Relevance of Rizal in Contemporary Nationalism

Dr. Jose Rizal became a national hero for a reason. He was a reformist, a novelist, a poet, a novelist, journalist, an optalmologist, and revolutionary. He sparked the 1896 revolution against the Spaniards. He gave importance to education, our freedom, promoting peace and equality, being proud of our filipino heritage, and many more. Although, while I was growing up, he was never one of my idols, or someone i really looked up to. I never really felt Rizal’s importance and presence in our culture. In fact, if not for this paper, the importance of Jose Rizal would have never crossed my mind. Dr. Jose Rizal was nothing more than another lesson to learn about in History to me. I knew he was many things, and contributed a lot of things to the country but all of these didn’t really mean that much to me. The Relevance of Rizal today, is something I have yet to discover in writing this paper.

Growing up, I was in an environment highly influenced by the western culture. The school I was in, in my grade school years was a school where not many of the kids knew how to speak straight tagalog. We struggled with our Filipino classes and this resulted to really easy Filipino lessons because the teachers knew we were not very good at it. Looking back, I realize that the lessons we had in my grade school were extremely easy, compared to the ones they would have in other schools. We barely used Tagalog or Filipino at home. English was the first language taught to the children in our family and Filipino was only learned in school. Filipino was used when speaking to our helpers and the drivers, and those who we knew could not speak English fluently. As a child I had no idea what nationalism was and did not experience a tinge of it in our family. Probably the only time I experienced it was when there would be a Manny Pacquaio boxing