Education and Freedom Theme Analysis

“What will you accomplish with Spanish, especially with the few who will actually speak it? Kill off your originality? Subordinate your thoughts to the minds of others and instead of being free, you will really make yourselves into slaves. Nine out of ten of you who think of yourselves as members of the educated upper middle class are renegades to your own country! Those among you would speak that language neglect their own to such an extent that they neither speak it or understand it, and how many of you actually pretend not to understand a single world!”

“The Tianí schoolmaster,” the secretary went on, as he riffled through his papers, “is looking for a better building—”

“What better building can he have than that warehouse that he has all to himself?” Father Camorra interrupted. […]

“He says there’s no roof,” the secretary replied. “And seeing as how he bought maps and notebooks out of his own pocket, he doesn’t want to expose them to bad weather.”

“That has nothing to do with me,” His Excellency muttered. “Tell him to ask the director of administration, or the provincial governor, or the nuncio.”

“I’ll tell you what, Father Camorra said. “This little schoolmaster is a bit of a filibuster malcontent. The guy’s a heretic! He maintains that a corpse rots the same whether you bury it with a ceremony or without one. Darn! One of these days I’m gonna haul off and slug him.”

Just like the thousands and thousands of students who preceded them, those two hundred and thirty-four suffered through those hours of class. And if things don’t change, the same thing will happen with those to come. They’ll get brutish and stupid. Their wounded dignity and vitiated youthful enthusiasm will turn into hatred and indolence, like waves on certain areas of a beach that end up murky, merely breaking one after another and leaving behind nothing but a great sediment of waste.

“Well, confine yourself to learning how to apply plasters and leeches and don’t try to make your mates’ lot either better or worse. When you get your license, marry a rich, devout young woman, practice well, make money, fly from anything that has to do with the general state of the country, attend mass, go to confession and take communion when everybody else does [...] Always remember that charity begins at home. Man should not seek more than the highest form of his own happiness on this earth, as Bentham says. If you have to tilt at windmills, you will end up with no career, no marriage, nothing. Everyone will abandon you and the first ones to laugh at your naiveté will be those very peasants themselves. Believe me, when you have gray hair like mine—like this!—you’ll remember what I said and see I was right.”

“Get rid of them and the indio will cease to exist. The friar is the father, the indio is the word! The friar is the sculptor, the indio the statue, because everything we are, everything we think, and everything we do we owe to the friars, to their patience, to their work, to their three centuries of modification of what Nature afforded us. And in a Philippines without friars or indios, what will happen to the poor government, in the hands of the Chinese?”

“I agree with you that we have our defects. But whose fault is that? Yours, after three and a half centuries of our education in your hands, or ours, when we bow down in the face of everything? If after three and a half centuries the sculptor has only been able to create a caricature, it will almost definitely come out poorly done.”

“Or perhaps the clay is inadequate…”

“Even less adept then, because if the clay is so inadequate, why waste the time? But he’s not only inept, he’s a fraud and a thief, because even knowing that his work is useless, he continues to do it just to get paid. And he’s not only inept and a thief, he’s corrupt, because he opposes any other sculptor who wants to try out his own talent to see if it’s worth the effort. The fatal jealousy of the incompetent!”

While these scenes unrolled in the street, in the dining room the greater gods handed around a piece of parchment on which the fateful words were written in red ink:

Mane Thecel Phares

Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra