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| Rizal Park, Manila |
The following is an address delivered by Margarita V.
Hamada,
Founder/Directress, on the occasion of HARVENT SCHOOLS’
Joint
Achievers’ Day, April 2, 2011, Sison Auditorium,
Lingayen, Pangasinan
Achievers’ Day is no ordinary day for
us in Harvent School. This is the day
that we celebrate our pupils’ achievements---achievements that are not at all
ordinary.
The pupils who just received their
Independent Reader’s certificates are indeed independent readers. They can read, write and speak in
understandable English, whether they are just 4, or 5 or 8 years old.
Those who just received their grade
school diplomas have passed my rigorous standards for higher order
thinking. This means, they are not
ordinary grade school graduates. They
can summarize what they read in grammatically correct English as they develop
new insights out of them. Now, many
college graduates cannot do what my graduates can easily do and most employers
will heartily agree with me!
My officers know that we need not
trouble ourselves developing our pupils’ skills for higher order thinking,
because most parents demand only one thing from us---to make their children
graduate as early as possible whether their thinking powers have been developed
or not. We refuse to do that. We refuse to follow the crowd because we hate
to be “ordinary”. To us, “ordinary” is a
bad word that connotes danger.
Modern times have made ordinary people
an endangered species. Today, as Elbert
Hubbard has astutely observed, “One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary
men, but no machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”
Being ordinary, then, is a “voluntary
misfortune”, to borrow the words of Nicholas Ling as he describes
ignorance. And so, we refuse to produce
tragic graduates whose skills can be done better, faster and more cheaply by
machines. Instead, we produce and shall
continue to produce what I call, future “aristocrats”.
My aristocrats are not necessarily
blue-blooded, surrounded by security guards everywhere they go. No. They are a special breed of people who
are in no particular danger, because they are more useful alive, than
dead. They are useful because no machine
can replace them. But more than this,
they are people who are not dangerous to others or to themselves.
These people I call “aristocrats”
read, and they read a lot. They love to
read because they understand what they read.
And they read not just to learn, but also to unlearn. Having been trained to think in grade school,
by being appreciated more for asking questions than for answering teachers’
questions, and for their original insights than for standard ones, they are
habitual skeptics who doubt and not just swallow and follow everything they see
and read. Hence, their beliefs and
opinions are tentative, never fixed.
They therefore are not fanatics, and so they suffer less and are never
the cause of society’s troubles.
Aristocrats never stop developing
themselves fully and well, even after they get a college degree. They leave their university’s professors to
embrace the best educators found only outside formal classrooms,
namely---hobbies, travel and adventure, movies and documentaries, odd jobs, odd
personalities, kindred spirits, life’s many challenges, and always, books,
books, books.
And so, aside from not being
endangered or dangerous, because of their excellent education outside school,
aristocrats are our source of all creature comforts. They renovate and innovate. They discover. They invent better products. They design better systems. And they share their new ideas, their new
discoveries, their new systems, services and products to enrich our lives as
they enrich their own.
H.P. Brougham describes intellectuals
as “easy to lead but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to
enslave.” His description fits my
description of aristocrats who are invariably intellectuals. Although they are not slaves, they drive
themselves harder than slaves in serving the community they belong to, helping
their officials do a good job, so they need not have to throw them out of
office through counterproductive coup d’ etats.
Aristocrats are therefore Mother Earth’s greatest treasures and
safe-keepers
.
Therefore, my dear graduates, these
are my parting words to you as you leave Harvent School---DO NOT BE
ORDINARY. To be ordinary is not just a
tragic misfortune but a crime against your good selves whom I have given the
foundation to become aristocrats. Instead, be IRREPLACEABLE.
If you choose to be ordinary and
replaceable, you accept what religion declares---that this world is a vale of
tears, and you will conspire with ordinary people to make it into a place of
suffering, indeed.
Be the aristocrats that I have
fashioned you to be and transform this valley of tears into Heaven on earth,
while we, who have inspired you to think and rethink, are still around to enjoy
it.
If this is a dream, it is such a
beautiful dream and “a dream come true” should be the phrase we must all
declare to one and all one day----a day not long forthcoming, I hope!
Congratulations to you for having
blossomed under our tutelage.
Congratulations to your parents who tried to believe in my ideals and to
rethink their long-held ones. And congratulations
to my staff for helping me achieve these ideals in each of you!
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you.
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Newspaper articles and essays by Margarita Ventinella-Hamada as featured on this blog:
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I very much appreciate my articles and
photos appearing on fellow bloggers' sites, popular broadsheets, and local
broadcast news segments, but I would appreciate even more a request for
permission first.
Thank you!
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