FR. ROGELIO Alarcon, O.P.’s pioneering and innovative education system cemented his legacy as the best Filipino Dominican educator, a former head of the Filipino Dominicans said.
Alarcon, the first prior provincial of the Dominican Province of the Philippines, died on Saturday, May 17, at 87.
During a funeral Mass on May 21, Fr. Quirico Pedregosa, Jr., O.P. said Alarcon was driven by his sense of mission as a Dominican.
“He was an innovative educator in the sense that he pioneered a system of learning that enables learners, according to their own individual uniqueness, to learn how to learn,” Pedregosa said in his homily.
“He was a true son of Saint Dominic. He remained as a teacher until the last moments of his life…Fr. Alarcon is the best educator, so far, that the province has produced. He was a visionary, and above all, he was a missionary.”
Alarcon established UST Angelicum College, the first non-graded learning system in the Philippines, in 1972 with just six classrooms, a small library, and nine teachers serving 315 boys. Six years later, he founded Angelicum School Iloilo.
He would go on to establish and help found schools, including the first Catholic university in Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Catholic University of St. Thomas Aquinas, where he served as rector.
For Pedregosa, Alarcon’s “innovative and visionary spirit” was drawn from his own experience as a student who once flunked his studies.
He likened Alarcon’s mission to St. Thomas Aquinas’s principle of “Learning is in the learner.”
“He knew what it meant to be an educator. He was consumed by that desire to find a way to help students learn according to their own tastes, to come up with a system of learning that is learner-centered,” he said.
In an effort to extend education to the poor, Alarcon led UST Angelicum College in establishing the Re-entry Agenda for the Poor (REAP) in 1998, which Pedregosa said was part of Alarcon’s ministry as a Dominican.
“He was a great missionary in the field, through the ministry of education. He was consumed with that mission in life to help those who are disadvantaged,” he said.
Pedregosa added that UST Angelicum College, which had long been implementing long-distance learning before the pandemic, is a testament to Alarcon’s visionary spirit.
“He had that vision of the future. His vision is to make the learner become an independent learner, one who learns and discovers for himself or herself, one who acquires knowledge and wisdom on his or her own,” he said.
“Fr. Alarcon was driven by a great visionary spirit. He thinks not only of today, but of the future. He has become a visionary leader in the field of education.”
Alarcon’s remains were laid to rest at Santuario de Santo Domingo.
The funeral Mass was presided over by the incumbent prior provincial, Fr. Filemon dela Cruz, Jr., O.P.
