Francis Kristoffer L. Pasion
Senior History Researcher
“Work and study hard. Be ready to offer all you have in the service of humanity and of our poor country.” – Doña Librada Avelino
PORTRAIT OF LIBRADA AVELINO, c. 1930s
It was an exhilarating yet turbulent time to live in the Philippines near the turn of the 20th century. As the Spanish colonial administration at its near end became overburdened by its own excesses and corruption, the ideas of liberty, civil rights, and equality were beginning to seep through the cracks of Spain’s farthest colony, the Philippines, brought about by the regime changes and power struggle between the liberals and the monarchists in Spain. While the uproar of this liberalism was muffled for a time with the execution of the three secular priests Mariano Gomes de los Angeles, Jose Apolonio Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora y del Rosario in 1872, liberal ideas remained and even thrived. And yet for a colonial society in the Philippines, it was even more difficult for Filipino women, owing to the rigid social expectations on their gender and their inaccessibility to education.
Beginnings
Librada Avelino Mañgali was born on 17 January 1873, almost a year after the execution of the Gomburza. Born in Quiapo, Manila to the couple Pedro Avelino, a pharmacist and entrepreneur, and Francisca Mañgali, housewife, “Ada” would grow up in a family home in Pandacan where inquisitiveness was the way of life. The father, although limited in his station, was able to invest enough for books–not the regular ones at the time that were mostly religious, but one replete in the stories of the human condition, through good literature. From her father, Ada became a voracious reader, having this insatiable thirst for learning. Such freedom of the spirit and thought, implicitly discouraged by the colonial regime, naturally leads to self-discovery, awareness of the issues in society, empathy, and a growing insistence of what is right and just.
Ada Avelino’s first exposure to a classroom was when she was aged 5 or 6. Her parents sent her to an all-girls’ school in Pandacan run by maestra Luisa Bacho, a passionate educator who early on recognized Avelino’s potential. One biographer noted that there was one time the Spanish Governor-General visited the school, and it was protocol to have all the students lined up for the official’s usual recitation exercise to test the students. Since Avelino was the brightest in her class, Bacho had her approach the official, who tested her in the “four principal tables” which she has already mastered. The governor-general was notably impressed.
Her mother’s death left a lasting impression on her. Three years later, Avelino’s father remarried. Paula Arcilla, determined as a stepmother to be as loving and as caring like her birth mother, took on this bright child as her own. Ada found an advocate in her stepmother, as she became supportive of her learning pursuits. In Pandacan, she studied Spanish under Fermin Raymundo, and soon, music from Ladislao Bonus, who, aside from having been consulted by Rizal with his poetry compositions, was said to have been involved in the musical productions in Manila and was able to assemble an orchestra composed fully of women. From these luminaries, Ada gained a greater appreciation of education. She learned the basic principles of the Spanish language, and was in her own right, a good pianist.
But she was discontented. As her dream began to take shape, Avelino saw that if she wished to take on the path of an educator, she would not be able to achieve it in the normal collegiate track among the private religious schools normally taken by women. Even in the incessant urging of her stepmother to go to Colegio de Santa Rosa or La Concordia, Avelino refused to do so. The public school track and the freedom of inquiry it promised was better.
The Dream Realized
Avelino’s learning pursuits led her to the private school of Dona Margarita Lopez, at her house in Tondo, where Avelino was in rubbing elbows with the rising nationalist feminist leaders of the time such as Rosa Sevilla de Alvero and Florentina Arellano, and poets such as Jose Palma. From there, she set her sights on training for the teacher’s examination to earn a license to teach. She passed with flying colors at the teacher’s civil licentiate examination at the Ayuntamiento de Manila in 1889, the first woman to do so. While running a school from her father’s house, she took up an additional course from the Assumption sisters who could give her the training necessary to teach secondary education. She finally earned this teaching license in 1893.
Jose Rizal’s article in La Solidaridad in February 1889, written for the Women of Malolos who pushed to have a night school for them to learn the Spanish language, had such an impact on her. In her reading of Rizal’s novels, it strengthened her resolved that her chosen path, to become a teacher, was a noble aspiration, and one that could help her fellow women and her country. As discontent brewed around her, with some relatives joining the Katipunan, and the specter of revolution was felt, Avelino continued to educate those who would come to her and trust her with their children.
The execution of Jose Rizal was personally devastating for her. On the day of Rizal’s execution on 30 December 1896, Avelino had her students attend mass, upon which she wept openly. Rizal’s demise only emphasized that the cause of the Revolution was just.
Hearing her friends become writers in Antonio Luna’s La Independencia, Avelino wanted to join the plans for a university being established by the Revolutionary Government in Malolos in 1898, but her students needed her in Pandacan. American soldiers, who at first presented themselves as allies of the revolution, soon changed tune. As American troops kept passing by Pandacan, Avelino was urged by her father to go to Manila. It was here that Pandacan was burned to the ground, with all the family’s house, possessions, and Ada Avelino’s school materials.
