It meant reaching goals, earning promotions, accomplishing everything I had planned for myself. There’s nothing inherently wrong with those things, but without realizing it, they became the standard by which I judged whether I was valuable. When I could no longer pursue them, there were moments when I genuinely believed I had failed. But slowly, I realized success isn’t something that disappears just because your circumstances change.

Today, I believe success means remaining faithful to your purpose even when life no longer looks the way you expected. It means continuing to grow despite your limitations, and finding ways to love and serve even if you can no longer do the things you once could.

One of the greatest surprises during this season was discovering how many people continued to show up for me. Friends reached out. People helped without being asked. They reminded me that relationships built through genuine care endure even when you have nothing tangible left to offer. That changed the way I understood success.

Tanya: How did being bedridden change your understanding of productivity?

Michelle: For most of my life, productivity meant accomplishing something. As long as I was working, achieving, or moving toward another goal, I felt valuable.

But when you’re bedridden, those external measures disappear. You can’t produce in the same way anymore. At first, that’s frightening because you begin asking yourself, If I can’t do anything, what am I worth?

It took a long time for me to realize that productivity and value are not the same thing.

Even in this season, I can still encourage people. I can still strengthen relationships. I can still share my story in ways that give others hope. Those things may never appear on a résumé, but they matter just as much.

Now I believe success isn’t measured by how much you accomplish. It’s measured by whether you continue living your purpose despite whatever circumstances life gives you.

Leadership, reimagined

Tanya: Earlier, you mentioned that leadership eventually became about helping others grow. Looking back now, years after serving as USG President, do you think your understanding of leadership has changed?

Michelle: Definitely.

When I was a student leader, I thought leadership was about making decisions, solving problems, and representing the student body well. I worked on receiving information, processing it, and communicating it to students. At the time, I thought that was what good leadership looked like.

Looking back, I think there were things I could have done differently.

Experience has taught me that leadership isn’t primarily about managing situations. It’s about influencing people in a way that genuinely helps them grow.

Now, whenever I talk to someone—whether it’s a colleague, a friend, or even someone I’ve just met—I always ask myself one question: Did I add value to that person’s life today?

That has become my measure of leadership.

People don’t all need the same thing. Some need encouragement. Others need someone to challenge them. Others simply need someone willing to listen. Leadership requires the humility to recognize that serving people means adjusting yourself to what they need rather than expecting everyone else to adjust to you.

That’s why I often describe leadership as creating ripples. A single drop of water seems insignificant, but once it falls, the ripples continue moving outward long after the moment itself has passed.

I think leadership works the same way. One conversation, one act of kindness, one word of encouragement—those small moments may end up affecting far more people than we’ll ever know.

That’s the kind of leader I hope to become now. Not someone remembered for a title, but someone who quietly left people better than she found them.

What she is most proud of

Tanya: Looking back on your journey from college until now, what are you most proud of?

Michelle: I’m proud that I still find ways to keep going.

Awards, titles, and achievements can all disappear, but resilience stays with you.

I’m grateful that I’ve been able to encourage other cancer survivors, persons with disabilities, and people who feel stuck in their own struggles. If my experiences can remind someone that they are not alone, then I’m proud of that.

More than anything else, I’m proud that I’ve learned to smile even through difficult seasons.

What inspires her now

Tanya: What inspires you today?

Michelle: I’m inspired by growth.

Even in difficult seasons, I believe there is still something more that I can do and someone more that I can serve. Challenges are not the final chapter of our lives.

If sharing my experiences helps another person realize that life can still be meaningful despite hardship, then those experiences become worthwhile. I think our struggles can become a source of hope for other people, and that’s what inspires me every day.

A message to students

Tanya: Finally, what message would you like to share with UA&P students who may be facing challenges of their own?

Michelle: There are three things I always remind myself of.

First, the most meaningful chapters of our lives are often the ones we never would have chosen for ourselves. The unexpected seasons are the ones that teach us the deepest lessons.

Second, never stop seeking truth. Whether you’re pursuing a career, building a family, or discovering your purpose, keep asking yourself whether the life you’re building is truly meaningful and worth living.

Finally, remember that your purpose can survive any detour. Circumstances may change. Plans may change. Even your abilities may change. But your capacity to serve, to grow, and to make a difference remains.

Purpose is always greater than the path we originally imagined for ourselves.

Good morning, esteemed colleagues.

It is a privilege to reflect with you today on a question as old as the institution of university itself, yet perhaps more urgent now more than ever before: What is the purpose of higher education?

We gather today as specialists in our respective disciplines, and most importantly as teachers entrusted with one of the most vital ministries there is – the formation of human persons. In every semester, we prepare syllabuses, design assessments, and evaluate student learning. We ask whether our students have mastered concepts, acquired competencies, or demonstrated learning outcomes. These are important questions, but they are not the deepest ones.

The deeper question is: What kind of human beings do our students become because they have attended our classes?

That question lies at the very heart of liberal education.

The world in which our students are growing up is massively different from the one many of us experienced as college freshmen. Now there is much:

• Technological Disruption - artificial intelligence now generates essays, images, and scientific analyses in seconds. Information is superabundant, yet wisdom often appears scarce.

• Social Disconnection - our students are more connected digitally than any previous generation, yet many experience deep loneliness, anxiety, and uncertainty regarding meaning and purpose.

• Cultural Polarization - public discourse has become increasingly fragmented. The ability to disagree respectfully, evaluate evidence critically, and pursue truth together is growing more fragile.

• Complex global challenges - climate change, migration, widening social inequality, and rapid cultural shifts present multi-layered questions that no single discipline can resolve in isolation.

These realities compel us to ask: should higher education merely prepare graduates for employment, or should it prepare them to live as human persons?

Making that decision is precisely where liberal education begins.

The university as more than professional training

It is common knowledge that universities have always contributed to economic development and professional competence. Society rightly expects our graduates to become business leaders, capable engineers, scientists, accountants, teachers, lawyers, and public servants.

However, if universities produce technically competent graduates who cannot distinguish truth from falsehood, who possess knowledge without wisdom, or who wield power without conscience, then higher education has fulfilled only a fraction of its mission.

This concern is not new. Nearly two centuries ago, St. John Henry Newman reflected on the purpose of the university:

“…university training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aim aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life.”

- St. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, Discourse X, “Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Professional Skill” (1852), 10.

Newman was not dismissing professional training. He was rather arguing that education possesses an intrinsic value because it enlarges the human intellect – enabling us to perceive reality more comprehensively and to exercise sound judgement.

