It must be one of the most unique school entrance tests ever, with a little mischief thrown in. 

One of Jose Rizal’s former students in Dapitan remembered how he and other adolescent applicants got accepted into Rizal’s community school. 

Dr. Rizal, then only in his early 30s but already the world’s most famous Filipino, would do the admissions interview during a walk in the nearby forest with the nervous applicant. 

After exiting the woods, Rizal would tell the boy that he left something in the forest, perhaps one of his specially carved wooden canes, and ask him to go back and get it, alone. 

Older boys would be hiding in the forest making scary noises. If the applicant somehow found a way to return the object, he was admitted. 

“He patted me on the back and praised my courage,” one of the students, Marcial Borromeo, would recall decades later. 

Rizal obviously wanted to see strength of character and not just intellect in his wards, who would live in his compound doing odd jobs while learning from him. 

Notorious for offending the Spanish colonial masters with his novels, Rizal was exiled in Dapitan, still a Mindanao backwater to this day. There he withdrew from his political activism and settled down to start a school and help develop the community. 

What stood out for me was how integrated he was in his natural environment. He made it even his initiation for those wanting to be in his orbit.  

His life ended in tragedy but Rizal was luckier than most exiles. Amazingly, he won the lottery in Manila soon after arriving in Dapitan in 1892, enabling him to pay off his debts, send money to his family, and buy an immaculate piece of land on the outskirts of town in Dapitan. If not for that, he would have been stuck in the poblacion under house arrest. Instead, he got the chance to be immersed in an unspoiled environment and enjoy a degree of freedom he couldn’t have imagined when he was sent into exile. 

He developed only a flat portion of his land beside the sea and below dense forest which he also owned and maintained. The forest is still intact more than 128 years after he left it. 

Nature studies and skills were integral to the education he gave his students, who learned how to swim and dive, collect sea shells, and catch and preserve butterflies. 

His forest was an extension of his classroom and a source for herbal remedies for his patients. Rizal found time to practice as a general physician, delivering babies and addressing a wide assortment of ailments, even if he had specialized as one of the most highly trained eye surgeons in Asia at the time. 

His environment was the subject of his long correspondence with leading natural scientists in Europe. But it was also an important means for him to acquire books which were not available in Mindanao. Museums in Europe, especially in Germany, were hungry for artifacts and specimens from the tropics, especially from less known regions like Mindanao. Rizal would ship a wide variety of preserved creatures to scientists who would agree to send back books that Rizal requested in exchange. His letters reveal a preference for Greek philosophy and Russian novels translated to German. 

On at least three occasions, the specimens he sent to Germany were greeted with eureka excitement, as they were found to be unknown frog, lizard and beetle species discovered by Rizal. 

He had no access to research laboratories or an intellectual community like a university that could have qualified him to be identified as a natural scientist. 

But he was easily a naturalist because of his passion for nature and desire to know and document his natural environment. I dare say that on top of everything else he was, Rizal was the father of Philippine biodiversity and the nation’s first naturalist. 

Yet naturalist is a word left out of inscriptions on his many statues. Indisputably, he was a patriot and poet par excellence, as well as a martyr and doctor and novelist. We need to add “naturalist” to all of that. 

This is not just giving our national hero his due. 

By making his love for nature essential to Rizal’s identity, we make it central as well to the vision for our nation.