The Strange Career of American Colonial Schools: Industrial Education and the PhilippinesJoshua Gedacht, University of Wisconsin-Madison [This is a draft. Please do not copy, circulate or quote without the permission of the author.]

Introduction Then, in the year 1898, the United States plunged into imperialistic adventures overseas under the leadership of the Republican party. These adventures in the Pacific and the Caribbean suddenly brought under the jurisdiction of the United States some eight million people of the colored races, a ‘varied assortment of inferior races,’ as the Nation described them, ‘which of course must not be allowed to vote. As America shouldered the White Man’s Burden, she took up at the same time many Southern attitudes on the subject of race.1 ---C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow Destiny has thrown the Negro and the Filipino under the tutelage of America….The Filipino has found America a means of bringing his country into vital relationship with what his forebears and he have cherished as the most precious thing in life…Both of these races need to know more about each other.2 --John H. Manning Butler, Baltimore teacher

In 1934, the United States Congress enacted the Tydings-McDuffie Act, granting

the Philippines semi-autonomous Commonwealth status and promulgating a ten-year

timetable for the colony’s eventual independence. This legislative watershed occasioned

much self-congratulation among Americans. After thirty-four years of beneficent

colonial dominion, the United States had successfully instilled a love of liberty,

democracy, and industriousness, preparing a formerly benighted people for entry into the

ranks of world nations. The act culminated a project that for many defined the essence of

magnanimous American rule: tutelage. The writings of John H. Manning Butler, a

teacher from Baltimore, reflected these prevailing sentiments. In the very year that

1 C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 72. 2 John H. Manning Butler, “New Education in the Philippines,” The Journal of Negro Education 3:2 (April 1934), 267-268.

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Tydings-McDuffie became law, Butler acclaimed the redemptive role of the United

States, noting how “The Filipino has found America a means of bringing his country…

the most precious things in life.” While this might seem like a paradigmatic, but

unremarkable, example of the national zeitgeist, Butler’s comments also underscore

another dimension of “uplift.” Observing that “Destiny has thrown the Negro and the

Filipino under the tutelage of America,” Butler—himself an African American—attested

to broader assumptions of race and racial hierarchy underlying Empire. United States

tutelage relied on the image of the African American, with all the attendant baggage of

racialist ideas and historical experience that image entailed, as a referent for

understanding the Filipino. This transposition of domestically derived racial categories to

the foreign Philippines profoundly affected American-Filipino relationships, and would

eventually undermine the aims of the American colonial state.

Booker T. Washington and his theories of industrial education afford an incisive

window to the nexus between American conceptions of race, education, and Filipino

experiences of colonial rule. A famous African American leader in a period of rising

racial tensions, Washington established one of the most renowned schools for Southern

freedmen, the Tuskegee Institute, in 1888. There, he elaborated a pedagogical

philosophy that posited agricultural and industrial instruction as the indispensable first

step for elevating impoverished former slaves. By studying “practical” skills, students at

Tuskegee could acquire the habits of self-help and entrepreneurship necessary for

launching an African American middle class. This program elicited widespread praise

and attracted the notice of leading whites. In 1901, Washington even received an

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invitation to President Theodore Roosevelt’s White House—something unprecedented

for a “Negro.”3

At about the same time, industrial education also garnered the attention of

colonial administrators searching for a rationale that could organize their embryonic

public school system. Bureaucrats and teachers on the spot in the Philippines gradually

embraced Washington’s precepts, facilitating industrial education’s emergence as the

dominant influence in the colonial schooling system. However, as a survey of its origins

and development will show, industrial education encoded problematic racial assumptions

and held dubious relevance for the political, economic, and social conditions of Filipino

society. Such incommensurableness spelled trouble for the colonial tutelary project.

This paper will examine how the “strange career” of Booker T. Washington’s

pedagogical theories in colonial schools problematically and ambiguously impacted

American-Filipino interactions; simultaneously transmitting specific notions of racial

hierarchy to the Philippines while also slowly, unintentionally, even irrevocably

alienating both elite and subaltern Filipinos and pushing them beyond the orbit of

American control.

