The Bernidos are starting a revolution. One that, should it meet with success, will result in an upheaval of the prevailing educational system or, as some observe, lack thereof in our country. It is a revolution that has been a long time coming. It is a revolution that we desperately need.
As theoretical physicists with postgraduate degrees from the State University of New York, they could have easily chosen to stay in foreign countries where they could be offered professorships in eminent universities and well-paying jobs with the perks that would necessarily go with them. Failing that, they could have opted to continue their distinguished careers as professors in the University of the Philippines, where, before their early retirement in 1999, he was director of the UP National Institute of Physics and she an assistant professor of the Institute. Failing even that, they could have settled for the more metropolitan environs of Cebu and her universities or even the relatively urban surroundings of Tagbilaran.
But for Dr. Christopher Bernido and Dr. Maria Victoria Carpio Bernido, all of the foregoing are not as attractive or perhaps as worthwhile as the prospects that they have now.
You see, they seek challenge. And they have taken on the mission of educating the Filipino youth, of training the next generation of our country’s leaders, educators, scientists, and engineers. For this mission, they are starting with the students of the Central Visayan Institute Foundation (CVIF) High School in Chris’s hometown of Jagna.
They were a mere rumor when I first heard about them in 2003. A rumor that was confirmed by feature articles in the Philippine Daily Inquirer and other publications some years later.
You will have heard of them most recently as 2009’s recipients of the Gawad Haydee Yorac, an award given by the Meralco and the University of the Philippines in recognition of selfless public service by Filipino leaders with lives worth emulating. The announcement came as a surprise to them. They had not known that they had been nominated by their friend Dr. Raul Fabella of the UP School of Economics.
The award can only signify what they and many educators like them have, for decades, struggled and continue to struggle for, buoyed by ideals, a sincere concern for the quality of education that Filipino children are getting, and a desire to change things for the better.
They first met each other in UP when Marivic was in her freshman year of her masteral degree and Chris, five years her senior and fresh from his Ph.D. with the State University of New Yord (SUNY) in Albany, had availed of the Department of Science and Technology's Balik-Scientist program. He was in charge of some freshman subjects and was, in fact, her professor in the subject Electromagnetism. Marivic admired that Chris had come back to a country that needed him. Nationalism, for her, was an important trait in the man who would be her husband.
But this was no surprise, really. Years earlier, when her father, human rights lawyer and former NBI Director J. Antonio Carpio, was first imprisoned during the martial law regime, she came at a crossroads. The choice was between going to college or becoming a revolutionary to protest her father’s detention. It took a farmer, wise with the years, to convince her to use her talent and her intellect for the good of the country.
Chris’s father, on the other hand, was Esteban Bernido, a former governor of Bohol and World War II hero who served as a cabinet minister of the Marcos administration from 1967 until his resignation in 1969.
In the mid-1990s, Chris and Marivic started the series of triennial lectures and workshops that would form the core of the Research Center for Theoretical Physics, which is today an integral part of CVIF. These workshops once even featured two physicists who would go on to win the Nobel Prize. Attending these seminars are invited students from colleges and universities in the Visayas and Mindanao, for some of which the Bernidos are visiting lecturers.
In 1999, when they undertook the administration of CVIF, he as president of the research center and she as principal of the high school, it had been besieged for years by changes in the country’s educational policies from without and by foundering finances and other problems from within. From more than a thousand students in the early ’90s, enrolment had dropped to 387 students in ’99.
The first three years of their CVIF experience they describe as a period of evaluation which, in 2002, led to their development of the Dynamic Learning Program (DLP) along with the implementation of the Department of Education’s Basic Education Curriculum, which they say has been very helpful.
The main innovation in the DLP is its “no homework policy” since it considers from experience that homework is rarely ever done at home and, in some cases, usually not by the student, making an assessment of their learning impossible. The program is marked by its focus on learning by doing and discovery to teach the student independence and creativity of thought. Its day class program is itself inspired, taking advantage of the peak hours of learning.
One more innovation is the Learning Physics as a Nation module, through which they’ve created a framework for teaching physics that, taking the DLP model, emphasizes activity-based learning and where the role of the teacher is as a guide, not an instructor. This program is currently being tested in some high schools all over the country and, depending on its success, it may soon be picked up by our public schools.
The Bernidos are also quite protective of their students, knowing the impressionable nature of young children. But their students are far from sheltered. Their school productions are exercises in creativity that expand the interests and awareness of the participants. They’ve staged plays in German, French, and many other languages, all while faithfully representing the respective culture. Timidity has no room in CVIF, where science, technology, theater, and the arts are measured by excellence.
These are but a few of the changes that they’d like to see happen in our educational system; a system which they see is too indebted to foreign aid that we let international policies determine what we teach in our schools. A system further complicated by overly ambitious elementary subjects and secondary curricula that are implemented only for about four years or less, making an actual evaluation of their effectiveness impossible and moot.
In spite of their engagements as educators, the Bernidos have remained active as theoretical physicists, every now and then coming up with original research and being published in international scientific journals such as the American Institute of Physics’s Journal of Mathematical Physics. Just an example is a paper lengthily entitled “Path Integrals for boundaries and topographic constraints: A white noise functional approach” which was published in 2002 and which consisted of pages of mathematical equations and explanations to boggle the layman’s mind.
Midway in the interview, as they were answering a question of how they can keep faith in the Philippines in spite of all that we face, they tell me that it is their faith in God that gives them hope. It is what gives their mission meaning. As educators, as scientists, and as human beings, the Bernidos live by their faith.
They tell me that they do what they can do, one class at a time, one child at a time. And when you’re set on changing the world, that may be the only way to do it.
