MABINI: A MODEL STUDENT

Aside from his family’s poverty, there were some other factors that could have induced Mabini not to study at all. His father, Inocensio Mabini, could not read nor write while his mother, Dionisia Maranan, seemed to be more educated. It was also known that there was no school in Talaga at that time. So it only means that if he really wants to study, he will walk six miles all the way to the town proper. But none of these things had stopped him from gathering his strength to ask his mother to send him to school in Tanauan.

Mabini was known as a “quiet boy who never had any books to study with, but who was nevertheless the exemplary student. He – they further say – used to read his lessons from the books of his classmates on the way to school”.1 At the age of 14, he was enrolled in the Secondary School of D. Valerio Malabanan also in Tanauan. This

Later on, Mabini engaged in several extracurricular activities to finance his matriculation and to comply with a requirement for graduation to work in a lawyer’s office. He further engaged in other activities of more extensive consequences. He was playing an important role in underground movements that would soon flare up in the form of a national revolution.7 Along with this background, he obtained the most excellent class records. He finished his course with a grade of sobresaliente in all of his subjects.

In 1888, Apolinario returned to Manila and enrolled in the Faculty of Civil Law of the University of Santo Tomas. The class of Mabini has been described as a class which has all good students with qualification of sobresaliente in almost all subjects. Felix Roxas, a member of the class, said that in the class of Civil Law under the eminent D. Cayetano Arellano, the students had to take notes in class as the professor did not use any textbook. Mabini was one of the two students with the best notes taken. However, he never wrote a word in class but he could reconstruct the lectures with commendable precision.It was also said that once a difficulty arose over some points which none of the best students could answer but Mabini correctly answered it. But the professor, thinking that it had been a matter of luck, put Mabini to further tests, until he was convinced that the poor ‘provinciano’ was his most valuable student.6

The next school year, 1885-1886, Mabini continued taking up the preparatory courses of the Law curriculum. Astoundingly, he finished the course with the grade of sobresaliente. Then again, he came back to Batangas to earn the right money he needs for the examination. He settled in Lipa and worked in the school of Sebastian Virrey. Virrey had reported that “Mabini was so fa1-3ithful to me that when I was absent from home he doubled his work, so that his departure caused me no little distress… The most

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