Harvest of pages

THIS week, I received two priceless gifts. The first was the day my mother turned 75.

The second came before that day ended, when I stopped by my favorite secondhand bookstore and found a hardbound copy of “The Hobbit” by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Reprinted in 2012, this edition was issued to mark the 75th anniversary of the tale that started “The Lord of the Rings.”

Before the movies, before the merchandise, there was the book. Actually not a trilogy, as “The Fellowship of the Ring,” “The Two Towers,” and “The Return of the King” are often called.

Before this singularly long novel—broken down into six books in three volumes—came “The Hobbit”.

In the 1930s, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a professor at Oxford, wearied by the endless correction of papers when he found himself scribbling on a blank leaf: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

But as Tolkien’s sons Christopher and Michael remembered, their father first told them “a long story about a small being with furry feet” during “winter ‘reads’ after tea in the evening.”

Christopher, then aged four or five, urged his father to be consistent during his retelling. He pointed out to his father that Bilbo’s door was blue, not the green of later versions; and that Thorin’s hood had a golden tassel, not silver.

Encouraged by such a rapt, critical audience, Tolkien wrote down the tale and sent it to someone who read, who believed others would read it, too.

When I held the 75th anniversary edition of “The Hobbit,” I was struck not just by my luck to hold such a handsome volume, whose paper jacket and inside illustrations bore Tolkien’s original drawings.

Before generations of readers of all ages discovered “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings,” Tolkien was a parent who tried to balance his responsibilities as a family man with his passion for stories.

Told by a friend that the publication of “The Hobbit” may fuel a public clamor for more stories about hobbits (the first edition was sold out within a few months of its release in 1937), Tolkien replied that this comment raised a “faint hope” that “duty and desire may… (perhaps) in future go more closely together.”

Though my parents worked for a living, my sister and I never wanted for stories and books. For our bedtime sessions, my late father, then a government doctor, picked liberally from comic books, novels and newspapers. My mother bought us more books than clothes, which made me indifferent for life to fashion but never for language and stories.

My first paperback edition of “The Hobbit” bears this faded record at the end-page: from September till October in 2002, I started and finished the novel while waiting for my father to wake up from a stroke. For a weekend of hospital tests, I’m packing the 75th anniversary edition of “The Hobbit”.

If not for a habit of jotting notes like diary entries in the books I read and reread, I remember primarily the stories. As his children learned during Tolkien’s fireside sessions, a master storyteller can make you forget everything but The Tale.

I logged the first 26 pages of “The Hobbit” in Pages4Progress, an online campaign that encourages readers to raise $1 for every page they read.

World Education Inc., a non-profit organization based in the United States, works with local groups to improve people’s access to quality education in 22 countries. Through literacy, people can deal with poverty, displacement, violence and HIV.

The Pages4Progress campaign encourages people to read 20,015 pages by September 8, International Literacy Day. This is also the 2015 deadline for the United Nations to attain Millennium Development Goal No. 2 of reaching universal primary education.

Every page logged in Pages4Progress is matched by a $1 donation for World Education Inc. After the Pages4Progress emailed that the first 26 pages I read in “The Hobbit” earned $26 for its online literacy campaign, I see the circle connecting the Oxford don setting down a winter’s tale for his children to generations of readers.

As every reader knows, in our imagined worlds, we are neveraging children enraptured with every turn of the page. So read and log today if you want to unlock worlds for someone who has yet to open a book.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)



* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 13, 2014 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Find the missing

THIS is my last chance to get a son adopted by the state.

The thought flashed throughout an afternoon search for the two-volume set of simulated college admission tests I finally found in one of the boxes of books.

I bought the reviewers more than five years ago for the older son, then in senior high school. He took the University of the Philippines College Admissions Test (UPCAT), the Ateneo College Entrance Test (ACET), the University of San Carlos Entrance Test, and the De La Salle College Entrance Test.

He chose the tests, curious how he would fare. Privately, I hoped he would pass the UPCAT and study at my alma matter.

But after passing the UPCAT, he decided to enroll in a private university.

Now it’s my second and last chance to relaunch a campaign to get the younger son to take the UPCAT, pass it, and enroll in the state university. For his choosing, there is a wide variety of degree and non-degree programs in ten UP campuses around the nation.

But to be accepted in a degree program, an applicant must first pass the UPCAT in August.

“Universal access to education” is embodied in Education for All (EFA) and Millenium Development Goals (MDGs). It is a beautiful phrase but a fraught one.

Access to education is far from universal. What is enshrined as a right is a privilege bought at a price. Every “aspirational” parent knows this.

Preparation to pass an entrance test so a student can compete with thousands for limited slots in a state university (82,000 UPCAT examinees last year) requires investing in quality primary and secondary education for 13 years, assuming he or she starts as early as 3 years of age and this before the K to 12 program was in place.

But this alone does not paint a true picture of education as an economic choice in this country, as well as other “settings of fragility” where EFA and MDGs are endangered. When a student drops out of class to sell candles or harvest forage for livestock, he or she becomes one of the “missing.”

Talisay City has 744 school-age children that have not completed any grade level, reported Sun.Star Cebu’s Justin K. Vestil last June 19. Citing data from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) – Central Visayas, the same report traced other students “missing” due to retention, transfer or dropping out: more than 4,000 children in Cebu, Lapu-Lapu and Toledo Cities.

What the system regards as a statistical loss is a human tragedy muted by clashing realities. It’s inevitable that of the millions swarming beyond the capacity of limited public school classrooms, considerably fewer will persevere through the year levels to try to qualify for college, let alone choose a course or a campus.

For those privileged to be on the track for a degree course, there is still a thicket of tuition and other fees to go through after hurdling reviews, entrance exams, and their attendant costs. To be in UP, P100,000 is needed annually for every student, at P3,000 per unit, Rappler reported in July 13, 2013.

But due to a state subsidy of nearly 50 percent, full-paying students or those classified under bracket A of the socialized tuition and financial assistance program (STFAP) pay only P1,500 per unit in UP Diliman, Los Baños and Manila, and P1,000 per unit in UP Cebu and other campuses.

Whether one is in bracket A, the so-called millionaires’ class for those who can afford to pay in full UP tuition and other fees, or bracket D, all UP students pay in full school fees upon enrolment. That’s just the start of their Calvary.

In April 2013, three weeks after UP Manila student Kristel Tejada drank silver cleaner because she was refused readmission over an unsettled tuition of P10,000, college students Daveson Beron and Don Benedict Pamintuan shot themselves.

Beron, a mechanical engineering senior at the Batangas State University, had failing grades that prevented him from graduating with his batch. Pamintuan, a physical therapy freshman at the De La Salle-Dasmariñas, failed in four subjects and learned he was to be transferred to the Batangas State University the following year.

If “universal access to education” spurs human aspiration, what can we do about the doors closing on missing youth?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 29, 2014 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”