SENATOR Loren Legarda filed a measure mandating the inclusion of Dr. Jose Rizal as a naturalist and medical doctor in the teaching of Rizal in all public and private schools, colleges, and universities.

Legarda’s Senate Bill 2653 aims to amend Republic Act 1425 or the Rizal Law.

In her explanatory note, Legarda said the Rizal Law was debated heavily when it was first passed in 1956.

“Since then, the teaching of Jose Rizal’s novels in both high school and college has been a mean for students to appreciate Jose Rizal,” Legarda said.

However, the specificity of the Rizal Law in naming the novels as major focus of Rizal studies has left the other aspects of Rizal’s life and work to be little studied and even less appreciated.

The senator said recent focus on the last four years of his life spent in exile in Dapitan also brought up the lack of further investigation as to his medical practice and his naturalist teachings as well as curriculum at the school he established there.

The senator stressed a renewed interest in Jose Rizal and his imagining of a great Filipino nation is needed and government support for such studies and teaching is long overdue.