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.

GENERAL ADMINISTRATION

559

Anyone familiar with education knows that the school administrator
cannot escape a certain amount of administrative routine, numerous
small duties as energy-consuming and as irritating as the chores of
a farm are to a capable farmer. The farm cannot be run without
the doing of the chores, nor a school system without its administrative
routine. But just as no farmer can be a success and few farmers can
be happy if much time is devoted to the farm chores, the school administrator can be neither successful nor happy if his routine work
takes much time or energy.
Because of the highly centralized school system of the Philippines,
there is here an amount of paper work and other forms of sheer
drudgery almost inconceivable to a school man from the States. Some
of this paper work is prescribed by general governmental regulations.
Some of it is an inheritance from the early military regime of the
Americans with its inevitable paper work and intricate system of routine
endorsements. Much of it has been developed by the Bureau of Education in years past. The need of eliminating useless paper work and
of simplifying reporting procedure has been recognized by both the
general government and the central staff in the Bureau. Both have
made recommendations for eliminating unnecessary correspondence but
nothing important seems to have resulted from such recommendations.
This work of eliminating needless drudgery in school recording and reporting should be energetically pushed to an early conclusion. A committee of the superintendents and representatives from the central staff
should go over every blank, report and special request of the central
staff to the field. Every useless item or one for which no clear need
is felt, should be eliminated. A much simpler form of endorsement
should be worked out. All this takes far longer time than the Survey
Staff could possibly give to it and moreover it can be done successfully
only as men familiar with the details and the dovetailing of reports into
each other, are constantly consulted. Such a procedure would undoubtedly eliminate much paper work. What it did not eliminate could
then be proclaimed as the bare minimum prescribed by the field. It
would then be done by the field in a much more cheerful spirit. In
any event, however, the division offices need more clerical help and a
better type of clerk as is pointed out elsewhere.