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.

270 EDUCATIONAL SURVEY OF THE PHILIPPINES

The number of situations which the majority of the Philippine children will have to meet are not many or complex. To give the children the ability to use the four fundamental processes accurately and
with a fair degree of speed in the solving of their real number needs
should be the chief concern of the primary grades.
GEOGRAPHY
The subject of geography is concerned with the problem, "Why
men in various parts of the world work, live, and play as they do."
This study calls for a knowledge of the geographic controls such as
climate, location, surface features, and soils as factors which influence
the lives of people. Geography no longer consists in the ability to
locate a place, tell its surface features, climate, industries. Information of this kind can be gained by memorizing facts and can be secured
with a minimum of thinking. Knowledge of this latter kind is apt to
be a very temporary character.
At the present time educators are concerned with having the study of
geography enable the child to understand first his own environment and
then the environment of other peoples. To gain a knowledge of how
conditions of the earth's surface, location, and climate affect the three
great needs of man, namely, food, shelter, and clothing, will require
real thinking and reasoning on the part of children. This knowledge
will do much to develop a symphathetic interest in an understanding
of the people of various countries and sections of a country. In the
main the same body of facts will be required as in the past but in a
more vital relationship and in a way which will enable children to
reason from cause to effect in the field of geographical phenomena, and
to apply geographic facts and principles to the acquisition of new facts
and the solving of new problems.
The work in geography in Philippine schools consists chiefly of formal learning of a vast number of facts in relation to their own province
and in regard to the Philippines in general. Children practice in
naming provinces and their capitals together with the chief products
raised in each. Careful painstaking work of this is being done by
teacher and children. Sometimes maps are used but in the main the
lessons consisted in a "fact" question being asked by the teacher and
answered by the children in the language of the book. Rarely were
the children led to see cause and effect. No reference was made to
excursions that had been taken although the course of study encourages
these. Children asked no questions about the lesson showing that the
spirit of inquiry had not been aroused. Rarely was a lesson taught;
the period was spent in the testing of memorized facts.