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.

SECONDARY EDUCATION

377

tion must always have regard for the present position of the pupil.
What the pupil likes must at least be taken as the point of departure.
As soon as the reading of literature becomes a duty instead of a
pleasure, it loses its greatest educative value.
Although the course of study includes extensive lists of books for
home and supplementary reading that are quite suitable, the emphasis
is clearly on literary materials of the conventional type-Evangeline,
the Sketchbook, Sohrab and Rustum, Silas Marner, Macaulay's Life
of Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, English Poems from Chaucer to Kipling, and the History of Literature. These, and a few others, are the
selections used for intensive classroom study. As a consequence, they
constitute the heart of the course. Teachers confess that they have no
satisfactory way of determining whether the outside reading is done
or not. Thus, while there has been some effort to get away from the
traditional course in literature offered in American secondary schools,
this effort has hardly been successful.
There are very serious objections to such a course in literature in the
Philippine high school. Many of these selections make little appeal
to American children. But their inclusion in the secondary school
curriculum in the United States has probably done no great harm, because of the natural development on the part of the pupil of reading
interests outside the school. In the case of the Filipino pupil the situation must be fraught with more serious consequences. The school is
almost solely responsible for the development of whatever reading interests he may acquire. Moreover, these selections, drawn from a foreign
culture and written in a foreign language, must be immeasurably more
difficult and tedious for him than for his English-speaking brother.
They assume a command of the language that few Filipino boys and
girls possess at the close of the intermediate school period. If this
course so often fails to develop in the American pupil a genuine love of
literature, it must be productive of very little growth in the Filipino
student.
A fact to be noted especially in this connection is the large emphasis
placed on poetry. While it is probably true that a people's finest
literary treasures are found in its poetry, these treasures are not to be
unlocked by one who has not mastered the language in which they are
stored. Except in its simplest and most musical forms, poetry written
in a foreign tongue is most difficult to appreciate and understand. The
poet is allowed a certain license in the use of words and in the ordering
of a sentence that is not accorded the prose writer. Even a native
may be so confused by the forms in which the poet clothes his thought