Note 4 — ANDA’S MEMORIAL, 1768

“The religious orders in Filipinas have always been accused of opposing culture and the diffusion of human learning among the Filipinos, having assumed, according to their traditional policy, the role of monopolisers of public instruction, in order thus to present themselves as its defenders and partisans, proclaiming themselves the civilizers of the people, and the source and origin of their intellectual progress. In reality, having in their hands the public instruction they so conducted themselves that, as Don Simon says, they organized an instruction of mere ceremony, intended to maintain the Filipinos in a calculated ignorance, and keep them imbued with principles which tended to subject their conscience and reason to the absorptive power of the monastic supremacy.” (Pardo de Tavera, p. 50, note 4.) ↑