For Newman, the educated person is more than someone who remembers a great amount of facts. Someone who has developed a “philosophical habit of mind” – the capacity to connect ideas, recognize and simplify complexity, and seek truth wherever it may be found. That insight remains remarkably vital today.

The Catholic university and the search for truth

As faculty members of UA&P, a Catholic university, our understanding of education is grounded in a transcendent vision of the human person. We believe that every student is created in the image and likeness of God. Education, therefore, is not a mere Page 3 of 30 rationing of information; it is a participation in the formation of persons capable of truth, goodness, beauty, freedom, love, and service.

This vision was articulated by Pope St. John Paul II in Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities:

“… a Catholic University is distinguished by its free search for the whole truth about nature, man, and God.”

- Pope St. John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990), no. 4

Notice the breadth of that statement. The university searches not only for truth about nature (the domain of the physical sciences), nor only about human society (the domain of the social sciences), nor only about culture (the domain of the humanities). Its search encompasses nature, the human person, and God together.

Truth is one.

Our disciplines are many.

And the university exists precisely because reality is far larger than any single discipline can fully explain.

Why this conversation matters today

Around the world, and explicitly here in the Philippines, higher education is increasingly evaluated through quantitative and outcomes-based metrics:

• Graduate employability rates

• Professional licensure performance

• Research productivity and citations (publish or perish)

• International rankings

• Industry partnerships

These are legitimate indicators, and we should strive for excellence in all of them. Yet the Catholic intellectual tradition reminds us that not everything that counts can actually be counted.

If graduates attain successful careers but lack moral integrity, compassion, civic responsibility, or a sense of personal vocation, something essential has been lost. As Pope Francis reminds us:

“True wisdom, as the fruit of self-examination, dialogue and generous encounter between persons, is not acquired by mere accumulation of data…”

- Pope Francis, Laudato Si (2015), no. 47

Liberal education as formation

The ancient Greeks envisioned a holistic kind of formation of the human person. Centuries later, Christianity deepened that vision by recognizing that true human flourishing includes intellectual, moral, spiritual, and communal dimensions. Catholic universities inherited and elevated this tradition. Its primary task has never been simply to produce workers. Its task has always been to educate persons to be free.

The German philosopher Josef Pieper echoes this:

“Education concerns the whole man; an educated man is a man with a point of view from which he takes in the whole world. Education concerns the whole man, man capax universi, capable of grasping the totality of existing things.”

- Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948), 39

Grasping the totality in Pieper’s sense is more than observing facts. It is learning to perceive reality truthfully, to recognize goodness, to appreciate beauty, and to discern what truly merits our ultimate commitment. Surely that is the deepest hope we hold for every student who sits in our classrooms.

Throughout the rest of this lecture, let us think, not primarily in our respective fields in CAS – Arts, Asia Pacific Studies, English, Filipino, History, Literature, Philosophy, or Theology – but together as educators entrusted with the formation of human persons.

• Before our students become professionals, they are human beings

• Before they become successful, they must learn to become wise

• And before they can transform society, they themselves must be transformed through education

Let us now address a deceptively simple question: What exactly do we mean when we speak of “liberal education”?

What is liberal education?

The question of liberal education has become urgent today. But before we can defend it, or renew it, we must first understand what it actually means. More frequently than not, liberal education is misunderstood:

• For some, “liberal education” is reducible to formation of stance in politics.

• Others assume it simply means studying literature, philosophy, or history.

• Still others equate it with general education courses that students must get out of the way before beginning their majors.

Historically speaking, however, none of these definitions captures its true depth. In understanding liberal education, we must go back, beyond the nineteenth century of John Henry Newman, and even the age of medieval universities, to the classical antiquity itself.

The word liberal comes from the Latin liber, meaning free, while education derives from the Latin educere, which means to draw out. A liberal education therefore, is literally an education that brings out our being free.

But what kind of freedom is this?

Certainly not freedom understood as doing whatever we please. The Catholic intellectual tradition has always distinguished between freedom as license or the absolute liberty to do what we want, and freedom as excellence – the freedom to know the good, choose the good, and become the kind of person we were created to be.

This understanding connects with the words of Jesus found in the Gospel of St. John:

“If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

- John 8:31-32

Notice the order. Truth precedes freedom. Freedom is not the rejection of truth; rather, freedom is the fruit of living in truth.

This biblical insight greatly shaped the Christian vision of learning: education exists not merely to increase our choices, but to cultivate the wisdom necessary to choose well.

The classical origins: Paideia

Long before Christianity, the ancient Greeks used the word paideia to describe the holistic formation of the human person.

Paideia is not simply about going through schooling. Essentially, it referred to cultivation of intellectual excellence, moral character, civic responsibility, and an appreciation for beauty. To be educated meant becoming capable of participating wisely in the life of the polis – the community. Knowledge, virtue, and citizenship were inseparable.

When Christianity encountered Greek philosophy, Christianity purified and elevated the Greek ideals rather than reject them. The pursuit of wisdom became inseparable from the pursuit of God, who is Truth personified. Thus emerged the educational vision that eventually gave birth to the medieval university.

The Medieval university: The unity of knowledge

One of the remarkable achievements of the medieval university was its conviction that all genuine knowledge ultimately forms a coherent whole.

Theology, philosophy, medicine, law, astronomy, mathematics, music and the natural sciences were not isolated enterprises competing for dominance. They were different windows through which human beings could contemplate the same ultimate reality. This conviction rested upon a theological principle articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas (borrowed from St. Ambrose of Milan):

“All truth, by whomsoever it has been spoken, has its origin in the Holy Spirit.”

- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 109, a. 1, ad. 1

Knowledge as an integrated whole

No modern thinker has shaped the philosophy of liberal education more strongly than St. John Henry Newman. In The Idea of a University, Newman argued that university exists not simply to produce narrow specialists, but to cultivate an “enlargement of mind.”

He writes:

“The enlargement of mind consists, not merely in the passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas hitherto unknown to it, but in the mind’s energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards and among those new ideas.”

- St. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, Discourse VI, “Knowledge in Relation to Learning”

Notice Newman’s emphasis:

• Education is not accumulation, education is integration.

• The educated mind does not merely possess facts, it understands relationships.

• It sees connections, recognizes proportion, and exercises sound judgement.

This is especially relevant today when our classrooms are starting to be dominated by artificial intelligence. Obviously, the educational challenge is no longer access to data. Our students can now retrieve vast amounts information in seconds. The real challenge is learning how to interpret, evaluate, integrate, and wisely apply knowledge. That is something no search engine or algorithm can accomplish for a student. It requires personal formation.

