TODAY I will be with the Young Leaders’ Forum at Carlos Hilado Memorial State College to provide assistance, inputs, and insights to the participants in the area of culture and arts. It will be focused on “What Can Every Youth Do to Promote and Accelerate Sustainable Development Goals.”
I always adopt this anthropology definition of culture: culture being the way of life evolved by a group of people that can be transmitted from one generation to another. I learn culture from my guru who told me about customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.
The National Commission for the Culture and the Arts has been telling us that Filipino culture includes our capability for excellence in making excellent products, excellent tools, in evolving excellent customs and believing in excellent attitude.
As Filipinos, culture could be referred to the heritage of the nobility of our people... the greatness of our soul, our ability to care about others. It is important that the participants in the Young Leaders’ Forum should understand the people’s culture for them to learn how and why people think and act as they do.
A study of a people’s culture will allow the leaders to realize the best traits of the people, as well as the best means to get into the hearts and minds of a people. Leaders are tools to help people become successful by maximizing what is in them. With the trends now, people should profit from imported and homegrown ideas.
Art could always be found in our culture. It is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. Every man’s work, whether it is literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself. The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all that is disagreeable evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.
In culture there is art and in art there is culture. Art is the power to think new and thinking new is the right of every person. Science is art and art is science. The scientist needs time to appreciate a beautiful poem, to understand the power of theater arts, and to appreciate music that gives life to a soul. In return, the artist needs to keep in tune with the research of a man who masters science.
In this 2018 International Social Science Camp, I want the participants assigned to me to develop cultural awareness... that knowledge and respect for one’s way of life. They should very well know that other cultures were shaped to suit unique conditions and that although different they should be accorded respect.
That could be the reason also why Silay City is hosting this International Rondalla Festival on November 3 to 11, 2018 with participants from the Philippines and other countries to show the world that we can be united through music and we can always attain peace and prosperity because we understand our culture and we believe that life is a form of art.
Congratulations young leaders!