Passion For Reason : On teaching the Nintendo generation
Raul Pangalangan
Inquirer News Service
IT USED to be easier to teach the public law cases on martial law and human rights. I began teaching law in 1984, the year I became a lawyer, and my students at the University of the Philippines then truly felt what they were studying. Over the next decades, it was no longer enough just to assign the traditional judicial decisions, which are the daily grind of law students. I took to assigning the more literary and moving journalistic accounts (more reader-friendly too); or a 1970s vintage human rights update by the Association of Major Religious Superiors; or a martial law-era autopsy report saying that the "patient" drank a bottle of acid while confined at the V. Luna Hospital. If the topic was comfort women, I'd show a sepia-toned photograph of the aggrieved grandmothers in their teens, their age when they were kidnapped and enslaved.
I do not think this is because today's youth care less, but it's more because their minds work differently. We must not judge them by the metaphors of the grim and determined activists of the 1970s and early 1980s.
First, we have provided them only a sparse record by which to remember the past. Elsewhere in the world, periods of impunity were documented through truth commissions organized by the state, e.g., South Africa, El Salvador or Argentina. We have deliberately avoided the truth, believing it more expedient to forget. There was never any closure, judicial or popular, to that dark chapter in our nation's life, and our collective psyche is forever hobbled by the questions left unanswered.
Second, today's youth may be attuned to their own way of "remembering." Historically, societies have done their remembering through huge public monuments, around which humongous public rallies gather annually to mark important events. The French have their magnificent statues, like Napoleon's giant tomb; we have our own, some of them imposing like Jose Rizal's at the Luneta and Andres Bonifacio's at Monumento, others a bit too literal and unimaginative, like that sculpture of Ninoy falling down the steps to the tarmac. Mao used to have his grand parades at Tienanmen Square, where he mobilized millions in well-choreographed displays of mass control; we have, of course, our own Manila-scale attempts at the Quirino Grandstand.
I doubt if these ways of remembering "connects" with the Nintendo (or Playstation) generation. The sheer passage of time may have reduced the annual September 21 commemoration to just another boring ritual, long on speeches, short on heartfelt meaning. Yet, precisely, the Nintendo generation is impatient with speeches and more attuned to the yearnings of the heart. It has been said half in jest that theirs is the age of "Oprah-fication," when the great public questions of the time are answered in human, personal terms. The goal is to be able to say, as Bill Clinton did, "I feel your pain."
That is why we must explore fresh new ways to make them feel our martial law-era pains. Last year, I brought my kids to the Ayala Museum, where they saw (in addition to the diorama of Philippine history) a documentary on the martial law years. By their questions, I realized that what was "current events" for my generation is classroom history ("Araling Panlipunan") to theirs.
But that wouldn't have been a problem for the oldies, because for us, it was okay for history to be boring and distant, nourishment for the mind but not for the heart, something we studied because it would be "asked in the exam." The Nintendo generation is more demanding.
To start with, the oldies were satisfied with books without pictures, all the information presented in linear form, black-and-white text written from left to right, top to bottom. The newbies think in wild vibrant color. If you describe an event, they want to see the photos, not someone else's description of what happened. They want the facts, not someone else's spin-doctored summary. And while statistics are okay, they prefer to hear a person telling his story. The older generation might hem and haw that that story is just one man's, and is therefore biased and personal, but the new generation says, "That's exactly why we want to hear it! That is what makes it authentic!" The older generation searched for objective standards before which the public must bow. The newbies seek personal causes by which they can stand firm before a cold and unforgiving public. Oldies want to be true to a cause; newbies prefer to be true to the innermost self.
The Nintendo generation remembers best through audio-visual media, or what the oldies might see as People Power through PowerPoint. You see, when kids play videogames, they control everything, just by using their thumbs. When at play, a kid lives in that separate universe constructed inside their heads. That is why my kids love watching "The Matrix," and then they turn around and explain it to me.
Recent reports say that our youth wouldn't mind a return to dictatorship, presumably more benign than in the 1970s, while becoming increasingly indifferent to activist elders (or should I say elderly activists) who memorialize the glorious battles in the democratic struggle in times past. The kids know not whereof they speak, but we must tell them more stories, and tell those stories better, if we expect them to remember. The future is in their hands, more specifically, their thumbs. Judge Learned Hand said: "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it."
