I’ve been to your place… your posts are awesome. I’ve learned a lot from you.

God bless, my friend…

Re your comment on the post:

We shared our bus with loads of children (grades 5 and six). Three of the buses were occupied by kids. In fact, we had a blooper in that particular trip because we were not supposed to be with the kids, but my friends and I were mistaken to be the kids’ teachers, so no one questioned why we were in that bus. We only found out we were in the wrong bus at lunch time. (We had lots of bloopers in that particular trip, and I plan to blog about them when I have time.)

Yes, I think visiting the place is a good way of teaching history. It’s better than simply reading things from books, or watching docus. The light show is like a docu, but seeing the ruins, the tunnel, seeing some memorabilia in the museum adds a lot of impact.

Becoming patriotic and good leader cannot be achieved by simply watching a docu, or visiting historical places, Buddy. It takes a lot more, although I’d say having a good grasp of our history, and not missing the lessons we should be learning and should have learned, does help. What that visit can do is reinforce the things the kids are learning in school, make them have a better feel of that part of our history, make that part of history more real to the children (by making them somehow feel that they’ve lived those times), and so on.

I’ve always liked to learn history, and I’ve always loved visiting historical places. But I have to admit, my knowledge of history is limited, mainly because for some reason, the teaching of history in my time had been focused on the whats, whens, wheres, and whos of things. I hated memorizing, so I did not care much about those things. But I like understanding the whys, the hows, the implications and effects of things, so now that I am out of school, I am trying to re-learn history the way I think it should have been taught. And that, I think, is one of the reasons I like visiting historical places.

(So, you’ve lost your head Buddy. Hahaha!)

I still think knowing our national anthem and respecting it means something. Of course, being a good citizen and having a good government counts a lot more than simply having citizens and leaders who can sing the national anthem very well. But why chose if you can have both?

Let me ask you tho. Did you see any group of school children touring the place? I know they teach history in our schools but will it make any difference if they’ll see what you saw in Corregidor? Will these kids understand better the meaning of patriotism and become better leaders in the future?

(I bet my head but your interest in our history was only aroused when you saw the place.)

Ah, the national anthem -its a lost cause. I know a country whose head of state can’t tell the title of their national anthem but the country and the government are functioning perfectly well.

–yes, we should be singing our own version of “amazing grace” instead –the funeral tempo, and bury our over-dependence from other foreign goverment’s influence on how we should run our own. We were never really free. They still control us; our government, our economy…