To elucidate the role of industrial education in colonial schooling and its

implications for American-Filipino encounters, this study will concentrate on three

discrete issues. The first section will locate United States schooling within

historiographic and theoretical context, paying particularly close attention to literature on

the vulnerabilities of the colonial state and colonial education. The second section will

delve into the beginnings of colonial schooling, the tenure of Fred Atkinson as first

3 Marc Bauerlain, “The Tactical Life of Booker T. Washington,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 50:14(Nov. 2003), B12.

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American Superintendent, and the effective implantation of an American pedagogical

export into Filipino soil. The next section will investigate the tumultuous tenure of the

second education director, David Barrows, and the influence of racialist discourse on

controversies over “practical” instruction. The third section will consider the career of

Camilo Osias, the first Filipino superintendent of school, and the putative “Filipinization”

of industrial education. The study will then conclude with some final thoughts on the

distinct—but wholly unexceptional—nature of American colonialism.

Definitions and Theory

Before proceeding to the empirical substance of industrial education in the

Philippines, this study must address three salient concerns: scope, terminology, and

theoretical frameworks for analysis. The first of these, scope, poses daunting challenges

to any work of scholarship no less one devoted to American colonial education in the

Philippines. A staggering range of curricula, types of schools, teachers, and

administrators comprised the “American school system.” Moreover, United States

educators did not create a system de novo, but confronted a preexisting network of

Spanish colonial schools that endured, in some form, through much of American rule and

emptied the dichotomy between “indigenous” and “colonial” of any meaning in the

Filipino context. Given the constraints of space, this paper will not attempt to account for

all the complexities of this multilayered imperial influence or educational diversity.

Instead, it will mainly focus on the origins, development, and evolution of industrial

education as idea and practice in the United States and the Philippines. A consistent

focus on industrial education will illuminate the dynamics of transnational interaction and

prevent this study from becoming mired in the intricacies of Filipino history.

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Ann Laura Stoler, Frederick Cooper, and Eric T. Love delineate useful definitions

and concepts for the second issue under consideration in this section: terminology. A

survey of Booker T. Washington and industrial education cannot escape politically

charged and often poorly defined terms like “race” and “racism.” In their essay

“Between Metropole and Colony,” Stoler and Cooper outline valuable and highly

applicable ways to think about “race.” In our present day, most people conceive of race

solely as a biological and phenotypic category independent from culture, class, or even

ethnicity. At the crest of imperialism in the early twentieth century however, Stoler and

Cooper contend that historical actors frequently conflated these notions, imputing racial

characteristics to class or vice-a-versa.4 Thus, as Paul Kramer discusses in his article

“Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons,” Anglo-Saxon, rather than white, civilization

turned into the main rallying cry of English and American imperialist jingoes.5 For the

purposes of this inquiry then, race will be defined not only in phenotypic and biological

terms, but also as an overlapping and fluid set of distinctions that underwrote hierarchy in

the period of high colonialism.

In his Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, Eric T. Love supplies a

definition for two other nebulous terms: “racism” and “racial hierarchies.” A good

working definition can obviate misunderstandings among readers, and Love’s

explanation of “racism” accomplishes exactly that. Love denotes racism “as exclusionary

relations of power based on race” that “can be understood more specifically as the sum of

4 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 14. 5 Paul Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and U.S. Empires, 1880-1910,” The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, ed. Julian Go and Anne L. Foster (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 45.

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culturally sanctioned beliefs, practices, and institutions that establish and maintain a

social order.”6 This definition simultaneously endows “racism” with sufficient flexibility

and concreteness to make it an effective category of analysis. Love also unpacks the

hierarchical dimension of racism, noting how “in the period of history considered here,

racism upheld social hierarchies and systems of privilege and oppression based on the

conviction that whites were, by every measure, superior to all nonwhite races.”7 Without

delving excessively into the arguments over “race” and its construction, these

articulations furnish a valuable tool for making sense of the inter-group and interpersonal

racial dynamic driving encounters between Filipinos and Americans.

