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.

304 EDUCATIONAL SURVEY OF THE PHILIPPINES

evenings, Saturdays, and Sundays doing their heavy office work. They
must deal with municipal councils, local school committees and parents,
as well as with teachers and pupils.
There is an additional difficulty under which the supervisor works,
the seriousness of which it has not been easy to estimate. This is the
difficulty arising from lack of authority to make final decisions in matters
which might well be left to his discretion. And, accompanying this,
there is distraction of his attention from the essential to the trivial in
the schools under his charge by the nature of reports made upon these
schools by superiors. Percentages and tabulations cannot be produced
to show how real are these difficulties. It may well be that the first
is a tradition rather than a fact. In recent years, there has been a
change in the situation which points in the direction of allowing more
variation in school work than was formerly permitted. This is well
illustrated by the introductory statements in the Course of Study for
Primary Grades. But the personnel of the supervisory staff is largely
the same as it was under the older, more rigid system. Force of habit
leads these men to refer to superiors matters that they are competent to
decide themselves. The same force of tradition leads superiors to adhere
to the old rigidity in spite of pronouncement in favor of flexibility.
There is need of a thorough-going and prompt revision of the Service
Manual; a definite rescinding of general orders and circulars of instructions which are actually obsolete though never recalled; and a definite
new formulation of powers and duties which will stop the fruitless
referring of problems from office to office. There seems to be no definite understanding among supervisors of just what their authority and
responsibilities are. Competent and conscientious men hold to what
they believe to be the letter of the law and waste their time and energies
fretting under the restrictions put upon their activities. Incompetency
settles into a routine which justifies itself by fulfilling the form of requirements and doing nothing that is not specifically prescribed. The
situation needs to be definitely clarified in this respect. Dead letters
cannot be left in the regulations with safety. If regulations exist in
definite form and new administrative procedure grows up without equally
definite sanction, every person who acts in conformity with current but
not definitely authorized procedure lays himself liable to being caught
up on some act which he had every reason for regarding as approved
practice. His technical violation of some tacitly, but not formally, abandoned regulation, may be used by unscrupulous persons as a means of
venting petty spite or of forwarding selfish ambition.
The nature of the reports to the Bureau by traveling supervisors
requires careful attention. When reports criticizing observed variations
from an alleged flexible course of study are sent to the Director of