A survey of the educational system of the Philippine islands by the Board of educational survey, created under acts 3162 and 3196 of the Philippine Legislature.

MEASUREMENT OF INSTRUCTION

127

THE DIFFICULT CONDITIONS WHICH HAMPER THE BUREAU OF
EDUCATION IN ACCOMPLISHING ITS PURPOSES
The testing program of the Commission has been sketched. What
are the facts concerning the work of the schools?
1. THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE HANDICAP.-The findings can be
interpreted properly only in the light of the fullest appreciation of the
difficulties which have confronted the Bureau of Education. For
twenty-five years the Bureau has struggled to create a modern educational system. The difficulties which have beset it have been many,
but no other single difficulty has been so great as that of overcoming the
foreign language handicap. A quarter-century ago, the officials who
undertook to solve the Philippine problem concluded that the greatest
need of the people was a unifying language. Whether rightly or wrongly, they decided against the wide-spread use of any one or several of
the dialects and began to organize instruction in English. From that
day to this, all educational problems in the Philippines have been foreign
language problems.
At the outset, therefore, the American pioneers took upon themselves
a herculean task-the dual one of teaching a people a foreign language
and at the same time of giving them a broad education through it. No
other country has ever attempted to carry such a load. We are measuring here, for the first time, the results of a nation-wide attempt to
solve a problem that is tremendously difficult.
The foreign language handicap, therefore, is from the start a serious
obstacle to success in teaching. From the day a Filipino child enters
the school he is confronted by the double necessity of mastering a strange
tongue and of carrying on school work in it. At no time in his career
does he encounter the single task of studying in his mother tongue. He
is required to learn to read, not in Visayan, not in Tagalog, not in Ilocano, not in Bicol-but in English. He faces the necessity of mastering
the intricacies of oral speech in a language almost completely unphonetic
and totally removed in accent, rhythm, tonal expression, and phonetic
organization from the one which he hears on the playground, in the
home, and in the community. During seven years of childhood (more for
most Filipino children) he has acquired the difficult coordinations of
pronunciation in his native dialect. When he enters school he must
disregard and attempt to blot these out of his habit system. He must
perfect a new set of oral habits more intricate than those already learned.
Not only do the old habits fail to facilitate but they actually inhibit the
acquisition of the new ones. This Filipino child, we emphasize, must
learn to read and write and speak a difficult foreign language-English
is a very difficult language-before he can proceed in his school studies.