Rising from the Ashes
From the devastation, even when her spirit was crushed, Avelino learned to be as hardy as her father. In the new dispensation opened by the Americans in the Philippines, American English was the required medium of instruction. Her private school, amid difficulty and new standards imposed, was soon dissolved. This did not quell Avelino’s spirit, but rather, it spurred her on to train, and even volunteered to teach the language to fast track her own learning process. She took up private lessons from Mauricio Somosa, a known English-speaking friend.
There was one time when her American proctor, Prescott F. Jernegan, author of an English textbook on Philippine history used in the American curriculum, mentioned in her class that Emilio Aguinaldo, president of the capitulated Philippine Republic, was “chief of the Cavite bandits.” She never took that in stride and instead rebutted the proctor in his class, to her classmates’ applause:
“Mr. Jernegan, Aguinaldo was not a bandit chieftain. Our revolutionaries were not bandits. They were patriots just like the Americans who revolted against England in 1776.”
Avelino’s efforts and achievement were acknowledged by the American administration in public instruction. David Prescott Barrows, the American superintendent on education, made Avelino principal of a public school for girls in Pandacan in 1901. Recognizing her further need to master English, Avelino asked for leave to go to Hong Kong, to train in English. This was cut short after six months due to an illness of one of her companions. Upon her return, she resumed her post, only to encounter opposition.
Amid the interference of American officials in the Bureau of Education, and her resistance to such interference, Avelino tendered her resignation in 1906, despite the pleading of superintendent G.A. O’Reilly not to resign. Her work as a good educator and school administrator had made a mark on the public school system.
Forging a New Path
The dream of starting a new school was always there. Avelino already had the training, the know-how, the experience under the new colonial dispensation. She kept to heart the essence of education, as it had always been advocated by Rizal, and all the teachers she was privileged to be trained under– and that is to emancipate the mind and feed the spirit, to dignify Filipino’s humanity and equip the person with the skills and the heart to achieve his/her potential.
LIBRADA AVELINO AND CARMEN DE LUNA, 1911, COLORIZED BY ADRIAN NAVARRO
It was from two of her close friends, Fernando Salas, and her classmate from her studies with the Assumptionists, Carmen de Luna, that Avelino got the encouragement she needed. They altogether financially invested in the dream of opening a school, which finally came to fruition in April 1907. They named it Centro Escolar de Senoritas (Central School for Ladies), the first non-sectarian school in the Philippines, which soon became Centro Escolar University in 1932.
In 1929, it was no less than the University of the Philippines, under its president and fellow nationalist, Rafael Palma, who conferred to Librada honoris causa Master in Pedagogy, in acknowledgment of her pioneering work in Philippine education and the advancement of women’s rights.
When Avelino died of cancer on 9 November 1934, with her dream fully realized, it was on her birth anniversary on 17 January 1935, short of a few months before the independence timetable for the Philippines would begin in November, that the new university cancelled their classes, for the women students to visit the grave of their fallen founder, whose final resting place was at La Loma Cemetery. Students poured in at the cemetery, all with gratefulness and admiration.
LIBRADA AVELINO MONUMENT IN THE CAMPUS GROUNDS, CENTRO ESCOLAR UNIVERSITY
In Memory of a Life Well-Lived
Avelino’s legacy goes beyond the still existing university that she founded in Mendiola, Manila. Education today, based on metrics and research, is lacking, and amid the socio-political climate, seems powerless. And perhaps the same discontent that we feel are the same ones she felt, looking at the colonial education that she aspired to change. The challenge is daunting. Yet Ada’s tenacity, her drive, her will to make her vision become a reality, was driven not by self-ego but by the very reason why we educate– to forge a new kind of Filipino, one who will take on the leadership mantle with all knowledge, humility, and beating heart for the welfare of their Nation.
The closing scene of Rizal’s El filibusterismo, which no doubt, was read by Avelino, still resonates:
“Where are the youth who will dedicate their innocence, their idealism, their enthusiasm for the good of the country? Where are they who will give generously of their blood to wash away so much shame, crime and abomination? Pure and spotless must the victim be for the sacrifice to be acceptable. Where are you, young men and young women, who are to embody in yourselves the life-force that has been drained from our veins, the pure ideals that have grown stained in our minds, the fiery enthusiasm that has been quenched in our hearts? We await you, come for we await you!”
Bibliography:
Alzona, Encarnacion. A History of Education in the Philippines, 1965 – 1930. Manila: University of the Philippines Press, 1932.
Alzona, Encarnacion. Librada Avelino: A Biography. Manila: Centro Escolar University, 1974.
The Philippine Teachers’ Association. The Filipino Teacher: A Monthly Journal of the Philippine Teachers’ Association, Vol. 1. No. 3, June 1907.
Varona, Francisco, & De La Llana, Pedro. Ada: The Life of Librada Avelino or the Development of the Soul. Manila: P. Vera & Sons Co., 1935.