Note 18 — Chapter X · FILIPINO INDOLENCE

Take the best of these schools, or so-called schools, and at their best. “They amount,” says Rizal, “to five or ten years each of 150 days at most, in which the youth comes in contact with those very priests that boldly proclaim that it is an evil for the natives to know Castilian [Spanish], that the native should not be separated from his carabao,18 that he should not have any further aspirations, and so on; five to ten years in which the majority of the students have grasped nothing more than that no one understands what the books say, not even the professors themselves, perhaps; and these five to ten years have to offset the daily preachment of the whole life, that preachment which lowers the dignity of man, which by degrees brutally deprives him of the sentiment of self-esteem, that eternal, stubborn, constant labor to bow the native’s neck, to make him accept the yoke, to place him on a level with the beast.