Beyond scope and terminology, theory—and more specifically, the postulates and

axioms underlying theories of colonial statehood—comprises the single largest quandary

for any investigation of American involvement in the Philippines. To what extent should

scholars assume the power of colonial states, and how should they calibrate their

empirical work accordingly? A growing revisionist literature engages these puzzles. In

their already mentioned essay “Between Metropole and Colony,” Frederick Cooper and

Ann Laura Stoler crystallize mounting dissent against conventional accounts of colonial

governance, arguing that the belief in the “unity and coherence” of colonial states

downplays the processes of negotiation between the colonizers and colonized and

occludes “basic questions” about imperialism.8 They predicate this assertion on John

Lonsdale and Bruce Berman’s 1992 work Unhappy Valley and its dual taxonomy of

“colonial state building” and “colonial state formation.” By formulating distinctions

6 Eric Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), xii. 7 Ibid., xii. 8 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” 19-20.

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between the “conscious” efforts to devise apparatuses of control in state building and the

“unconscious” compromises that define the contours of state formation, Lonsdale and

Berman effectively draw attention to the gap between imperial imaginings and practice.9

In Colonialism’s Culture, Nicholas Thomas puts a capstone on this theorizing,

identifying indigenous actors as the motor for “reformulations” of colonization, and

evocatively describing how colonial projects “are often projected rather than realized.”10

Taken together, these authors suggest the need to analyze industrial education’s potential

susceptibility to these processes of “reformulation.”

Julian Go, a sociologist of American empire and the Philippines, sketches out

possible ways to operationalize these “reformulations” in his article “Chains of Empire,

Projects of State.” Although Go commends the growing scholarly interest in indigenous

societies and their multifaceted internal complexities, he also enjoins scholars to consider

the crosscutting contradictions that transcended the colonizer-colonized divide and ran

“all the way up to and through the metropolitan state itself.” Divisions or tensions

“internal” to the metropole could thereby offer opportunities for various Filipino actors to

pursue their own objectives.11 Such an insight provides a fruitful framework for the

interpretation Booker Washington’s theories and its interrelationship with Filipinos. The

tenets of industrial education encompassed tensions within American society, particularly

those between “progressives” who subscribed to a more far-reaching vision of reform and

9 Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (London: James Currey, 1992), 5. 10 Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 58. 11 Julian Go, “Chains of Empire, Projects of State: Political Education and U.S. Colonial Rule in Puerto Rico and the Philippines,” Comparative Studies in History and Society 42:2 (April 2000), 336.

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uplift, and conservatives who wished to leave things as they were.12 Although racialist

assumptions underpinned both these mindsets, progressives believed in the imperative of

at least improving inherently inferior peoples, whether African American or Filipino,

while conservatives tended to wonder why Americans should even bother. Industrial

education, in its eschewal of intellectual pursuits and emphasis on manual skills,

represented a compromise. Go’s article is suggestive of the need to explore how

Filipinos could exploit these divergent tendencies.

Edward Said’s Orientalism inadvertently indicates the necessity of further

examining such ideological tensions and their implications for the unfolding of colonial

education in the Philippines. Although a seminal work, critics regularly deride

Orientalism for its monolithic portrayal of imperialism’s cultural structures. But Said’s

Orientalism actually prefigured Go’s concern for metropolitan incongruities in at least

one significant matter. For Said, tutelage and uplift constitutes a fundamental

legitimating rationale for the imperial project, arguing that, “what really mattered was the

unbroken, all-embracing Western tutelage of an Oriental country.”13 Yet this stands at

variance with what he identifies elsewhere as the defining trait of Orientalism, the need to

depict non-Westerners as the irreducible opposite of “rational, peaceful, liberal, logical”

peoples.”14 Although Said does not explicitly call attention to this inconsistency, these

passages do suggest that Euro-Americans needed to somehow integrate, however

uneasily, these differing conceptions of inherent, timeless “others” and educable charges.

As this study will demonstrate later, the debates and discussions over industrial education

12 Kimberly Alidio, “Between Civilizing Mission and Ethnic Assimilation: Racial Discourse, U.S. Colonial Education and Filipino Ethnicity” (Ph.D diss., University of Michigan, 2001), 54-55. 13 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 35. 14 Ibid., 49.

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often evoked these contradictory Orientalist assumptions, with educators, teachers, and

administrators alike vacillating between frustration over the Filipino’s immutable

incompetence and satisfaction with their educational progress.

