My kind of Filipinos

This story was taken from http://www.inq7.net/

My kind of Filipinos
Posted 00:19am (Mla time) Feb 19, 2005
By Solita Collas-Monsod
Inquirer News Service

ONE of the noteworthy results of the Pulse Asia Survey conducted last November was that almost two-thirds (63 percent) of the respondents-where every Filipino had an equal chance to be selected-disagreed with the statement, "This country is hopeless," with 20 percent undecided and only a relatively small minority (16 percent) agreeing. A significantly smaller proportion, but still a majority (54 percent), also disagreed with the statement, "If it were only possible, I would migrate to another country and live there," with 18 percent undecided, and a larger minority (28 percent) agreeing.

Those statistics need a human face, and this column is devoted to Chris and Marivic Bernido, who are exemplars of this majority and whose actions show how deeply they love their country and how much they are willing to do to make it a better place to live in.

Chris and Marivic are not your average Filipino couple. Both have PhDs in Theoretical Physics (State University of New York, Albany) and have distinguished themselves in the field, in the Philippines and abroad, with an international reputation in Path Integrals Method and White Noise Analysis (don't ask me what these are, but they sound impressive). Their names appear as authors or co-authors in the Journal of Mathematical Physics and other international journals. Both were in the faculty (Chris was director) of the National Institute of Physics, University of the Philippines, and both earned "Outstanding Teacher" awards when they resigned in 1999.

It is easy to jump to the conclusion that they left UP for greener pastures abroad. With their qualifications, they could work practically anywhere in the developed world, at salaries at least 10 times the local rates. But if that was what happened, this story would have been about two more Filipinos who joined the brain drain.

Money was not their object. They went back to Jagna, Bohol, (population 30,000) to set up the Central Visayas Institute Foundation with two seemingly disparate arms: the Research Center for Theoretical Physics (RCTP), serving Visayas and Mindanao, and the Central Visayas Institute Foundation (CVIF) high school, originally set up 30 years before by Chris' grandfather, which was floundering. Their primary aim was investment in human capital, more precisely human capital development. It was payback time-to the country they love.

That the RCTP is flourishing should be no surprise, given the backgrounds of the founders. It regularly conducts seminars and workshops for the transfer of technology and knowledge. It helps institutions of higher learning in Visayas and Mindanao improve their research and teaching capabilities, as well as their academic programs, and hosts triennial international conferences which have attracted some of the best physicists in the world, including Nobel laureates. The Bernidos receive no help from the Philippine government for these efforts.

But if the Bernidos' work in RCTP serves as a beacon for physics research and training, their work in CVIF is making waves in the Philippine education circles. The school has been visited by educators from all over the country (the most recent being the consortium of Poveda, De La Salle and Immaculate Conception Academy), and the Bernidos have been invited to expound on what they are doing under the sponsorship of the Fund for Assistance to Private Education.

Why? Because in the course of four years of school administration (principal, director), teaching (General Science, Chemistry, Physics, Geometry) and by firsthand experience, they realized that the traditional teaching methods developed in the West were not effective in the current Philippine context. So they worked out a program called the CVIF Dynamic Learning Program (CVIF Program, for short) which is suitable for the large classes common in the Philippines, requires a smaller number of textbooks, needs fewer science equipment, reduces teaching personnel requirements, is less dependent on the abilities and personalities of teachers, has built-in checks of dysfunctional behavior observed in Filipinos (which they list as: a culture of dependence, underdeveloped virtue of honesty, low standards of quality or the pwede na 'yan attitude, skewed priorities, and a poor concept of time and discipline in keeping schedules). In short, a program that addresses the problems and adverse conditions existing in the country.

And get this, folks: the students have no homework under the CVIF Program (I hope to write more about this in another column).

That the program is succeeding can be judged from what the Bernidos call external checks. First is that for the first time in their school's history, students passed the UP College Admission Test two years in a row: five (out of 12 who took it) in 2003, and four in 2002 (after eight years without any passers). Second is that in the Mathematical Challenge for Filipino Kids Training Program conducted by the Mathematics Trainers Guild (MTG) of the Philippines, the number of CVIF qualifiers rose from one to eight to 10 since 2002-with two of them ranking second and third overall, outranking their counterparts from Tagbilaran City.

How's that performance for a rural high school where almost half of the students had a parent or guardian who did not get past high school? Chris and Marivic dream of some of those students eventually feeding into the Research Center for Theoretical Physics. And they are working hard to realize that dream.

They are my kind of Filipinos.