Beyond specialization

One of the paradoxes of the modern university is that as knowledge expands, our disciplines become increasingly specialized.

Surely, specialization has yielded extraordinary progress. Modern medicine, structural engineering, clinical psychology, data science, etc., could not exist without it. Yet specialization also carries inherent risks.

A scholar may come to know increasingly more about increasingly less. We, faculty members, can become fluent within our own sub-fields while losing the ability to converse meaningfully with colleagues across the other building, or wing of ACB. Students, likewise, may become highly competent technical experts without ever grappling with the larger questions:

• What is justice?

• What is beauty?

• What makes a human life truly meaningful?

• What moral responsibilities accompany knowledge?

• What does it mean to be a human person?

Liberal education insists that these are not optional or decorative questions. They are essential questions that should not be ignored. Lest we fall into what Maritain describes as mere cleverness:

“There are people who think that it is wonderful to have a mind that is quick, clever, ready to see pros and cons, eager to discuss anything, and who believe that such a mind is that to which university education must give scope -regardless of what is thought about, what is discussed, and how important matter is. These people are unaware that if they succeed in making such conception prevail, they would at best transform universities into schools of sophistry. In fact, they would not even produce sophists, who have some force, but rather disarmed and talkative minds, that believe they are well informed but live by words and opinions.”

- Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads (1969), 61

Educating for civic responsibility

The contemporary philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum offers a compelling defense of liberal education from a civic perspective. She argues that free and democratic societies require citizens who are capable of critical reflection, empathy, and global responsibility. In Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, she warns:

“Thirsty for national profit, nations and their systems of education are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive. If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than whole citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements…”

- Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010), Chapter 1

Whether approached philosophically, politically, or theologically the core concern remains the same. If education becomes exclusively technical-vocational, society will produce efficient workers without cultivating wise citizens.

Catholic universities add an even higher dimension to this concern. We seek to form not only wise citizens, but persons capable of holiness, integrity, and self-giving service.

Professional and liberal education: A false dichotomy

At this point, I think an important clarification is necessary to be made. Liberal education is sometimes mistakenly presented as though it were opposed to professional or technical training. This is a false dichotomy.

A bona fide university education should enthusiastically prepare students for successful, productive careers. Indeed, professional excellence is itself a valuable form of service to the common good.

• The physician must be clinically skilled.

• The engineer must be able to design safe structures.

• The accountant must be technically meticulous.

• The business executive must keep enterprise profitable.

• The teacher must master pedagogy.

However, professional competence alone cannot answer the ethical and human questions that inevitably arise within every profession:

• Should a physician pursue every procedure that modern tools permit?

• Should an engineer build a system simply because technology makes it possible?

• How should a journalist balance speed with truth?

• How should business leaders weigh profit margins against dignity of labor (human dignity)?

• How should artificial intelligence be ethically governed and employed?

These questions cannot be answered by technical formulas alone. They require moral discernment and wise judgment. Liberal education equips students to ask and answer precisely these questions.

Education as the formation of judgement and character

Perhaps the greatest gift of liberal education is not information, but moral judgment. C.S Lewis warned that intellectual development without moral formation can become dangerous.

In The Abolition of Man, Lewis wrote:

“We make men without chest and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

- C.S Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943), Chapter 1

Lewis’s metaphor of the “chest” represents the rightly formed moral and emotional life— the essential bridge between abstract reason and physical appetite. Knowledge alone is insufficient. Character matters. Wisdom matters. Conscience matters. This insight lies at the heart of the Catholic educational tradition which seeks to inform minds and rightly order hearts.

If liberal education is an education for true freedom, if it seeks the integration of knowledge, if it forms moral judgment rather than merely transmitting information, then these fundamental questions need to be asked:

• Freedom for what?

• Knowledge ordered toward what ultimate end?

• Formation according to what vision of the human person?

These questions bring us directly to what distinguishes a Catholic University from every other institution of higher learning. The Catholic intellectual tradition does not merely defend liberal education, it offers one of history’s richest explanations for why liberal education matters in the first place

Before we turn to that vision, I would like you to answer the following questions: What does it mean to educate not merely competent professionals, but whole human persons? Think of one graduate whom you consider truly successful not simply because of their career titles or financial achievement, but because of the kind of human being they have become. When you picture that person, what qualities come to your mind first?

The Catholic vision of liberal education

Every educational philosophy, whether it explicitly admits it or not, rests upon an underlying anthropology, an understanding of what it means to be human:

• If we believe human beings are primarily economic agents, education will focus strictly on productivity and profit.

• If we believe they are merely consumers, education will cultivate preferences.

• If we believe they are only biological organisms, education will concentrate on adaptation and survival.

The Catholic tradition traces from a radically different conviction. It begins with the opening chapter of Genesis:

“So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

- Genesis 1:27

Everything else flows from this foundational truth.

The student who enters our classroom is not merely a future employee, a collection of measurable competencies, or a consumer of educational services. Each student is a person of inherent dignity, created in the image and likeness of God, endowed with reason, freedom, and an orientation towards truth, goodness, and beauty. That single conviction changes everything about how we understand education.

Education as the formation of the whole person

The Catholic tradition has never reduced education to mere intellectual training. It has always sought the formation of the whole person: an integral human formation.

These includes intellectual rigor, certainly, but also moral character, spiritual depth, emotional maturity, civic responsibility, aesthetic appreciation, and a commitment to the common good.

The Second Vatican Council expressed this horizon clearly in Gravissimum Educationis. Its Declaration on Christian Education reads:

“A true education aims at the formation of the human person in the pursuit of his [or her] ultimate goal and at the same time for the good of those societies of which he [or she] is a member.”

- Vatican Council II, Gravissimum Educationis (1965), no. 1

Notice the twofold horizon. Education is ordered simultaneously toward personal flourishing and the flourishing of society.

The Catholic University, therefore, rejects two reductive traps:

1. Education is not merely individual self-actualization.

2. Education is not merely workforce preparation.

It is the formation of persons capable of living responsibly with others and, ultimately, entering into communion with God.

St. Josemaria Escriva puts it succinctly:

“There is no university properly speaking if the transmission of knowledge is not joined to the complete formation of the personalities of young people. … when, in the plenitude of time, Christ revealed for all times the hidden mysteries of eternal destiny, an order was established that was both human and divine, in the service of which the university attains its highest role.”

- Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer y la Universidad (1993), 77

Faith and Reason: Two ways of knowing

One of the defining contributions of the Catholic intellectual tradition is its absolute confidence that faith and reason are not rivals, but partners. Saint Augustine famously expressed this dynamic relationship:

“Believe that you may understand; understand that you may believe.”

- St. Augustine, Sermon 43, 7, 9

Augustine was not asking us to abandon reason for blind belief. Rather, he recognized that faith expands the horizon of reason, while reason purifies and deepens faith. Centuries later, Thomas Aquinas articulated this with so much clarity. For Aquinas, human reason is a divine gift. Because God is the author of both creation and revelation, genuine truths discovered through reason can never ultimately contradict revealed truth.

This confidence reached its iconic modern expression in Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio:

“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”

- Pope St. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (1998), Introduction

A university that abandons reason descends into intellectual sentimentality, while one that excludes the horizon of faith risks reducing reality solely to what can be measured, quantified, or experimentally controlled.

A university that is Catholic invites a perpetual dialogue between theology, philosophy, the natural sciences, the social sciences, the arts, and the professions. Not because their methods are identical, but because reality itself is one.

The unity of truth in an age of fragmentation

This conviction leads directly to another hallmark of Catholic higher education: the unity of truth.

In the contemporary university, academic disciplines are necessarily specialized. We rightly value domain expertise. Yet without an overarching framework, specialization can easily devolve into intellectual fragmentation:

• A biologist may know little philosophy.

• A philosopher may know little economics.

• An economist may know little theology.

• A literary scholar may rarely converse with a physicist.

The Catholic intellectual tradition does not oppose specialization. Instead, it insists that specialization must not become isolation. As Pope St. John Paul II wrote in Ex Corde Ecclesiae:

“It is the honour and responsibility of a Catholic University to consecrate itself without reserve to the cause of truth.”

- Pope St. John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990), no 4.

Notice how he speaks of the cause of truth, and not merely the accumulation of isolated facts. Truth is not fragmented simply because our disciplines are.

The university becomes a genuine universitas, a true community of scholars, when it fosters authentic conversation across disciplinary boundaries. As faculty members of the College of Arts and Sciences, we are uniquely called to model that integration which our students deserve to see.

Education as the search for wisdom

Where the modern world prizes information, the Catholic university must cultivate wisdom.

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.”

- Proverbs 9:10

Biblically, wisdom is not just high intelligence or a technical cleverness. It is the capacity to see reality as it truly is and to order one’s life accordingly.

Aristotle observed that philosophy, the love of wisdom, begins in wonder. Wonder enables us to receive reality as a gift to be contemplated, rather than merely manipulated or exploited.

It is worth asking now:

• How often do our students experience genuine wonder in our classrooms?

• Do our courses leave room for questions that cannot be answered in a multiple choice exam?

• Do we cultivate contemplation alongside analysis?

• Do we invite students not only to solve technical problems, but also to ask whether what they are pursuing is good, true, and beautiful?

Education for service and the common good

Furthermore, a Catholic University does not educate merely for personal prestige or career advancement. It educates for service.

Pope Francis has reminded educators that knowledge detached from human solidarity becomes cold and sterile. In Evangelii Gaudium, he sets forth a guiding principle:

“Realities are more important than ideas.”

- Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (2013), no. 231

For academics, ideas matter. Theories matter. Published research matters. But education reaches its true fulfillment only when knowledge becomes embodied in loving, responsible action.

Here in the Philippines, this carries urgent, concrete implications. Our graduates enter a society facing complex challenges: persistent poverty, environmental vulnerability, ethical dilemmas in technology, massive corruption, political polarization, and widening societal inequalities.

A Catholic liberal education must ask our students:

• Not just, “What career will you pursue?”

• But, “Whom will your knowledge serve?”

The answer to that question marks the difference between treating education as nothing but credential, or embracing it as a vocation.

The teacher’s vocation

This brings us to our own role as educators. Whether we realize it or not, we model what a human scholar looks like. Students learn from our intellectual honesty, our humility, our fairness, our respect for evidence, our openness to dialogue, and our charity toward those with whom we disagree.

Pope Paul VI famously declared in Evangelii Nuntiandi:

“Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses then to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.”

- Pope Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi (1975), no. 41

Our students may eventually forget specific details from our lectures, but they will remember:

• How we exercised authority in the classroom.

• How we addressed their struggles.

• How we responded to the difficult questions.

• Whether we nurtured their intellectual curiosity or dampened it.

• Whether our lives reflected the values we professed.

A university that is Catholic asks beyond what subject matter we teach. It asks who we are becoming as teachers and witnesses to the truth.

The Catholic vision of liberal education is, at its heart, a vision of integral human formation. It proclaims that reason is a divine gift, faith is a guiding light, truth is integrated, wisdom is achievable, and education is ultimately ordered towards human flourishing in service to others and communion with God.

This vision has sustained universities for centuries. Yet today we face unprecedented global shifts: artificial intelligence, digital saturation, ecological stress, and rapid cultural reorientation.

All of this brings us to the crucial question: Can this ancient vision still speak meaningfully to the twenty-first century?

I would suggest that it is more necessary now than ever before.

I invite you to consider your own academic discipline. Beyond technical competence, what human virtues does your field require for true excellence? Now, consider a second question: how does your course cultivate those specific virtues, deliberately, not only in what you teach but in how you teach?

Why liberal education matters in the age of AI

Every week seems to bring another technological leap. It is entirely understandable that educators everywhere are asking aloud:

• What capacities remain uniquely human?

• What is the fundamental role of the university when information has become instantly available?

These are not pure technological questions. These are primarily educational and, ultimately, theological questions. We need only refer to Magnifica Humanitas of Pope Leo XIV

AI clarifies the purpose of human learning

For centuries, formal education placed immense weight on the acquisition and storage of information, precisely because information was scarce. Libraries were limited, books were expensive, and access to specialized knowledge required years of physical proximity to scholars.

Today, information is superabundant. And artificial intelligence drastically accelerates this reality. It can retrieve, summarize, compare, and reframe information at breathtaking speeds.

However, notice what AI cannot do:

• AI can generate plausible answers. It cannot assume moral responsibility.

• AI can recognize complex statistical patterns. It cannot exercise conscience.

• AI can simulate empathy through natural language. It does not experience compassion.

• AI can optimize calculated decisions. It cannot discern the transcendent Good.

The emergence of AI does not render liberal education obsolete. Rather, it clarifies its true purpose. If machines can process data, then universities must become far more deliberate in cultivating those capacities that belong properly to the human person: ethical judgment, prudence, courage, compassion, and the restless search for meaning – the very core values we champion – wisdom, integrity, solidarity, and excellence.

Pope Benedict XVI wisely observed:

“The question of the social use of new technologies is not merely a technical matter, but a human and ethical one.”

- Pope Benedict XVI, Message for the 43rd World Communications Day (2009)

Technology is never neutral. It is never merely about what we can do. It is always shaping who we are becoming. That is a question no algorithm can ever answer.

1. Intelligence is Not Wisdom

One of the most dangerous misconception of our digital age is the assumption that high intelligence and wisdom are identical. They are not.

• A person may possess extraordinary analytic skill while remaining completely devoid of right moral judgment.

• An individual or an AI may process vast amounts of data while remaining incapable of discerning what truly matters.

Today, our primary educational hazard is not ignorance. It is the illusion that because information is instantly accessible, understanding has been achieved. There is an infinite distance between retrieving data and contemplating truth. AI can perform the former. But only human persons can undertake the latter.

2. Technology Must Serve Human Dignity

Pope Francis has repeatedly cautioned against adopting a purely technocratic paradigm – a mindset where technical efficiency becomes the supreme value. In Laudato Si’, he warns:

“Technology tends to absorb everything into its ironclad logic.”

- Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ (2015), no. 108

Pope Francis is not anti-technology. His critique targets something deeper. When efficiency becomes our highest good, other essential human values are quietly sidelined:

• Human dignity and moral conscience

• Authentic solidarity and communal life

• Contemplative appreciation of beauty

• Care for common home and the vulnerable

As Catholic educators, we must ask: Are we training our students merely to operate systems more efficiently, or are we forming them to evaluate whether those systems serve human flourishing?

Liberal education in the Philippine context

Our graduates step into a complex social landscape marked by:

• Persistent economic inequality and poverty

• Vulnerability to climate disaster and environmental degradation

• Labor migration and the fragmentation of family life

Deep political polarization, digital echo chambers, and rampant misinformation These challenges cannot be solved by technical skills alone:

• Economic issues require ethical leadership, not just financial engineering.

• Environmental crises require scientific mastery animated by moral stewardship.

• Political polarization requires citizens trained in civil dialogue, local rigor, and mutual respect.

• Misinformation requires habits of critical inquiry, evidence evaluation, and intellectual integrity.

• Mental health struggles among our youth call for communities that cultivate real hope, belonging, and spiritual grounding.

In short, the defining challenges of the contemporary Philippines are precisely the types of human problems that demand a liberal education.

Education for the common good and vocation

The Catholic intellectual tradition rejects the view that education is a purely private commodity or a tool for personal aggrandizement. Knowledge carries an inherent social mortgage.

In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis offers a simple, radical truth:

“No one can face life in isolation.”

- Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti (2020), no. 8

Education is not merely about upward mobility. It is preparation for participation in the common good.

Our graduates will go on to become engineers, scientists, educators, corporate leaders, public servants, lawyers, artists, and community organizers. The ultimate test of our university is not whether they achieve high incomes or titles, but whether they're professional excellence lifts up their communities.

A Catholic liberal education transforms a career choice into a vocation of service.

Seeking truth in an age of misinformation

The practical question for us today is not whether liberal education belongs in our college or program. The question is how each of our disciplines uniquely contributes to it.

I invite you to think of one signature assignment or project that students complete in your course. If an artificial intelligence tool could complete that assignment flawlessly, what uniquely human capacity, what habit of heart or mind, would you still want your students to develop through that work?

Liberal education across the disciplines

We have argued that liberal education is more necessary than ever—not despite artificial intelligence, but precisely because of it. If higher education is to remain deeply human, it must form students beyond having technical skills. It must form them in wisdom, judgment, character, and social responsibility.

But some might ask: “Isn't it liberal education primarily the task of philosophy, theology, literature, or history?”

The answer is a definitive no.

Liberal education is not a single department. It is not an isolated program. It is not merely a set of general education requirements that students check off before starting their “real” majors.

Liberal education is a vision that animates every discipline within the university.

• Every discipline contributes something indispensable to our understanding of reality.

• Every discipline cultivates a different habit of mind.

• Every discipline forms particular human virtues.

• Every discipline participates in the university’s shared search for truth.

St. John Henry Newman reminds us:

“All knowledge forms one whole, because its subject matter is one.”

- St. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, Discourse III, “Bearing of Theology on Other Branches of Knowledge”, 4

That single sentence captures the essence of the university. Our departments or programs are many. Reality is one. Our methods differ. Truth does not.

Every discipline asks fundamental human questions

At a deeper level, each discipline grapples with a fundamental question about what it means to be human:

• Biology asks: what is life, and what does it mean to steward it?

• Psychology asks: how do you humans suffer, heal, grow, and flourish?

• Political Science asks: how can human communities govern themselves with justice?

• Economics asks: how should resources be ordered to promote genuine human flourishing?

• History asks: how does memory shape our present identity and moral choices?

• Literature asks: how does one imagine the meaning of love, suffering, hope, failure, and articulate man’s meaning?

• Mathematics asks: how do logical order, harmony, and truth manifest in and reveal reality?

• Communication asks: how can truth be faithfully articulated and shared in the community?

Notice the underlying reality: every single academic field ultimately converges upon the human person. That convergence is precisely what a Catholic liberal education illuminates.

The faculty as an intellectual community

This brings us to a crucial insight: liberal education does not happen simply because a curriculum exists on paper. It happens when the faculty themselves embody a living intellectual community.

Pope St. John Paul II describes the Catholic university as:

“A living institutional witness to Christ and his message…”

- Pope St. John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990), no. 49

That witness is expressed whenever faculty members across all departments or programs:

• Demonstrate intellectual integrity and humility.

• Welcome honest evidence and pursue academic excellence.

• Engage colleagues respectfully across disciplinary boundaries.

Students watch how we interact. They notice when teachers or departments collaborate rather than compete. They notice when a scientist speaks respectfully of theology, or when a philosopher values data. In observing us, students witness a model of what an educated mind looks like.

Integration rather than competition

One of the ongoing temptations in higher education is interdepartmental rivalry:

• Which department generates the most research funding?

• Which major attracts the most students?

• Which field is the most marketable?

While these questions have administrative relevance, educationally they miss the larger horizon. UA&P is not an assemblage of isolated ivory towers. It is an intellectual communion. Different disciplines, different methodologies, different questions, yet one single search for truth – unitas! And that is the true meaning of universitas.

If every academic discipline uniquely enriches liberal education, our final question becomes essentially practical:

• How do we teach in ways that cultivate wisdom rather than mere information processing?

• How do we structure our courses so that they form moral judgement alongside professional skill?

• How do we guide our students to succeed professionally while flourishing as persons

• What does liberal education look like in the day-to-day life of our classrooms?

I invite you to turn to a colleague near you—ideally someone from a different discipline. Together, complete this sentence for each other’s respective field: Your discipline contributes to liberal education by helping students learn to.

Pedagogical implications for faculty

What difference should all of this make in our classrooms?

The encouraging news is that this does not require us to teach entirely different subjects. It asks us to teach our subjects differently.

1. From Delivering Content to Forming Persons

The first pedagogical implication is fundamental. We must see ourselves beyond our being content experts in our disciplines. We must recognize ourselves as educators of human persons, first and foremost.

Of course, expertise matters immensely. Students deserve professors who are intellectually rigorous, professionally competent, and deeply committed to scholarly excellence. But our vocation extends far beyond transmitting data. We are entrusted with forming human lives.

This insight reflects the Second Vatican Council’s declaration that true education aims at “the formation of the human person in the pursuit of his ultimate end and of the good of the societies of which he is a member” (Gravissimum Educationis, no. 1). Every class session should implicitly ask two questions simultaneously:

a. What should students know? (cognitive dimension)

b. What kind of persons are they becoming through learning this? (formative dimension)

Those two questions must never be separated:

In every discipline, knowledge shapes character, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

2. Teaching Students to Ask Deeper Questions

Generative artificial intelligence has permanently altered an ancient assumption about education. For generations, the professor was the primary gateway to information. Today, information is ubiquitous and instant.

Our distinctive contribution as educators is increasingly found elsewhere. That is, in helping students ask better questions.

St. Augustine of Hippo reminds us that education begins in desire, the innate human drive to know, to understand, and to seek wisdom. Yet in his Confessions, he cautions against a restless, superficial pursuit of knowledge:

“There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger… the disease of curiosity.”

- St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book X, Chapter 35

St. Augustine was not condemning genuine intellectual inquiry (studiositas). Rather, he was warning against a scattered, consumerist curiosity (curiositas) that seeks novel information without wisdom, and facts without personal transformation.

Our task as educators is not meant to satisfy curiosity, but to discipline and elevate it. Instead of allowing students to stop at “What is the answer?”, we invite them to ask:

• Is this claim true, and how do we know?

• What underlying assumptions frame this argument?

• What are the ethical consequences of this conclusion?

• Whose voices or perspectives are missing here?

• What moral responsibilities follow from acquiring this knowledge?

3. The Classroom as a Community of Collaborative Inquiry

A university that is Catholic should model academic rigor, and more importantly intellectual charity. Students should experience the classroom as a sanctuary where honest disagreement is welcomed because truth is pursued collaboratively rather than competitively.

Pope Benedict XVI emphasized that reason and faith walk together in the search for truth. In his address to Catholic educators, he noted:

“A particular responsibility of each Catholic educational institution is to offer a witness to the ‘profound unity that exists between the way of faith and the way of reason’… [enabling] students to acquire a vision of the subtle balance between the human person’s capacity for self-transcendence and the limitations of human reason.”

- Pope Benedict XVI, Address to Catholic Educators at The Catholic University of America (April 17, 2008)

Facts matter, but facts require interpretation within a coherent vision of reality. Universities produce and distribute information in order to help students see reality more truthfully.

This changes our dynamic as teachers. Rather than rushing to provide instant answers, we can intentionally respond with deeper questions, not to evade the issue, but to invite student discernment. This is why seminar discussions, case studies, reflective writing, collaborative research, and interdisciplinary dialogues remain indispensable. They cultivate habits of discernment rather than passive consumption.

4. Intellectual Humility in an Age of Certainty

Today’s media-savvy culture rewards instant commentary. Social media algorithms incentivize outrage, and AI tools generate fluent answers in seconds. Yet genuine scholarship requires intellectual humility.

St. Thomas Aquinas, despite his monumental intellectual output, maintained a deep awareness of the limits of human reason before the divine mystery. His writings consistently demonstrate that intellectual rigor and deep humility belong together.

This humility should mark our teaching. It is acceptable, and often profoundly educational, for a professor to say: “I don’t know the answer to the question, but let’s investigate find out together.”

Such statements do not diminish faculty authority. They establish credibility. Students learn that scholarship is an ongoing, humble search for truth rather than a performance of omniscience.

5. Cultivating Ethical Discernment Across the Disciplines

Every academic field encounter ethical thresholds. The goal is not to turn every class into an ethics or moral theology class. Instead, the ethical dimensions already present within the field can be brought to light:

• Engineering and Technology: Does this technology serve authentic human needs or exploit human weakness?

• Natural Sciences: How do we ensure research integrity and respect for life?

• Psychology: How do we uphold human dignity and confidentiality in clinical settings?

• Economics and Business: How do market practices align with distributive justice and human rights?

• Communication: How do we combat digital misinformation and practice public honesty?

• Environmental Science: How do we carry out faithful stewardship of creation while harnessing its resources?

Knowledge never exists in a vacuum. It carries real-world human consequences. Students profit immensely from assignments that ask not only “what can be done?” (competence), but also “what should be done?” (prudence).

6. Assessing for Wisdom, not Mere Recall

If liberal education values wisdom, judgement, and synthesis, our assessment practices must reflect these values.

Foundational knowledge is non-negotiable – students cannot analyze concepts they have not mastered. However, once foundational knowledge is established, assessments should challenge students to analyze, compare, synthesize, evaluate, reflect, and create.

St. John Henry Newman argued in The Idea of a University that true education “enlarges the mind” by enabling students to see relationships among disparate ideas. Our assessments should reward integrative learning rather than rote repetition.

We can cultivate this through:

• Applied case analyses that present messy, real-world dilemmas.

• Reflective synthesis essays connecting theoretical concepts to moral practice.

• Collaborative research that requires multiple perspectives and original synthesis.

• Community-engaged learning projects that place academic knowledge at the service of others

7. Teacher as Witness

Students learn from who we are and how we live. Long after they forget our specific decks or assignment instructions, they remember our character and example.

In Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Pope St. John Paul II wrote:

“Academic teachers are called to be outstanding in integrity of doctrine and probity of life.”

- Pope St. John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990), no.22

Notice that he pairs intellectual integrity with moral integrity. Students observe whether we prepare meticulously, treat them with patience, acknowledge our errors, speak truthfully, and take genuine joy in learning.