One last study that can bridge the gap between the rich theoretical literature on the

colonial state and this study’s empirical subject—public primary schools in the colonial

Philippines—is Michael Apple’s recent 2003 essay “The State and the Politics of

Knowledge.” Just as Ann Stoler, Julian Go and others problematized the colonial state’s

hegemonic operation, Michael Apple seeks to complicate the role of education as a

straightforward instrument of colonial state control. Apple contends that schools do not

simply abet elites in their efforts to “build a local identity, amend or preempt social

fragmentation, and win support from the ruled.”15 Rather, an array of social actors,

sensing the power of colonial regimes to fix “real” knowledge and thereby set cultural

and political priorities, will often challenge educational policy either through outright

agitation or more surreptitious strategies of subterfuge.16 By outlining this possibility of

opposition, Apple illustrates how schools can emerge as the most direct arena of

contestation between colonial state authorities and local actors. Moreover, he intimates

an approach to Booker T. Washington’s theories that would place Filipino receptions of

industrial education—rather than American administrative competency—at the core of its

analysis. The possibility of conflict or subversion identified by Apple illustrates how the

ultimate success or failure of this policy would hinge not only on the will of colonial

officials, but also on the agency of those to whom it was directed. Did Filipinos, whether

peasant or elite, urban or rural, “mestizo” or “indio,” desire “practical” education?

16 Michael Apple, “The State and the Politics of Education, The State and the Politics of Education, ed. Michael Apple (New York: Routledge, 2003), 17.

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Could this type of “practical” instruction in fact address their immediate needs and social

concerns? And if this pedagogical system did not consist with such priorities, how could

indigenous actors have manipulated metropolitan divisions and deflected colonial policy

in more congenial directions? These questions will inform the rest of this study.

The Beginning of the Strange Career: Fred Atkinson

In May 1900, Booker T. Washington welcomed Fred Atkinson, a relatively

unknown high school principal from Massachusetts to his famous educational

experiment, the Tuskegee Institute, for a tour. A graduate of Harvard University and a

holder of a PhD from Leipzig University in Germany, Atkinson did not sojourn to

Tuskegee simply for professional commitments to his high school however. Upon a

recommendation given by his personal acquaintance, Harvard President Charles Eliot,

William Howard Taft, the president of the second Philippines Commission, plucked the

young principal from obscurity and offered him a position as first General Superintendent

of the newly formed colonial Education Bureau.17 In the April 1900 appointment letter,

Taft implored Atkinson to make due haste in his departure for the Philippines, and he

would leave quickly enough. But first, Atkinson made sure to send a missive to Booker

Washington seeking counsel, writing that “education in the Philippines must be along

industrial lines and any and all suggestions from you would be invaluable.”18 Atkinson

soon managed to squeeze in that May visit to Tuskegee. So began the strange career of

industrial education in the United States’ Asian colony.

17 Glenn May, Social Engineering in the Philippines: the Aims, Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy, 1900-1913 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 80. 18 Quote in Ibid., 89.

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As Atkinson prepared for the difficult assignment awaiting him by touring

Tuskegee, the challenges of pacification and insurgency had already propelled education

to the top of the American colonial agenda in the Philippines. While significant

conventional fighting had subsided by early 1900, the Filipino-American war continued

to smolder and insurgency plagued the nascent colonial state.19 Military officers were

among the first to identify schooling as a promising means for neutralizing the

insurgency and conciliating the population, with no less a figure than military governor

Arthur MacArthur asserting “I know nothing in the department of administration that can

contribute more in behalf of pacification than the immediate institution of a

comprehensive system of education.”20 Military affinity for schooling reaped an

impressively large, if haphazard, army school system. By September 1, 1900, the army

schools enrolled nearly 100,000 students.21 This keenness for education quickly infected

the civilian bureaucracy as well, captivating William Howard Taft and other officials

with its potential as an instrument of colonial governance and political suasion. By the

end of the year, President William McKinley proclaimed an expansive new educational

mandate:

It will be the duty of the Commission to promote and extend and, as they find occasion, to improve the system of education already inaugurated by the military authorities. In doing this they should regard as of the first importance the extension of a system of primary education which shall tend to fit the people for their duties of citizenship and for the ordinary avocations of a civilized community. 22 Primary schooling thus emerged as an overarching imperative for the new colony. 19 Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War: 1899-1902 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000), 185. 20 Quote from Luis Camara Dery, “Of Primers and Pensionados: How Education Reconciled the Filipinos with the Americans,” The Army of the First Philippine Republic and Other Historical Essays (Manila: De la Salle University Press, 1995), 160. 21 Glenn May, Social Engineering in the Philippines: the Aims, Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy, 1900-1913 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 79. 22 Quote from Mary Suzuki, “American Education in the Philippines, the Early Years: American Pioneer Teachers and the Filipino Response, 1900-1935,” (Ph.D diss., University of California-Berkeley, 1991), 82.

