“He who has had to do with the Indians of Filipinas can do no less than assent to this truth. We find them more clever than ourselves in learning any mechanical work, but more stupid in whatever depends upon the understanding or on the imagination. In so brief a time do they learn the trade of artists, musicians, embroiderers, cobblers, tailors, and whatever is reduced to the mechanical, that they exercise it fairly well in little time. If they are not satisfied with it, they readily give it up and learn another trade. There are Indians who have gone through all those trades, and they have filled them all well. But not one of them has ever surpassed mediocrity. There has never been an artisan who has invented any improvement in the trade which he learned. They are most ingenious in imitating what they see, but they never invent anything. If those men had the talents of Europeans, why is it possible that one cannot find in three hundred years one who has added anything to what was taught him?
“I can affirm of the Filipinos with whom I have lived for more than sixteen years, that they are handy in every kind of mechanism which is shown to them. They are capable of imitating the most curious works, but they can invent nothing, for they lack imagination and fancy, and are very obtuse in the abstract sciences because they lack understanding.
“Some try to attribute this to the subordination in which the Spaniards hold them. I will ask such people why does not that subordination and submission prevent them from making any mechanical work with a sufficient perfection? The soldiers learn the military exercise quicker than do the Spaniards; the children learn to read readily; most of them write an excellent hand. The girls easily imitate the laces and embroideries of Europa. Why do they not imitate equally well our philosophers, our mathematicians, and our poets? Why do they not make any advance in painting, in music, and in the other sciences which require imagination and understanding?[31] More than half of the seculars of the Manila archbishopric are Indians. There are some who have become alcaldes-mayor, officers in the royal army, and advocates in the royal Audiencia. Why have none of them gone beyond a very moderate mediocrity in the sciences to which they have dedicated themselves? Just as among Europeans individuals are found for all kinds of abstract sciences, it must be confessed that in the same manner nations are found who, because of the climate in which they have lived for a long series of generations, have contracted a certain tangency of understanding which disposes them very little to receive metaphysical and spiritual ideas.”[32]
This gives us the key to the fatal results obtained in education in Filipinas. Of the hundreds of students who matriculated annually in the colleges, fifteen per cent did not succeed in obtaining the degree of bachelor, and if those who gained a professional title in the university scarcely reached ten per cent, and of them the greater number were advocates without clients, and physicians without patients, they, united with those who abandoned their books and mutilated their career, were in the villages the greatest calamity that befell the country. They all pompously called themselves pilósopos for filósofos [i.e., philosophers], and they were no more than ignorant and presuming fellows, pettifoggers, intriguers, and lazy, haughty, and vain fellows, who neither could nor would work, or aid their parents in work or trade, but could dress as those in Manila, prink themselves out like women, censuring everything, even the religious acts, in order that they might be esteemed sages. They were, through their vices, a grievous weight to the parish priests; by their laziness and viciousness, an insupportable burden to their families; by their lewdness and intrigues the mine which furnished suits to the lawyers, and for the disaffected and filibuster, as they were almost all of them affiliated with freemasonry, a danger to the government and to the nation.[33] All those evil students learned all the evil of the capitals and laden with vices, evil ideas, and morals, they were in the villages a scandal for the majority, a snare for some, and mischievous for all.
“Those deserters from the university,” says Escosura, “half instructed with incomplete notions of the sciences which, belonging to the superior education, require to be studied by persons of consideration and social prestige, and above all to be upright, in order that they may not be dangerous to the public safety; those deserters from the university form, I repeat, a class in Filipinas, and are, above all, insatiable leeches who devour the substance of the Indians, so many other founts of lawsuits and quarrels among their fellowcitizens.”
Perhaps I shall be asked at this point: “Why since you [religious] see and know all this, why did your religious devote themselves to, and encourage, education?” Because it is very difficult to separate oneself from the influence of the time; for it is impossible to oppose the conquering current of opinion, as the monastic orders of Filipinas did not arrange means to free themselves from the pressure of the government, and to reply to the unjust charge of having retrograded, which those who did not know the country even on the map fulminated against them; and lastly to avoid greater evils. The regular province of the Augustinian fathers was the last to devote itself to superior education among the Indians. When did it do that, and why? When Señor Becerra was minister of the colonies in the years 1887 and 1888, and that minister of sad memory planned an official institute in the capital of Iloilo, the Augustinian fathers saw in the plan of the minister a most grave danger for the country, and they went ahead to ward it off. All we parish-priest regulars of Filipinas saw with pain the advances which freemasonry was making in the country by means of the abandoned advocates and physicians, unfit students, ambitious caciques, wealthy fellows, ruined by their vices or by play—we know the works of the spade against the foundation of Spanish domination which were based on religion, prestige, and superiority of race. We all recognized and experienced the apathy and indifference of the authorities who were not ignorant of the frauds and plans of the lodges; and there were even governors of the provinces who protected them. And if to all that which we knew, recognized, and could not remedy, we had consented that Señor Becerra establish in Iloilo an institute of secondary education with professors who might have been freemasons or atheists, the catastrophe would have been certain and imminent, for such institute would be a seeding place for filibusters and insurgents. In order to avoid that, the Augustinian order planned and constructed at its own expense an edifice which it resolved to dedicate as an institute. That could not be carried out, for the last revolution of ’98 came upon them before it was inaugurated.
