The Early Years
In Philippine education, the name Dr. Pedro T. Orata is associated with academic excellence — one who championed education for people from all walks of life. But before the honors, there was a boy from Bactad who kept failing the walk before he ever failed a subject.
He was born to Numeriana Tamesis-Arata and Candido Arata, with one surviving sibling, a sister named Victorina. The change in spelling of the family name, from "Arata" to "Orata," was an arrangement he made to relieve a childhood unease — he did not want to be called on to recite first in class.
Life was hard for the family. Young Pedro helped his parents on the farm and with household chores, and sold vegetables carried in a basket over rice paddies — even after he started Grade I in Bactad, where classes only went up to Grade III.
To continue past Grade III, Pedro walked four kilometers into Urdaneta to enroll in Grade IV. He failed. His father, believing Pedro simply disliked school, put him to harder work on the farm — up at five in the morning, tending animals, harrowing and plowing until late at night. Pedro enrolled again, and passed.
With no Grade V offered in Urdaneta, Pedro walked eleven kilometers to Binalonan with three barrio-mates — leaving Sunday afternoon, returning Friday. The next year intermediate grades reached Urdaneta, and he finished elementary there in 1916.
He enrolled at the College of Agriculture in Los Baños, failed Botany, and went home homesick — finishing Grade VII in Urdaneta before entering the Pangasinan Provincial High School in Lingayen, the province's only public high school.
His sister Victorina, who had stopped her own schooling after Grade IV, took in boarders in Lingayen — cooking and washing clothes to help him stay. From 1916 to 1920, brother and sister walked the road between Lingayen and Bactad again and again.
"Our provisions — rice and wood — had to be taken to Lingayen by my father in a carreton drawn by our old carabao. At first, I rode in the carreton, but I discovered that I could walk faster than the carabao. Besides, I pitied the carabao." Pedro Orata, recalling the walk to high school
The family's sacrifices paid off. Among ninety-nine graduates, Pedro finished high school as valedictorian of the Class of 1920.
Orata's Education in the US
At his graduation, Victorina had a surprise: her alcansia, a bamboo tube she had filled coin by coin from laundry work in Lingayen. It was enough for a ticket to the United States.
Orata arrived in June and worked grueling hours fixing railways in Montana, saving enough to enroll at the University of Illinois that September. Then came a letter from home — his father had died. Grief-stricken, he planned to return, until couples who had taken him under their wing convinced him to stay and finish.
So Orata poured his grief into work. He got a job in a dormitory washing dishes, then structured his weekdays around it: up at five, working until 8:30, off to a 9 a.m. class, back to work from noon to 2 p.m., another class at 2:30, then work again from 5 to 8:30 in the evening. Only after nine at night, back in his quarters, did he open his books. Weekends brought odd jobs — windows, lawns, homes. In summer, to save bus fare, he walked more than an hour and a half back to his room after eleven hours of work.
After four years, he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana with final honors in education, then earned his master's degree there in 1925 and his Ph.D. at Ohio State University in 1927. His dissertation, which challenged the "theory of identical elements" advanced by the noted educator Dr. Edward Lee Thorndike, drew honor citations and was published by Ohio University Press.
Contributions to Education
Orata returned to the Philippines in 1927 with his wife, Vinda Adkins, who would perish during the Japanese occupation. He taught briefly at Bayambang Normal School, now Pangasinan State University, then the Philippine Normal School — becoming the youngest division superintendent on his posting to Isabela, then Sorsogon from 1931 to 1934.
He returned to the US to serve on the Ohio State University staff, then took a post as principal of an experimental community school on an Indian Reservation in Kyle, South Dakota — an assignment that planted ideas he would later apply at home. A stint at the US Office of Education in Washington followed, until 1941.
Back in the Philippines as Technical Assistant of the National Council of Education, Orata returned to Urdaneta with the outbreak of World War II — where he met his second wife, Pilar.
Tasked by the Americans with reestablishing schools in Urdaneta, Orata worked with lawyers, dentists, engineers, and other professionals to reorganize the elementary schools and open the Urdaneta Community High School — the first public high school in the Philippines established outside a provincial capital.
They held classes in an old bombed-out church with no roof. Three hundred fifty students and fifteen teachers divided the space by year level. There were no books, no chairs — students sat on the floor. When they graduated, the seniors received handwritten diplomas.
Called back to Manila for the Department of Public Instruction, Orata was then invited by UNESCO as an educational expert to study and report on the Thai education system, and later served as a program specialist at UNESCO's Paris headquarters until his retirement in 1960. He was invited to be dean of the Graduate School of the Philippine Normal College from 1960 to 1964.
In 1966, Dr. Orata founded the Urdaneta Community College — one of the country's first community colleges — and served as its president until his death in 1989, opting to have his own salary and allowance given instead to students struggling to finance their studies.
In recognition of his influence on Philippine education, the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation honored him for public service in 1971.
The boy who walked kilometers across rice paddies to attend class, who failed before he ever passed, who changed his own name so he wouldn't be called on first — became an authority whose innovations outlived him, still without having drawn a president's salary from the school he gave his name to.
Every road Pedro Orata walked as a child,
he later paved for someone else.
