These times

These are challenging times, one fraught both with dangers and opportunities, more dangers and more opportunities than ever before inside this older man’s lifetime. He was born in the mid-1950s. Soon after the end of the previous war. He was a young boy when he saw his first television screen, rounded at the corners, black and white, and showing only 3 or so broadcast channels.
Now he is writing these words into the computer screen. And if there is any piece of information he should ever need to write this, he will simply connect to the internet. Chances are he will find the information he needs. Now, is a wonderful time for writers.
He should know. He began writing in the old days. And it took him quite a while to adjust to the “new” days, the new ways of doing things. But with much effort, he seems now to be getting the hang of working with a computer. But never quite as much nor as well as his students and his children. They figure it much better than him. They were born into these times.
These are good times for teaching. And since he has taught many generations of students, he should know. He knows there are certain profound differences between his students now and of previous generations. This is not a simple difference of quality easily answered by telling which is better. Both classes of students have different proclivities, different attitudes, different inclinations towards knowing and making things. And yet, at the core, they are generally the same students, having the same dreams: to learn how to do things quickly, to develop over time some control over their own lives, to be educated. The difference is that students now have the invaluable resource of new technology, especially the internet. Given the possibility he might have misread completely this differential of quality of students over time, the inescapable truth is: He has become over time a better teacher. Technology helped.
And there are times when he comes across a former student. And in the back of his head he feels a need to apologize for not being a better teacher back then, for not having taught them the things he teaches his students now. He feels what every old artist must feel when he looks at his earliest works. He remembers this mix of feelings: a bit of embarrassment, yes; possibly, remorse; but also most assuredly a deep appreciation of his own struggles as a teacher going through many years of a relative ignorance.
And yet, despite limitations, he is mostly surprised how well his older students are doing: This one doing quite well as a photographer. Another one making his or her mark as a designer, a painter, sculptor, graphic artist, performance artist; or doing well in a business that they love. Many of them now raising families of their own, begetting new dreams and dreamers. Quite a number of them being now teachers, university professors, people of science, even a few becoming priests and nuns.
And then he feels better about himself. That they do well gives him a sense of relief that despite his previous ignorance, his lack of sufficient of experience when he was still a randy young man, he did not destroy any of his students’ dreams. Whatever generation they come from they are figuring out in their own terms this complex discipline which is art, the study and the teaching of it, the art of it’s making.
And he knows now, how this field is changing very rapidly. Young people can actually learn it much faster. The question is: Can teachers teach it just as fast?
The history of local art had points when the world of art-making changed quite suddenly in a flashpoint: In the Philippines, there are historical markers for these points in time. There is the Katipunan revolution at the end of the 1800s and then the years thereafter when education really took off. Then there was the period immediately before and after the Second World War. The years of martial law certainly marks the growth here of something of an artistic self-awareness, a collective artistic conscience. And now we are seeing how our artistic development in the age of information and new technologies.
He cannot tell how, exactly and completely, but it is obvious that art is changing very rapidly and in a most profound way. He takes profound here to mean those things which touch the most fundamental bases of art. Especially, the area of its functions: What is it for? Who and how is it being consumed? What are its new usefulnesses? And if things are changing this way, what are the things of art that have not changed or have yet to change? What is the sound, smell, look, taste and feel of what will be looked on, many tomorrows hence, as the Classical of these times?
Looking at these times. He thanks his God and everyone who has ever helped give him shape and form, everyone who has ever touched him, or whom he has ever touched, even this computer in front of him, for how fortunate he is and what an interesting lifetime his is becoming.

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