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President McKinley’s stirring directive described the general purposes of

American educational policy, but left much of the specifics of setting up a school system

unsaid and uncertain. However, Fred Atkinson and his colleagues did not lack for

precedents in starting their assignment. The second half of the nineteenth century, for

example, witnessed a dramatic enlargement of Filipino public school under the aegis of

the Spanish colonial authorities.23 Atkinson though swiftly dismissed the Spanish system

as intellectually moribund, theological in character, and skewed toward the illustrado

landholding elites.24 The schools set up by the U.S. army in 1899 and 1900 presented

another obvious model, but most soldiers-cum-teachers had improvised their duties and

no centralized bureaucracy or coherent philosophy had ordered the military system into

anything resembling a whole.25 Past experience, in Atkinson’s mind, offered little for his

“novel” endeavor. One injunction from the military pedagogical regime, however, did

appeal to him. In his 1900 recommendations to the Philippine Commission, Captain

Albert Todd, the temporary Army director of public schools, advised “that industrial

schools for manual training be established as soon as fair knowledge of English has been

acquired.”26 Atkinson’s solicitations of Booker T. Washington bespoke his intention to

follow through on Captain Todd’s industrial schooling scheme. But what would such

idea of mean for American schools in the Philippines and the project of tutelage?

A brief exploration of the provenance of industrial education in the United States

can help to illuminate Fred Atkinson’s conceptions of colonial schooling and his

23 Encarnacion Alzona, A History of Education in the Philippines, 1565-1930 (Manila: University of the Philippines Press, 1932), 64-70. 24 May, 82. 25 Ibid., 79. 26 United States Bureau of the Census, Census of the Philippine Islands, Taken under the Direction of the Philippine Commission in the Year 1903, volume 3 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905), 640.

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concomitant notions of race. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century

period, white Americans extolled Booker T. Washington’s emphasis on practical and

manual skills for two interlocking reasons: because it conformed with their vision of

themselves as benevolent guardians and of African Americans as members of a

subordinate and inherently inferior race; and because it would shape a compliant,

subservient workforce in the developing industrial economy. With the exception of some

particularly inveterate racists who would not countenance any schooling, Southern

landholders and Northern businessmen alike agreed upon the benefits of an education

system that, in the words of prominent Hampton Institute backer Samuel Chapman

Armstrong, focused on producing “dull plodders.” By incubating these “dull plodders,”

the manual labor curricula, which often featured ten-hour days of labor in sawmills,

farms, and kitchens, would confirm the lowly position of the “Negro.”27 It would also

simultaneously celebrate the role of whites who propagated the values of “hard work”

and the “dignity of labor.” Moreover, the writings of northern industrialist and

philanthropist William H. Baldwin illustrate how racism neatly dovetailed with the

exigencies of the capitalist economy:

“The Negro and the mule is the only combination, so far, to grow cotton.” The South needs him; but the South needs him educated to be a suitable citizen. Properly directed, he is the best possible laborer to meet the climactic conditions of the South. He will willingly fill the more menial positions, and do the heavy work, at less wages, than the American white man or any foreign race which may yet come to our shores. This will permit the southern white laborer to perform the more expert labor, and to leave the fields, the mines, and the simpler trades for the Negro.28 Industrial education would thereby consign African Americans to where Baldwin and

others believed they belonged: the lowest rungs of the emergent industrial order.