7. Recovering Intellectual Wonder

Finally, there is a pedagogical practice that transcends every discipline: cultivating wonder. Too often, university life is dominated by content coverage. We rush through our syllabuses, grading assignments under tight deadlines, and fulfilling accreditation requirements. These administrative tasks are necessary, but if students graduate having mastered technical content without ever experiencing intellectual wonder, we have fallen short. C.S. Lewis captures this imperative brilliantly:

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”

- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943), Chapter 1

Liberal education is not merely clearing away ignorance. It is awakening life. Our classrooms should be places where students discover, more than technical information, delight in truth, reverence for creation, gratitude for beauty, and hope for the future.

Liberal education is not about administrative structures or distribution of general education requirements. It is ultimately about the kind of university community we aspire to build, and fundamentally, the kind of human beings we hope our students will become.

Before we conclude, I invite you to think of some of the changes you can make in your syllabus or classroom this coming semester that would cultivate wisdom, ethical discernment, or wonder among your students.

Conclusion and challenge for us all

To draw this lecture to a close, I suggest that we revisit the decisive question, the very question with which we began:

What kind of graduate do we hope to form?

• Not merely: what technical skills will our graduates possess?

• Not only: what lucrative careers will they pursue?

• But most fundamentally: who will they become?

Beyond success: The true goal of higher education

The answer to the question dictates everything we do within our classrooms.

If our highest goal is the formation of human persons who seek truth, love, wisdom, serve the common good, and uphold the sacred dignity of every human being, then our classrooms cease to be places of mere information transfer. They become sanctuaries of human transformation.

St. John Henry Newman reminded us that the true purpose of a university is the cultivation of an intellect capable of apprehending reality in its fullness. He described the genuinely educated person as possessing:

“A connected view or grasp of things.”

- St. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, Discourse V, “ Knowledge Its Own End”

That phrase is urgent for our time:

• In an age of fragmented information, liberal education forms intellectual integration.

• In an age of hyper-specialization, it restores wholeness.

• In an age of relentless distraction, it cultivates sustained attention.

• In an age of moral uncertainty, it forms prudent judgement.

Our mission

Our goal is more than graduating clever individuals. Our biggest mission is to form persons who embody wisdom, integrity, solidarity, and excellence animated by faith, reason, and love.

Pope St. John Paul II writes in Ex Corde Ecclesiae:

“The basic mission of a University is a continuous quest for truth through its research, and the preservation and communication of knowledge for the good of society.”

- St. John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990), no. 30

That is the soul of higher education. Truth is never sought for private aggrandizement. It is always ordered toward service.

Our vocation as veachers

We often talk about our heavy workloads: teaching hours, mentoring, research expectations, extension programs, meetings here and there, accreditation, and syllabus revisions. These responsibilities are real, and frequently demanding.

Yet beneath their weight lies something infinitely deeper: a sacred vocation.

Pope Francis has taught us that education is fundamentally an act of hope:

“To educate is always an act of hope.”

- Pope Francis, Address for the Global Compact on Education (15 October 2020)

Hope is not naïve optimism. Hope is the firm conviction that minds can be enlightened, hearts can be transformed, and education participates in God’s ongoing renewal of the world.

A threefold challenge

Let us then pay attention to these three invitations:

1. Pursue Uncompromising Academic Excellence

   The Catholic intellectual has never feared rigorous scholarship. The person demands it. Intellectual excellence honors both our students and the God who is the source of all truth. Let our research and teaching always remain fearlessly ordered toward objective truth.

2. Teach Our Field as Part of a Unified Conversation

   Let us help our students connect the dots between faith, ethics, economics, history, communications, arts, science, etc. Let us invite them to ask not only “How do we achieve this?” but “Why does this matter?” Not only “Can we do this?” but “Should we do this?”

In doing so, we restore that unity of knowledge that lies at the heart of the word universitas.

3. Never Underestimate the Power of Our Example

Students may forget our lectures, but they rarely forget teachers who embody integrity, patience, joy, and intellectual generosity.

Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique. Authentic education flows from the faith, identity, and moral integrity of the teacher acting as a living witness in the classroom.

Restless heart and the search for meaning

More than sixteen centuries ago, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote his famous prayer regarding the deepest yearning of the human spirit:

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

— St. Augustine, Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1

Our students walk through our university gates carrying many kinds of restlessness:

• Some seek intellectual mastery.

• Some seek career success.

• Some seek belonging and validation.

• Some seek moral guidance and hope.

Whether they realize it or not, their university journey is part of that deeper human search for truth and meaning.

Our task is not to hand them easy answers. Our task is to accompany them on the journey: teaching them to seek truth with humility, wisdom with perseverance, and goodness with courage.

When we educate in that spirit, we engage in the formation of whole human persons. And we contribute directly to the moral and spiritual renewal of our families, our communities, the Church, our nation, and the world.

Final charge

Before we display our slide, before we launch into our lecture, before we review the course syllabus...

Let us ask:“What kind of person will this lesson help my students become?”

If that question accompanies every lecture we prepare, every assignment we grade, every research project we supervise, and every conversation we hold with our students, then liberal education will cease to be merely an abstract educational ideal. It will become the living, beating heart of UA&P.

Thank you very much!

This speech was delivered by Commencement Speaker Jose R. Soberano III during the 31st University Graduation Rites held at the Plenary Hall, PICC on August 15, 2026.

Thank you for your warm invitation. It is a joy and an honor to be with you this afternoon.

As a young Cebuano from humble beginnings, I came to Manila 54 years ago to pursue my college degree. I arrived with a simple suitcase, a few clothes, and the hope that a better education would lead to a better future for me and my family.

Never did I imagine that one day I would stand here as the commencement speaker at one of our country’s most respected universities. Life, indeed, has a wonderful way of bringing us full circle.

But this is not my first UA&P graduation here at the PICC. I have sat in this audience before—not as a guest, a professor, or a commencement speaker—but as a proud father.

In 2009, and again in 2013, I watched two of my daughters, Joanna and Jamie, graduate from this very University, both from the Integrated Marketing Communications program.

Today, I continue to see the fruits of that education. Both have built successful careers on their own and now serve as important pillars in my company, Cebu Landmasters. As a father, I will always be grateful to UA&P—not only for educating my daughters, but for helping shape the women and leaders they have become.

So before I congratulate the graduates, allow me first to recognize my fellow UA&P parents. Parents, congratulations. This milestone belongs to you as much as it belongs to your children. May we give all our parents a warm round of applause.

