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.

206 EDUCATIONAL SURVEY OF THE PHILIPPINES

will require in all probability forty to fifty years. That is, unless heroic
measures are taken soon to improve the methods of keeping children
in school, two generations will be required to bring about a situation
in which language instruction will be permanently effective. Such projections into the future should serve to illustrate the seriousness of the
problem.
No more important problem faces the Bureau of Education than
that attracting children to and holding them in school. Unless the
children can be kept in school regularly and for a sufficient period of
years, it will be impossible to carry out the purposes for which the
school is created. The tests which the Commission gave prove this
conclusively. The report has already shown the impossibility of teaching a foreign language and of carrying on instruction in it unless
approximately all of the children can be kept in school at the very
minimum four years. Indeed, unless instructional methods can be radically improved, the children must be kept in school five or even six
years. Two years of the present instruction give children practically
nothing of permanent value; three years serve the purposes of the
school but little better. The Commission is of the opinion that four
years is the basic minimum, and that this should be raised to five
years certainly within the next decade. The Bureau of Education, the
Legislature, and the people of the Philippines should courageously face
this crucial fact: on the average the children must be kept in school
twice as long as at present. To give one or two years of primary
education of the type now current throughout the Islands is a gross
extravagance. True economy can be practised only by larger expenditures and longer retention in school.
ELEMENTARY-SCHOOL CHILDREN ARE ADOLESCENT
AND PREADOLESCENT
1. FILIPINO PUPILS ARE MUCH OVERAGE FOR THEIR GRADES.Coordinate with the problem of keeping children in school is that of
attracting them at an earlier age and of moving them through the
grades regularly. At the present time, the pupils of Philippine elementary grades are two or three years older than American pupils.
The average ages of the pupils in each grade of the two school systems
are given on Figure 17.
This graph throws out in clear relief the marked differences in the
ages of the pupils of the systems.
Note how definitely the Philippine curve appears to the right of the
American curve. In the United States the younger children predominate, in the Philippines the older. That it is very common to
discover adults in the elementary grades is shown by Table 10. There