More beneficial for the country, more in accordance with the monastic traditions, more in harmony with the recommendations of our glorious founder, which were practiced by our virtuous ancestors, would have been the opening of schools of arts and crafts. In reality, although the Spanish government established a few of those schools in Manila, Pampanga, and Iloilo, it was so unseasonable that it was unable to gather the fruits which were promised in their founded hopes. Such is the scarcity of Indian artists and artisans, that of the former there are a few sculptors, engravers, and painters, etc., but of the latter, we can assert that almost all the trades are in the hands of the Chinese, and only carpentry, cabinet-making, architecture, masonry, and some other trades, are exercised by Indians, to whom the parish-priest religious taught them because they needed them for their works and constructions.
It is known that the ancient monks divided their time among prayer, contemplation, study, and manual work. St. Anthony[34] and his five thousand monks, as well as all those who afterward imitated the monastic life or that of the desert, employed part of their day in labor with their hands, weaving mats, making shoes, oars, boats, or small skiffs, and other similar labors. Our father, St. Augustine, desired his monks to also devote some hours of the day to manual labor. Accordingly, our predecessors did it. It is true, that the spirit of the respective epochs changed the character of the bodily work, but the monastic corporations of Filipinas, which recognized the incapacity of the Indian for science and deplored the pernicious effects of science poorly digested by the natives, if they could not do away with the action of the governments, the influence of opinion, the pressure of the times, would have had to turn aside, by means of their parish-priest religious, the tendency of the Indians to the literary branches, and to have directed that tendency to those branches of pure imitation, for which it is necessary to recognize, and we do that gladly, that the Filipino Indian has exceptional abilities. At the same time that the university was founded, and the colleges provided, schools and workshops ought to have been established for the natives, which would have obtained the preference in those narrow, dull, and lazy minds, with greater benefits to the country and less harm to all. All the monasteries founded by St. Basil the Great[35] had in charge an elementary superior school, and another of arts and crafts joined to it. That ought to be the model of the religious orders in Filipinas, in spite of the governments of the mother country, of the demands of opinion manifestly gone astray on this point, and of the spirit of the epoch which could not have any influence in that country, most especially by their constitution, nature, customs, and government. Had the religious corporations, thoroughly permeated with their Christian and civilizing mission, proceeded in that manner, the contingent of sons with the three pointed design of the square and apron,[36] who left the halls of the colleges and became the petty leaders and chief revolutionists who betrayed the mother country and were also the greatest enemies of those who had taught them the little good that they knew, would not have been so numerous.
The cholera, which made ravages in the Filipino Archipelago in 1882, left in the saddest orphanage many children of both sexes and of all the races. They, abandoned, and without resources, wandered through the streets begging public charity. The Spanish women, moved by the disconsolate spectacle, which so many ragged and hungry children offered, formed a society, from which a committee was chosen, which went to the governor-general to beg for food and shelter for those abandoned children. The governor summoned the provincials of the monastic order, as being the natural protectors of the destitute, and creators of the centers of education and learning in the country. He petitioned them for support and aid. The father provincial of the Augustinians, representing his order, took under charge of the province of Santísimo Nombre de Jesús, the support, education, and teaching of the abandoned and orphaned children. The Augustinian fathers assigned for that purpose local sites provisionally in the avenue of San Marcelino, where they gathered the children who were wandering through the city of Manila, and gave them shelter in the temporary barracks. But since the latter had no hygienic conditions, and were not large enough, they transferred the children to the lower parts of the convent of Guadalupe, which were spacious and well ventilated. There they opened workshops of sculpture and ceramics, painting, and modeling, and there they remained until the year 1892, when the schools, workshops, and children were transferred to the building of the new plant constructed for that purpose in the village of Malabon. That place united all the desirable conditions of solidity, decoration, size, and even elegance, which could be desired. There the Augustinian fathers taught the orphans, in addition to their primary letters, painting, designing, sculpture, and modeling, printing, and binding, and indeed the printing plant was bought by the voluntary donation of some religious, through the economies practiced in the missions by dint of privations and of a life of poverty and mortification. We know one of those religious, respectable for his exemplary virtue, who gave for that purpose all his savings, consisting of two thousand pesos. We feel that his humility has prohibited us from placing his name here, so that he may be blessed by all who should hear of a charity and liberality peculiar to the sons of a St. Augustine, who gave even his death-bed to the poor, and suitable also to those of Santo Tomás de Villanueva, father of the poor. That asylum of the orphans, and of the unfortunates abandoned by its founders who had to flee from the ingratitude of the revolutionists, was burned by the shells which the Americans threw to dislodge the Indian rebels who had made forts of it, and being looted afterward by pillaging Chinese who took away even the paving-stones of the lower floor, a cargo of which was surprised by the North American police in the Pasig River, and returned to the Augustinian fathers—the only indemnity which they have received up to date.