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

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children who go on to the higher grades and encounter difficult paragraph reading in which word knowledge is of comparatively slight
assistance.
The chief cause, however, of the increasing lag of reading ability
behind American practice is found in the curricula of the two countries.
The American course of study from the fourth grade makes a much
larger use of silent reading than does that of the Philippine schools.
Systematic courses in history and geography begin in that grade. A
much larger amount of science reading is given. Literature appears and
much "supplementary reading" gives practice in silent and meaningful
reading. In American schools, reading is used much more constantly
as a tool for getting meaning. There is a sharp decrease in the proportional emphasis on formal oral reading.
In Philippine schools, on the contrary, there is no such sharp departure in reading practice. The curriculum of the intermediate grades is
to be severely condemned. In its lack of intellectual content it reveals
itself as a bare, sparse thing. In the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades,
the amount of reading that is done by a pupil in school is totally inadequate. The amount that he does at home is 0.
In the intermediate school, therefore, reading as a tool for getting
meanings is not widely used by Filipino children. Assignments in
geography consist, at most, of few succinct paragraphs. Content of
textbooks is sparse, very compact, and not graduated to fit the experiences of Filipino children. Almost no "supplementary readers" are
available in the great body of schools. Children below the high school
almost never read a whole book. In the Annual Report of the Director
of Education for 1923, the total number of books in all elementary-school
libraries is given as 440,000. That is, on the average, less than one
book for each two Filipino children. We show the paucity of the
reading material on Table 19. Novels and juvenile stories are missing
from the experiences of Filipino children. Public libraries are practically nonexistent. Newspapers and magazines almost never find their
way into children's hands at home.
The result is that reading in the upper grades is much more emphatically a continuation of the formal oral pronunciation begun in
the lower grades than it is in the United States. The members of the
Survey Commission saw hundreds of reading exercises in upper as well as
lower grades. Almost never did they see opportunity provided for continuous silent reading. In only one province did they see teachers using
devices calculated to develop the ability to get meanings silently and
rapidly from the printed page. Everywhere they went they met almost
total ignorance of the problem of developing the ability to read silently.