27 James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 57. 28 Quote from Ibid., 82.

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Booker T. Washington, the preeminent African American exponent of industrial

education, did not of course imbibe white racism or willfully consent to his own

subjugation. A shrewd strategist and political actor, Washington retained separate aims

from his white benefactors. He advocated an essentially gradualist approach that could

acknowledge the racist outlook of whites but also manipulate this racism to produce

African American wealth and, eventually, launch an African American middle class

capable of advancing more expansive demands.29 However, the premises articulated in

books like Up from Slavery, where Washington wrote that “The work to be done in order

to lift these people [freedmen] up seemed almost beyond accomplishing,” did resonate

with whites.30 And the deep opposition of many African Americans to Washington’s

program, who criticized him at venues like the 1899 “Afro-American Chicago

Conference” for failing to advance racial equality,31 is illustrative of how most whites

could come to interpret industrial education through their racist worldview.

In 1900, the new Philippines Commission loftily pronounced that education

would be “one of the most forceful agencies for elevating the Filipinos, materially,

socially, and morally, and preparing them for a large participation in the affairs of

government.”32 While Fred Atkinson shared the Commission’s emphasis on schools as an

instrument for social “elevation,” his immediate recourse to a system of industrial

education suggests the limits of this vision. Why did Atkinson hastily decide to

correspond with Booker T. Washington and embrace industrial education? Atkinson’s

writings betrayed motivations and a general mindset uncongenial to egalitarianism. In

29 Suzuki, 96. 30 Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (Williamstown, MA: Corner House Publishing, 1899), 116. 31 Anderson, 104. 32 Ibid., 77.

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his 1905 book, The Philippine Islands, Atkinson draws one of many direct parallel

between Filipinos and African Americans in the South, writing that “Thirty-nine years

have now passed since the close of the Civil War and the negro problem is still

unresolved; at the end of a like period of time we shall be struggling with the Philippine

question.”33 Elsewhere, Atkinson cites the African American experience of industrial

education as an appropriate antecedent for schools in the Philippines:

In this system we must beware the possibility of overdoing the matter of higher education and unfitting the Filipino for practical work. We should heed the lesson taught us in our reconstruction period when we started to educate the Negro. The education of the masses here must be an agricultural and industrial one, after the pattern of our Tuskegee Institute at home.34

Reconstruction, industrial education, and “the Negro,” thus furnished Atkinson with the

primary optic for understanding his job in the Philippines.

For Fred Atkinson, industrial education intuitively made sense for the Philippines

not because it would advance Filipino and American equality, but because it could

provide a solution for “huge and novel work—this training some six or eight millions of

tropical, indolent people for self-government.” Ruminating in his book on how

Americans could “instill in him [The Filipino] such moral restraint and ideal freedoms as

will help him through the perils of an unknown freedom,” Atkinson eventually asserted

that “Although it is impossible in a day or in a generation even to enable these peoples to

raise themselves from a state of semicivilization to the rank of a civilized nation, the

difficulty of our task is not insuperable.”35 Filipinos, like their indolent African-American

counterparts, could thus fulfill the role of “dull plodders” in the vital, but subordinate,

agricultural political-economy. Fred Atkinson wholeheartedly subscribed to this vision.

Concluding The Philippines Islands with the observation that “One thing that impresses 33 Fred Atkinson, The Philippine Islands (New York: Ginn and Company, 1905), 14. 34 Quote from May, 93. 35 Atkinson, 16.

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the newcomer deeply is the wonderful possibility of the archipelago in an agricultural

way, and with the transformation of these natives into a contented laboring people the

degree of self-support which is necessary and possible will be realized,”36 Atkinson

envisioned the Filipinos as placid, productive workers toiling at the behest of their

colonial overlords. But there is one question that Atkinson never seriously pondered:

would Filipinos accept this vision?

Although Fred Atkinson’s two-year tenure as General Superintendent witnessed

the breathtaking expansion of the American colonial school system to nearly 200,000

students by 1902, snatches of evidence forewarned the potentially adverse ramifications

of an industrial education system. Colonial schools flourished not because of the

implementation of Booker T. Washington’s ideas, but because of Atkinson’s failure to

actualize them. In spite of Atkinson’s rhetoric, industrial education did not make

substantial inroads between 1900 and 1902.37 While the foundational piece of legislation

for colonial schools, Act 74, included provisions for the establishment of trade and

agricultural schools, and defined “practical education” in the English language as an

important component of the curricula, institutional weaknesses prevented the Bureau of

Education from supplying necessary tools and appliances.38 Industrial education faltered.

