San Diego State University - Del Sudoeste Yearbook (San Diego, CA)

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WHITE AND GOLD 5 Schools were started in the districts where ignorance and crime were worst. When these schools were started, there were one hundred thousand chil- dren in attendance; but with our policy the system began expanding rap- idly, and reports show that the next year we had two hundred thousand children, the next three hundred thousand and last year there were half a million. Next, we had to develop a corps of teachers; at the outset there were only eight or nine Americans, and we had to enlist young boys and girls, give them as much of the knowledge required for teaching as possible, and put them to teaching the children. Often a boy or a girl of nineteen or so would have to teach children in the first year, and have himself no knowledge beyond the first year; often a teacher would learn one day for the first time what he or she hadto present to the class the next. Of course this gave rise to many amusing incidents, a few pathetic ones, and plenty of absurdities. But beneath all the absurdities we found a great deal of earnestness. There was an example of this in the work of one of the teachers whose school I visited one day. The class were having a reading lesson from the English chart, and the new letter that was being introduced was j. The teacher was absorbed, and the children, following his pointer on the Chart, were raptly reciting in unison HWe hump at home. We hump at school. I have a dog and he shall hump, too! But these Filipino teachers are interested and enthusiastic, and for the reason that they are teaching the children of their own race, they are apt to hold out longer than Americans. We asked some of the Spanish teachers, too, to come over; but we found that they were too fixed in their methodsetoo ttsotl,eand we had to ship them back. But this corps of native teachers, organized and instructed by American ed- ucators, is the best, most potent element throughout the whole archipel- ago,and wherever you find a young Filipino man or woman teaching school in the districts, you find a person whom the whole community respects and admires. uWhen we first came into possession of the Philippines, it was apoor country; it was our task to build this country up after three years of the most desperate war, after a plague that had killed the cattle, after an epidemic of cholera, after the trade had been ruined by the destruction of crops by the locusts. Yet out of this country we had to raise a revenue for schools. The only place'to get it was from the people themselves. So we went to the Municipal Boards and talked school as hard as ever we could, in order to get their assistance. The revenue now amounts to over t six million pesos a year, or three million dollars. uBut after we had gotten the children and the books and the schools and after we had built up the corps of native teachers, we had to have some sort of administration. You cant keep a thing of this kind going

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cu..- 4 WHITE AND GOLD years ago said that in a few generations there wouldn't be a man-jack of those people left; this is true in part, but it is not true of the Malayan por- tion of the people. A hundred years ago the Filipino people numbered 3, million and a half; today they number seven millions If this rate of in- crease continues, you will hnd at the middle of the present century that a people has been built up which will in time equal the Japanese. With the aspirations and the purposefulness that they are, as a people, acquir- ing from the Americans, they will have become a nation of no mean quality A word about the social life. The Archipelago is divided into forty provinces; each province is divided into pueblos of forty square miles or so and inhabited by forty or fifty thousand people. One town is much like all the others, with the wide plaza, the great splendid churchhthese churches, in many ways, surpass our California missionsethe jail, the store and a few fine houses. In these houses you will find people of educa- tion, of culture, you will find pianos, books and pictures and a warm hos- pitality. But up in the woods and along the streams are clusters of hamlets where the mass of the people live in poverty and squalor, utterly illiterate, with no enlightenment whatever; it is these people who make up ninety-seven per cent of the population. The first thing that made itself clear to the government was that whatever institution was to be employed in the archipelago, must be an institution that would reach and educate this great mass. And that is the task that we undertook six years ago. tlThere is now a school within reach of all the children, the children of the rich, the merchant and the peasant classes. We had to figure closely. According to the census reports it was found that there were 1,200,000 boys and girls of school age, throughout the islands. We could not, of course, begin to take all these and give them eight years of in- struction; so we cut the course down to three years, which included the smallest amount of instruction that would be of practical service. This divided the number of children by three, and instead of taking the girl or the boy between the ages of six and fourteen, we took them between the ages of ten and thirteen. This course so arranged included three years of English, during which the pupil learned to read, write and speak the language correctly; enough arithmetic to enable him to cast accounts, realize the condition of crops and know what his debts amounted to; and one year of geography which gave him a general idea of the shape of the earth. This education represents so great an opportunity and has worked Such a revolution that it separates the child from its parents by a wide chasm, and has begun to dissipate the clouds of ignorance that have So long hovered over the archipelago. tlThe first thing to do was to get enough schools, teachers and books.

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6 WHITE AND GOLD unless you have some one responsible. At the present, in each province there is a division superintendent Who is an American; he appoints teachers, settles salaries, superintends the financial work, is responsible in every way. Each province is divided into districts, and in each of these is an American teacher, who has the supervision of that district; this means the supervision of as much as two hundred square miles and about fifty thousand people. Some of these district supervisors get up early in the morning and travel all day on foot, on horseback, by sail or canoe, often in weather when it is raining ten or fifteen inches a day; that's pretty heavy rain. These four hundred men are the most splendid, fearless, heroic body of men it has ever been my lot to see. They have escaped death in a thousand ways, have actually met death by violence, by drown- ing and by smallpox; often they go into communities where there are any- where from fifty to two hundred children stricken with smallpox in its most malignant form. And they never realize that the work is heroic. The primary is not the only school, however. We are trying to give all the children three years of instruction and some of the children more. This school, which might be called intermediate, takes children between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. The girl has three years of house- keeping; the first year she learns to clean the house, disinfect it,fight dis- ease germs and sew; the second year she learns to cook; the third year she learns to tend the sick and take care of the little children. The boy, after his three years of English, may choose to be a doctor, a lawyer, a beggar- maneany old thing. He can have three years of industrial work; either in the farming-school, the school work-shop, or the school fisheries. It has been said that the Filipinos donlt like to work, that they prefer to wear good clothes, patent leather shoes and stiff collars. The Filipinos WILL work. They have a facile hand and an accurate eye; they can do with the eye and hand work as delicate as that done by the Japanese. As a people they have an ardent admiration and high respect for manual dexterity; even down in the Mohammedan country, the man Who can make a creese, the sharp sword that will take a manls head off at one stroke, or the man Who can build a boat, is looked up to and called t lextremely clever. l l ttThroughout the islands the man skillful with his hands is respected and admired, as he should be in all countries. Yes, the Filipinos Will work and work hard; they may not enjoy it but they can be made to if their imagination is appealed to; they may not care to raise beans, but they will raise beans if you cast a glamor of romance over it. uLastly, there are forty high schools, one in each province. After the six years of primary and intermediate work, those who can afford it attend the high school. It is different from the high schools over here, being a sort of technical training-school, Whose aim is to put the student