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.

134 EDUCATIONAL SURVEY OF THE PHILIPPINES

II. How WELL CAN PUBLIC-SCHOOL PUPILS READ ENGLISH ON
LEAVING SCHOOL?
Stated more concretely: How well can they get meaning from the
printed page? How difficult passages can they read? Charts I, II,
III, and IV tell the story. Our attention should be fixed first on the
primary school. The most important phase of the question is: How
well can children read English at the end of three years training?
After four years of training?
The answer is clear: They have such a very limited ability to get
meaning from the printed page that the possibility of long retention
after leaving school is extremely doubtful.1 At the end of the fourth
grade, when because of repeating grades the typical child has been
in school five years, Filipino children read about as well as American
children at the end of Grade II. Turn to Chart I. The average 2
ability to get the meaning from connected paragraph reading in the
fourth grades of forty-two municipalities, including Manila, is 18.
In the United States the average achievement of Grade II is 15.9; of
Grade III, 34.4; and of Grade IV, 51.0. The achievement of American children in Grade IV is not equalled by Filipino pupils in Grade
VII, although they have been in school on the average more than eight
years. The failure of the Philippine schools to teach boys and girls to
read appears still more strikingly in the performance of fourth-year
high-school students. Seniors at the close of the eleven grades of
"academic" work read, by and large, only as well as fifth-grade American pupils. Education at all levels in the Philippines, primary, intermediate, or high schools, is being hampered because children cannot
read well.
Now this comparison with American children is a justifiable one.
Instruction is carried on in the schools of the Philippines first and foremost for the purpose of developing the ability to read, write, and speak
English. Whether this is a proper purpose, we are not concerned to discuss in this section. The only standard of comparison, therefore, is the
product of the schools of English speaking countries. American educa1That they do not retain it five years after leaving school is shown in a succeeding
section.
2The median is used generally throughout this report in place of the average, or
arithmetic mean. The median is the middle measure or the middle value on a scale
of measures; On Chart I, we say that the median attainment in paragraph reading in
the fourth grade is 18 because of 42 municipalities the score of the 21st and 22nd
municipalities was 18. It has been proved by many investigation that, for practical purposes the median and the average of human abilities, are approximately equal. Interpretations from one will be the same as those from the other.
We use the median in this report because of its greater economy of computation.