A Woman's Impression of the Philippines

by Mary H. Fee

Some four years ago, I was teaching a class in the Manila School of Arts and Trades, and was giving some directions about the word form of English sentences. I advised the class to stick to simple direct sentences, since they would never have any use for a literary style in English. Some six or eight young men instantly dissented from this proposition, and insisted that they were capable of acquiring the best literary style. Not one of them could have written a page of clear, grammatical, idiomatic English. I tried to make it clear to them that literary English and colloquial English are two different things, and that what they needed was plain, precise English as a medium of exchange in business, and I said, incidentally, that such was the English possessed by the major portion of the English-speaking race. I said that although the American nation numbered eighty millions, most of whom were educated and able to make an intelligent use of their language in conversation or in writing, the percentage of great writers and speakers always had been small and always would be so.

When I had finished, the son of a local editor, arose and replied as follows: “Yes, madame, what you say of Americans is true. But we are different. We are a literary people. We are only eight millions, but we have hundreds and thousands of orators. We have the literary sense for all languages.”

Nearly thirty years ago, when I was a pupil in the Kansas City, Missouri, High School, the stepson of a United States Circuit judge made a brutally rude and insubordinate reply to a woman teacher who said to him, in reference to an excuse which he had given for tardiness, “That is not a good excuse.” The young man turned an insolent eye upon the teacher—a gray-haired woman—and replied, “It’s good enough for me. What are you going to do about it?”

The Home of an American Schoolteacher

I cannot conceive that a Filipino child would be guilty of such insolence, such defiance of decency and order. But never have I met an American child who would have the artless indiscretion to put himself in the position of Domingo. The American child does not mind violating a rule. He is chary of criticising its propriety or its value. In other words, the American child does not mind doing wrong, but he is wary of making a fool of himself; and I have yet to meet the Filipino child who entertained the faintest suspicion that it was possible for him to make a fool of himself. Nor is the attitude of dissent among Filipinos limited to those who express themselves. It is sometimes very trying to feel that after long-winded eloquence, after citation and demonstration, you have made no more real impression upon the silent than upon the talkative, and that, indeed, the gentle reserve of some of your auditors is based upon the conviction that your own position is the result of indomitable ignorance. One of my friends has met this spirit in a class in the Manila High School. A certain boy insists that he has seen the iron head of a thunderbolt, and although he makes “passing grades” in physics, he does not believe in physics. He regards our explanations of the phenomena of lightning as a parcel of foolishness in no wise to stand the test of his own experience, and nothing can silence him. “But, ma’am,” he says, when electricity is under discussion, “I am see the head of a thunder under our house.” This young gentleman will graduate in a year or two, and the tourist from the States will look over the course of study of the Manila High School and go home telling his brethren that the Filipino children are able to compete successfully with American youth in the studies of a secondary education. I myself had a heart-breaking time with a sixth-grade class in one of the intermediate schools of Manila. The children had been studying animal life and plant life, and could talk most learnedly about anthropoid apes, and “habitats” and other things; but they undertook to convince me that Filipino divers can stay under water an hour without any diving apparatus, and that the reason for this power is that the diver is “brother to a snake”—that is, that when the mother gave birth to the child, she gave birth to a snake also, and that some mysterious power remains in persons so born.

Filipino children are not restless and have no tradition of enmity between teacher and pupil to urge them into petty wrong-doing. Their attitude toward the teacher is a very kindly one, and they are almost uniformly courteous. Their powers of concentration are not equal to those of American children, and they cannot be forced into a temporarily heavy grind, but neither do they suffer from the extremes of indolence and application which are the penalty of the nervous energy of our own race. They are attentive (which the American child is not) but not retentive, and they can keep up a steady, even pull at regular tasks, especially in routine work, at which American children usually rebel. In fact, they prefer routine work to variety, and grow discouraged quickly when they have to puzzle out things for themselves. They will faithfully memorize pages and pages of matter which they do not understand, a task at which our nervous American children would completely fail. They are exceedingly sensitive to criticism, and respond quickly to praise. Unfortunately the narrow experience of the race, and the isolation and the general ignorance of the country, make praise a dangerous weapon in the hands of a teacher; for a child is apt to educe a positive and not a relative meaning from the compliment. Filipino children have not attained the mental state of being able to qualify in innumerable degrees. If a teacher hands back a composition to an American boy with the words “Well done,” the child understands perfectly that his instructor means well as compared with the work of his classmates. The Filipino is inclined to think that she means positively well done—above the average for all the world. I once complimented a class in Capiz on the ease with which they sang four-part music, and said, what I truly feel, that the Filipinos are a people of unusual musical ability. They managed to extract from the compliment the idea that the musical development of the Filipinos is far in advance of that of the Americans.

Middle-class Filipinos have a very inadequate conception of the tremendous wealth of artistic, literary, and musical talent interwoven with the world’s development, and are especially inclined to pride themselves upon their racial excellence in these lines, where, in truth, they have achieved almost no development whatever in spite of the possession of undoubted talent. They do not understand the value of long training, and are inclined to assume that the mere possession of a creative instinct is final evidence of excellence in any art.

It will be some time before what real talent they have will make itself felt in any line, because it will take a great deal of tactful handling to make them reveal their natural artistic trend instead of falling into imitation of Europe and America. It is strange that a people so tenacious of its opinions with regard to matters of fact should be so willing to surrender its ideal with regard to the thing of which a nation has most reason to be tenacious, its natural expression. But the whole race is so morbidly sensitive to the sneer that everything Filipino is necessarily crude that the young art student or the young musical student feels that his only hope of winning commendation is in painting or playing or composing after European models; while as for the populace at large it has its own standards in which other motives than artistic excellence play the largest part.

I had a friend, a young Filipino girl, who has been one of the most diligent among the pupils of the American schools. She was staying with me two or three years ago when my publisher sent me a copy of a primer intended for use in the Philippines, and which had just been gotten out in the United States. The publisher had spared no expense in his illustrations, and we were tremendously proud of the artistic side of the book. This Filipino girl had heard me use the expression “poor white trash,” and I had explained to her how the Southern negroes use the words as a term of derision of those who fail to live up to the traditions of race and family. When I took my book to her in the joy of an author in her first complete production, she looked at it a minute and burst into tears. “Poor Filipino trash!” was all she could say for a long time, and I finally pieced it out that she was enraged because the Filipino boys and girls in my book were sometimes barefooted, sometimes clad in chinelas, and wore native camisas instead of American suits and dresses. I pointed out to her that not one Filipino child in a hundred dresses otherwise, but my argument was of no avail. The children in the American readers wore natty jackets and hats and high-heeled shoes, and winter wraps, even at play, and she wanted the Filipino children to look the same.