Note 1 — EDUCATION SINCE AMERICAN OCCUPATION

It is the results of the pre-American education that allows the following to be said: “The party which follows the intellectual leadership of Leon Guerrero (director of El Renacimiento) is quietly resisting what they call the ‘Anglo-Saxonization’ of their people through the schools. These men are really Spanish at heart (the older, mostly so in blood), and they have a Spanish-Latin feeling of hostility to the very name of ‘Anglo-Saxon.’ They prefer Latin education and educational methods, and Latin molds of civilization. Where they go astray is in their assumption, entirely gratuitous, that they really represent the Filipino people and Filipino ways of thought, desires and aspirations which are to be ‘squelched’ by this new campaign of instruction in English. Now, superficially, there are little evidences to corroborate this view, as would be inevitable, as the results of three centuries of tutelage according to Spanish models. But the man who looks beneath the surface sees at once that the Filipinos are not ‘Latins’ and were not ‘Latinized,’ and that these intellectual Latins, floating at the top of Filipino society are as mistaken as can be in assuming that they are representative of their people. The truth is, the Filipinos, in the mass, are, as regards the purposes of any real education, virgin material to work upon. Not only has their national and social life not been cast over in Latin molds, but Spanish influence was just sufficient, added to their undeveloped state at the time of the conquest, so that there are no ‘Filipino molds’ of civilization. They are really just ready to be worked upon, and whatever fundamental elements of ‘Filipino nationality’ there are latent, whatever inherent or acquired social traits properly constituting a ‘Filipino soul,’ will come to the front with this new opportunity.”1