Over the years, my relationship with UA&P has grown far beyond that of a parent. Through the SBEP Program, supporting the University’s recent expansion in Cebu, and learning from UA&P’s founders and leaders who have become my mentors and friends, I have come to appreciate what makes this University truly distinctive.

While I am not a graduate of UA&P, I have long admired what this University has sought to do differently: not simply to educate minds, but to form people.

And I believe that mission has never been more relevant. You, graduates, are entering the workforce at a remarkable moment, when AI is significantly transforming how we work and challenging us to think more deeply about what only we, as human beings, can bring.

Many people will ask you what you plan to do next. But I would like to ask you a different question: Who will you become?

Because in a world where knowledge is everywhere, and technology continues to level the playing field, what will ultimately distinguish you is not only what you know—it is who you are. That, I believe, is the enduring advantage of a UA&P education.

Over the past four decades, I have had the opportunity to hire people, build organizations, and watch countless careers unfold. Through it all, one question has stayed with me: What truly sets some people apart?

And the answer lies in many of the same values UA&P has worked to instill in you.

So today I will leave you with three principles—values central to your formation here, which I hope you will continue to strengthen as you step into the real world.

So first :

1. Build Character before Credentials

As you leave this hall today, you will join thousands of graduates entering the workforce. All of you will have degrees. Many of you will have impressive grades, internships, certifications, and resumes.

Those things will help you get noticed. But over time, people will remember something far more important: Can you be trusted? Because every opportunity in life ultimately rests on trust.

When people trust you, relationships grow. Colleagues want to work with you. Mentors invest in you. Teams follow you. People entrust you with greater responsibility. Over time, the quality of your relationships becomes one of the clearest reflections of your character.

The same lesson guided me when I founded Cebu Landmasters. We started as a small company competing against much larger real estate developers. Yet customers entrusted us with their homes, employees chose to build their careers with us, and partners chose to grow alongside us.

I don’t believe that happened because we were the best or the biggest, but because we placed relationships at the heart of our business. We worked hard to earn people’s trust by listening,

showing up consistently, and delivering on our commitments. Over time, those relationships became the foundation upon which our company was built.

So my first advice is this: Don’t spend your early years only building your credentials. Continue building your character.

Because character earns trust, trust builds relationships, and those relationships will open more doors than credentials ever will.

My second is this:

2. Build Wisdom before Convenience

Technology will continue to change the way you work. But it will never replace your judgment.

The defining moments in our careers rarely come when everything is going well. They come during times of uncertainty—when there are no easy answers and every decision carries consequences.

At Cebu Landmasters, some of the decisions I am proudest of were made during our most difficult times.

During the pandemic, for example, the safer and more convenient choice would have been to stop construction, postpone new projects, and minimize our exposure to risk, as many businesses did. Instead, we chose to keep moving forward. It was not an easy decision, and there was no obvious right answer at the time.

But we reminded ourselves that many people were relying on us: employees who needed their jobs, homeowners waiting for the homes we had promised, contractors and suppliers with businesses to sustain, and workers who needed to keep earning to put food on the table for their families.

So we kept going. We continued building, launched more projects, delivered homes, and served our customers instead of waiting for the situation to become more certain. We did not know exactly how the pandemic would unfold, but we made the best judgment we could, guided by what we believed was right for the greater good.

Those decisions helped define who we were as a company. And because we kept moving, we emerged stronger, stayed ahead, and most importantly, fulfilled our commitments.

The defining moments of your career will be no different. They will come when the correct path is not the easiest one, when your values are tested, or when there seems to be no clear right or wrong answer at all.

One of the greatest gifts of your education is sound judgment—the ability to think critically, discern wisely, and act with integrity.

So continue to cultivate it. Embrace technology. Master it. But never surrender your thinking to it. Never let convenience replace discernment, or speed replace wisdom.

Because in the end, your career will be defined not by the answers you find, but by the decisions you make.

And finally:

3. Build Purpose beyond Success

As you begin your careers, many people will ask what you want to become. What profession will you pursue? Which company will you join?

But there is an even more important one: What are you here for?

The answer did not come immediately for me.

After 23 years with the Ayala Group, I left a stable and promising corporate career to run for Congress, believing that was where I was meant to serve.

I lost that election, but I didn’t want to give up, convinced that public service is my calling. As I prepared for another campaign, I began to see a different opportunity to serve closer to home.

Near my hometown in the countryside of Cebu, I saw that many hardworking families did not have access to affordable, quality housing.

That inspired my first housing project, which I called St. Josemaria Village—named after my patron saint and the inspiration behind your University, St. Josemaría Escrivá.

That first project changed the course of my life, and eventually led to the founding of Cebu Landmasters in 2003.

I realized I had not abandoned public service. I had simply found a different way of living it. By helping Filipino families own their homes, building communities, and improving people’s lives, I found my purpose.

And perhaps the important lesson I can leave you with is this: I did not discover my purpose after graduation. I discovered it at 47. So don’t be anxious if you don’t have your whole life figured out today.

Be patient in discovering your purpose, but intentional in pursuing it. Keep asking yourself: What gifts have I been given? Whom am I called to serve?

Success may bring recognition, promotions, or financial rewards. But purpose gives meaning to them all. When your work is guided by purpose, success becomes more than personal achievement—it becomes a source of hope, service, and light for others.

As I stand before you today, I also find myself at a meaningful milestone in my own journey. Just last month, after more than two decades of building Cebu Landmasters, I stepped down as President and CEO. I transitioned to the role of Executive Chairman, passing leadership to the next generation—my children and the leaders who will carry the company forward long after my time.

That transition has reminded me of what truly matters.

While I am grateful for the homes and communities we have built, I am even more grateful for the home I return to every day - my wife, my four children, my eight grandchildren, my family and friends, and the many people who have walked with me throughout this journey.

And perhaps this is what Unitas has come to mean to me—recognizing that the work we do, the people we love, the values we uphold, and the God we serve are not separate parts of our lives. They are all part of one life.

And one day, when our own journey is complete, we will all be called home. What will matter then is not simply what we achieved, but how we used the one precious life God entrusted to us.

Graduates, today you leave this University, but your formation does not end here.

Wherever life takes you and whatever career you pursue, build your character. Cultivate wisdom. Live with purpose.

May you use your talents not only to build successful careers, but to build lives of meaning.

And when the world asks not only what you have achieved, but who you have become, may your life be the answer.

Congratulations, Class of 2026. Thank you and may God bless you all. Mabuhay kayong lahat!