Ambeth R. Ocampo

A historian can never claim to have the last word on anything as he is limited by his sources and further so by his viewpoint.

If we cannot agree on what was important yesterday, what more on events that happened a hundred or three hundred years ago? The point here is that history is open ended and we cannot be sure about the past. So why study history? Because it teaches us to see the connections between events. Knowing how and why a certain event happened is helpful because in many cases people separated by time and place can sometimes be in similar situations. They can be mentally contemporaneous without knowing it. History gives us hindsight.

Who says history is stagnant? For a historian, facts do not change; it is the way we look at things, our interpretations, that are always changing. This is what makes history exciting - that we can always find something new in what is old.

School made us 'literate' but did not teach us to read for pleasure.

As you can see, there are quite a number of things taught in school that one has to unlearn or at least correct.

Rizal learned the right ideas at the wrong time, and for this he was shot.

Can you imagine the feeling of being an oppressed colonial being addressed respectfully by a colonizer in the mother country?