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Show EDUCATIONAL FAILURE "We are making a failure of this scheeme, a monstrous, mortifying failure; fail-ure; not ihhemediable, perhaps, but fast becoming chronic, and requiring instant attention from those who are competent to modify the situation." This rather startling statement in regard re-gard to our attempt to set up an American educational system in the Philippines is made in an article in Gunton's Magazine by Theodore de Laguna, Ph. D., a Cornell man who went to the Philippines as a teacher. There is "widespread disgust" among the Filipinos for the American educational educa-tional scheme, he tells us, and the chief desire of the teachers is to get back to America. All this is in strange contrast with the high hope that so many had in the civilizing influence of that shipload of teachers that crossed the Pacific a year, and a half ago. Dr. de Laguna attributes the failure to two principal causes the quality of the teachers, and the attempt to impose the English language on the natives. In regard to the teachers he says: "The teachers were a regiment of carpet-baggers, come to exploit the country in their small way, and then, after a few years, would sail happily home without a regret to spare. Had everything gone smoothly with the work here, the carpet-baggers' interests inter-ests might h'ave been sufficient to keep them at their task; but with the first breath of failure, it would be hard to find any class of men more liable to hopeless discouragement. Then, indeed, it became a mere question ques-tion of living out one's time somehow some-how and getting home again. "Few of the teachers had any considerable con-siderable knowledge of Spanish; scarcely any could speak it grammatically grammati-cally and fluently. This was a serious handicap, not so much in the classroom class-room as out of it. For though in these islands only a small percentage of the inhabitants can speak Spanish, it is none the less the established idiom of culture. Every gentleman speaks it, almost without exception. Thus it happens that the American teacher teach-er in his ignorance of Spanish, and still more his picturesque attempts to express himself in broken, ungrara-matical ungrara-matical phrases, puts himself upon the level of the boor and unavoidably exposes himself to contempt." The teacher, in time, may learn Spanish; but the native does not care to learn English: "The scheme is to teach the Filipinos Fili-pinos something for which they feel no immediate need, and in which they take no direct interest, namely, the English language. Other subjects have a place in the program, but the English language is practically the sole subject of instruction. "Why, then, do not the children learn it? Some do learn it, namely, the few that have a daily opportunity of using what they learn. In a few j cities, where there are hosts of Amer- j icans, soldiers and citizens, English is a living tongue; but for the greater multitude of Filipinos it is practically ; a dead language. "Why should a Filipino care to learn English? Not many reasons are conceivable. In a few cities it might help many a boy to get employment, and in these cities English can be successfully taught. Elsewhere it is important only for the governing lass, affect' ng, as H does, their commercial com-mercial nr-J poli'inal interests. "But for the Filipino peasantry there is no motive for learning English, Eng-lish, and accordingly they will not and can not learn it. A new language can only come to them with a new ' life; schooling can not give it to them. Americans commonly suppose that these dialects are very simple affairs, consisting at most of a few hundred words, and with no very elaborate elab-orate grammatical structure. This is far from being true. To speak of the Visayan language, to which I have given some study, the richness of its vocabulary has been an ever-recurrent occasion of wonder to me, and the beauty and consistency of its grammatical structure are obviou3 enough to charm even a very imperfectly imper-fectly trained philologist." Simultaneously with htis declaration declara-tion that our Philippine educational scheme is a failure in practice comes a declaration by Dr. A. F. Chamberlain Chamber-lain in the Pedagogical Seminary that it is wrong in principle. He says: "Education, no more than a nation, can exist half-slave and half-free its motto, too, is liberty or death. To educate the Filipinos, without using to the full their language and their literature, the thousandfold stimuli of their environment, their racial temperament tem-perament and ideals, their past history his-tory and natural ambitions for the fu-ture, fu-ture, is to stunt them in body, mind and soul. We have let loose upon them the soldier, the trader, the school teacher and the missionary and we talk about education? The brain cure we are treating them to at the hands of our teachers is worse than the 'water cure' our soldiers gave them. In education, as in everything ev-erything else connected with the 'new colonialism,' we began wrong. We can change, if we will, for it is not altogether too late. But it must be a complete change and an honest admission ad-mission of error. To educate the Filipinos Fili-pinos as Filipinos, and not as Americans, Ameri-cans, is the right ideal. Let 10,000,-000 10,000,-000 Malays as such develop along the lines of their native genius and some day the world will rejoice that they have been. Educate them through themselves and they will become strong, as their kinsmen the Japanese Japan-ese have done, adding a new star to the constellation of civilized races." Literary Digest. |