The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume 45, 1736 / Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century

by Unknown

PUBLIC INSTRUCTION

Primary instruction cannot be considered in a backward state, and, indeed, I believe that, in proportion, there are more persons who can read and write in these islands than in España, and in some [other] civilized countries.[1] In each village there is a suitable building for the use of a school, to which all the children must go except during the months of sowing and of harvest. The master, and other expenses, are paid from the communal fund. In view of this I have wondered at seeing in many foreigners the strange belief that the government does not permit the learning of reading and writing; for I can assert that, in the archives of Manila I have found many old and recently-dictated decrees, with a spirit diametrically the contrary, which repeatedly enjoin the teaching of the Castilian language. Women also share in this benefit, and I have found girls who lived not only far from the capital, but in an isolated house distant from the village, and, notwithstanding, they had learned to read and write. One must confess, however, that they scarcely know other books than those of devotion, especially a poem entitled the Pasion de Cristo [i.e., Passion of Christ]. Besides the said schools, which are equal in number to the villages and the schools of some private masters,[2] both in the chief cities of the provinces and in the capital where their number is very considerable (there being among them not a few of music and drawing), there are found in Manila various public institutions of education for men and women. In regard to them one can form a correct judgment by the following explanation.