This is not to say that the Filipinos before the Thomasites came were un-schooled although the American press played that theme uncritically. The Spanish education system, while elitist, racist and inadequate, nevertheless, produced fine minds who became the intellectual and military stalwarts of the Phiippine revolution against Spain. There was Rizal, Mabini, and Antonio Luna to name a few.
When Aguinaldo established the first Asian republic in Malolos on June 12, 1898, the nascent Filipino republic instituted its own public school system modeled ironically, after the Spanish primary school. In a roster of school children enrolled in 1898 in Malolos, the students came from different parts of the Philippines, Cavite, Iloilo, Ilokos. Tuition support came from padrones or sponsors. Subjects were, naturally, tended towards the religious side, but arithmetic and grammar were also part of the curriculum. Far from the depictions of the American press and officials during that time that the Filipinos were a step from savagery to civilization, the nascent Filipino republic was committed to the idea of public education. It was also bilingual with instruction both in Spanish and Tagalog.
American colonial administrators took advantage of the missionary zeal and naivete of the Thomasites into its project of ?Benevolent assimilation?. Coined by William McKinley, it was a euphemism for the pacification of a population at war and for colonial justification, Colonialism was a term anathema to the ideals of the American founding fathers. The Thomasites were not only literally let-loose into the hinterlands, not to mention the culture shock, for there were no orientation sessions provided. They were also given little provisions to run a school. School supplies were scarce or none, classrooms were shared if not dilapidated, and except for Manila, teachers quarters where not exactly kosher with salaries often delayed.
Official educational policies were directed towards the mastery of the English language and the acquisition of vocational skills. The official perception was that the natives were slack and spoke in barbarous languages. Influenced by experiments on the schooling of Amer-Indians and the newly-freed African Americans, school administrators believed that the Filipinos belonged to the same category and therefore would benefit from a similar schooling experience. Of these programs, only English took hold, establishing the Philippines as one of the largest English-speaking populations outside of the US. It also seriously deprecated the development of the various vernaculars, particularly Tagalog, the which later became basis for the national language. Tagalog and other languages was further devalued by penalizing its use in schools with threat of fines or whipping. English was the only road to progress and industry.
The pool of skilled industrial labor envisioned by the policy makers did not materialize. Instead, secondary education funnelled its graduates into the Manila’s colleges and universities, eventually producing one of the largest college-educated populations whose numbers were vastly unproportional to the number of white-collar jobs available. Without industries, the civil service became the major employer where knowledge of English was requirement for employment. Part of the imbalance was siphoned off in the 20’s and 30’s by the large-scale recruiting of Filipino labor for the agricultural and fishing industries of the United States, initiating the first of the so-called “waves of immigration” to America and the birth of the American ‘manong’.
August is specially significant to the ?manongs? of San Francisco for it marked the month when the I-Hotel fell. The International Hotel became the final destination for many ?manongs? dispersed throughout California, either from the farming fields or from their release from the Army after World War II. Expecting the benefits of an American-style education, they soon realized that the toiling in the land of milk and honey did not match the enforced bachelorhood and racism in the workplace. Lincoln?s Gettysburg address that many have learned and memorized from their American-style schooling was lost in the reality of racial America. The I-Hotel was the last Filipino comfort zone for the aging manongs and veterans. Faced by eviction from commercial developers, the residents and various community organizations and allied interests battled the eviction to the very end until the physical removal of the I-Hotel residents from their rooms by the police. Many consider this event the crucible upon which Filipino-American activism was forged along with alliances between minority organizations. It probably also marked the end of the ?first wave? of immigration as it transitioned into the second large influx of mostly professionally trained immigrants. America continued to be the sole destination for many hopeful Filipinos. The intended goals of the Thomasites to teach English and the consequently the American way of doing things continue to resonate through generations. The Thomasites were in fact, the perfect model for colonial reproduction, so sucessful in the minds of many, that one pundit recommended a similar program for the trouble Muslim areas of Southern Philippines.
Many Filipinos came to regard the Thomasites and the teachers that followed after them with ambivalence. They were unwitting tools of American pacification and imperialism. Yet they became models of public service and of the American work ethic. Many stayed behind, making families in the Philippines, starting businesses, or remained in the universities to found important disciplines — Austin Craig, Rizal’s biographer and H.O.Beyer, a pioneer in Philippine Anthropology, to name some prominent ones. The irony was that the educational policy born of colonial circumstancees failed to attain its desired objectives, producing instead an educated population rife for immigration. It created its own inertia which was neither American nor truly Philippine, creating a vulnerable public school system that became the whipping boy for politicians of every regime and the source of American labor.
Suggested Reading:
Mary Bonzo Suzuki, American Education in the Philippines, The Early Years: American Pioneer Teachers and the Filipino Response, 1900-1935. (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1991).
Gilbert Perez, “From the Tranport Thomas to Sto.Tomas”, in Bulletin of the American Historical Collection, Vol 2, No.1(5) 1973 pp. 13-26; Vol.1(6), pp.59-74.
Website: http://www.thomasites100.org/thomas_home.html
