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.

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

251

school education and that they have had practically no guided training
in the technique of teaching. The art of teaching is most complicated
and difficult to master. Especially is this true of teaching in the primary
grades. To carry on vivid class work, to keep individual children at
their maximum paces, to put one's self in the background and to draw
out the activities of the pupils is a difficult art to acquire. The Course
of Study for Primary Grades prescribes specifically the work to be
done-the teachers and principals adhere to it rigorously. The procedure of the classroom is thoroughly memoriter, the learning of specific
and isolated facts being apparently the only intellectual product. Only
rarely were schools encountered in which the intellectual work of the
school centered around or grew out of spontaneous activities of the
children themselves. Only rarely was evidence found that pupils were
developing in power to organize activities or to think out social or intellectual problems for themselves.
This definite criticism of the lack of spontaneity, pupil initiative and
reasoning which pervades primary instruction is made with full recognition that such outcomes naturally spring from the administrative conditions
under which the schools are affecting. To draw out the capacities of
little children is a skill that comes only through hard work, preceded
by thorough study and guidance and aided constantly by stimulating
criticism from associates and leaders. And since the conditions that
make possible the development of such true teaching skill do not inhere
in the Philippine school system the product of the class exercises is
the inevitable mechanical fact learning which is being described.
Can the character of primary class exercises be changed? No more
rapidly than the teachers are lifted up out of the rut of routine in which
their lack of training compels them to walk. The magnitude of the
task is tremendous. At this point the reader would do well to canvass
the report on Teacher Training in Chapter IV.
PLANS OF WORK.-The plans of work which teachers are required
to make have always been a much mooted question in education. Too
great emphasis cannot be given to the need of carefully prepared lessons.
The form which this preparation should assume is a matter, however,
of experimentation. Teachers with little training need to make a more
detailed plan than those of greater training and longer experience.
This is no doubt true of teachers in the Philippines. What actually
happens in the primary schools is that each teacher prepares week by
week an elaborate itemized plan of work for each class exercise of the
coming week. Once the plan is made it serves as a detailed pattern
according to which each exercise is conducted. The result is "recita) tions" of the cut-and-dried, question-and-answer type. The mechanical
plan is therefore a partial cause of the mechanical class exercise.