Without widespread “practical instruction,” Filipinos inundated American schools in the

genuine hope that they would extend more inclusive opportunities for learning than had

their Spanish predecessors. But expressions of displeasure at the initial efforts toward

industrial education betokened problems ahead if Americans persisted in pursuing such

an approach. And as will be shown, some evidence indicates that not only American

36 Ibid., 412. 37 May, 89. 38 Ibid., 93.

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bureaucratic ineptitude, but also Filipino opposition, played a central role in forestalling

the realization of Atkinson’s plans.

American colonial source material suggests that industrial education encountered

considerable resistance from the peasant Filipino population. Bernard Moses, the

secretary of public instruction and Fred Atkinson’s direct superior in the colonial

bureaucratic hierarchy observed, “industrial education has met, and will continue to meet

with certain obstacles. The people have been accustomed under their earlier instruction

to regard education as a means of putting themselves in positions where manual labor is

not required.”39 Moses attributed this friction to “ancient” prejudices:

One of the delicate tasks of the industrial schools is to break down this ancient prejudice, on their success in this undertaking depends the possibility of introducing and carrying to successful results the system of industrial education. Hitherto comparatively little has been accomplished. This is due in part to the lack of appliances and in part perhaps to the difficulty of acquiring a knowledge of the Filipino’s attitudes toward this work and of hitting upon the proper means of overcoming his prejudices.40 Moreover, this view accorded with other American evaluations of Filipino public

opinion. The Editor of the Teachers’ Assembly Herald, writing in 1913 in an effort to

mobilize more support for a “practical” type of education, spoke of the “unfavorable

attitude of the public toward industrial work in the public schools of the early days.”41

These views of the editor and Bernard Moses, admittedly, do not portray a complete

picture of peasant Filipino opinions. Americans filtered their observations through the

distorting lens of Orientalism, and the absence of Filipino sources renders the motivations

behind this hostility opaque. But these American sources do at least unearth peasant

antagonism and a lack of faith in the utility of industrial education. 39 Quote from ibid., 93. 40 Philippines Department of Public Instruction, Annual Report of the Secretary of Public Instruction (Manila: Bureau of Public Printing, 1902), 26. 41 Quote from “Contributed Articles on ‘What People Think of our Industrial Work,’” Tales of the American Teachers in the Philippines, ed. Geronima T. Pecson and Maria Racelis (Manila: Carmelo & Bauermann, Inc., 1959), 207.

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If peasant opinion opposed industrial education, American officials did not find a

much more amenable audience in the elite Filipino classes either. From the outset, the

cacique landholding elites and bosses at the apex of the Filipino commercial agricultural

economy assailed American schools for instituting a curriculum demeaning to their elite

status.42 A 1904 account from Helen P. Beattie, a teacher from San Bernardino County in

California, spoke to this widespread illustrado contempt:

It could hardly be expected that well-to-do parents would send their children to these public schools, as, in addition to exposure to weather, children were exposed to nameless horrors in the shape of dirt, disease, and vermin, from being brought into close contact with the neglected ones of the lower class. Private schools flourished for the children of the upper class, but, save the fact that these were pay schools an hence more select, there was no difference between them and the public schools. The teaching was as poor and the accommodations were but little more adapted to school needs.43 This statement corresponds with the view of another teacher, Frederic Marquardt, who

noted that “on more than one occasion, when school gardens were laid out or vocational

courses in woodworking were started, the richer pupils wanted students to do their work

for them.”44

While the Filipinos and Americans might have possessed motives for

exaggerating the intransigence of wealthy classes, statistics compiled from colonial

sources indicate that private schools, whether of the Catholic or secular variety, did

indeed attract many disgruntled caciques. Between June 1901 and April 1902, twenty-

seven new private schools opened in Manila, and by 1903 1,004 private schools dotted

the archipelagic landscape.45 Although other factors, including restrictions on Catholic

instruction and the choice of English—that language of “civilization” and colonial

42 May, 108. 43 Helen P. Beattie, “American Teachers and the Filipinos (1904), Bulletin of the American Historical Collection XII:3 (July-September 1984), 70. 44 Frederick S. Marquardt, “ Life with the Early American Teachers,” Tales of the American Teachers in the Philippines, eds. Geronima Pecson and Maria Racelis (Manila: Carmelo & Bauermann, Inc., 1959), 5. 45 May, 96.

18

conquest46—as the medium of teaching undeniably contributed to this exodus, it seems

unlikely that the colonial ardor for industrial education would serve to make public

primary schools anymore palatable for the upper classes.

By the late fall of 1902, Fred Atkinson had presided over the ostensibly

auspicious establishment of American education in the Philippines. In line with stated

colonial objectives, primary schools covered an ever-expanding swath of the Filipino

islands, teachers generally employed English as the language of instruction, and students

received a rigorously secular education. Act 74, cut through the organizational muddle of

the army years and devised what, at least on paper, resembled a centralized education

bureaucracy with a clear chain of command between Manila and local divisions. And

industrial education, for all its difficulties and miscues, was inscribed in the curriculum.

Bernard Moses’ late 1902 pronouncement of Bernard Moses that “provision has already

been made for a very wide extension of industrial training” demonstrates the colonial

unflagging devotion to industrial education. But the vaguely hinted at exasperation of

peasant and elite Filipinos intimated gathering storm clouds on the horizon. A

pedagogical program predicated on the ideas of Booker T. Washington and a host of

racist and Orientalist assumptions perhaps did not commend itself to the needs and

aspirations of Filipinos. The clash over industrial education that ensued in the following

years would further complicate this picture.

An Egalitarian Interlude? David Barrows and The Twists of a Strange Career After Fred Atkinson departed from the Philippines in late 1902 amid controversy

over his work habits and accusations of professional negligence, colonial authorities hired 46 Andrew B, Gonzales, Language and Nationalism: The Philippine Experience Thus Far (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1980), 26.

19

David Barrows as its new General Superintendent. An ambitious PhD in Anthropology

with experience in the Philippines as the former head of the colonial Bureau of Non-

Christian tribes, Barrows’ appointment presaged shifts in the policy direction of colonial

schooling. Indeed, the extant historiography usually casts David Barrows in the role of

antipode to his predecessor. This depiction hinges on two issues: Barrows’ lukewarm

opinion of industrial education and his corresponding attitudes on Filipino social

structures. Conventional accounts juxtapose Barrows, the apostle of “literary” education

and social egalitarianism against other General Superintendents who favored industrial

curricula and accepted the Filipino social status quo. Believing that schools could fashion

“a person of far different possibilities from the man whose education never arises beyond

that of routine toil,”47 Barrows did in fact adopt a more classically liberal approach to

pedagogy, emphasizing reading, writing, spelling and phonetics over manual labor.48

Moreover, Barrows frequently decried the pernicious despotism of caciques, in one case

noting how:

The cultivated man among the Filipinos, while fairly bursting with protestations of his patriotic solicitude for the advancement of his more humble countrymen, is in reality quite contemptuous of their illiteracy and actually opposed to any enlightenment which will loosen their hold over them. The greatest danger at present menacing the success of our schools is that, pleased with the capacity of the and cleverness of the youth of the cultivated class, and desirous of forwarding his success along higher levels of education, we may forget the primary and essential importance of educating the child of the peasant.49

Barrows lauded education as a means to rectify such calumnies, averring in December

1904 that “Two years of instruction in arithmetic given to every child will in a generation

47 Quote in May, 101. 48 Ibid., 100. 49 United States Bureau of the Census, Census of the Philippine Islands, 647.

20

destroy that repellent peonage or bonded indebtedness that prevailed throughout the

country.”50 In other words, schools would effect changes akin to social revolution.

While references to Booker T. Washington and panegyrics for industrial

education declined after 1903, historians nonetheless tend to overstate the discontinuities

in policy and attitude that marked David Barrows’ tenure. In spite of Barrows’

broadsides against “manual training,” industrial education remained an integral

component of American public schools in the Philippines. In a 1904 edition of the

primary curriculum disseminated throughout the archipelago, the Education Bureau

retained a section termed “body training.” This program consisted of handiwork,

drawing, physical exercises, whittling, gardening, needlework, housekeeping and other

forms of manual labor.51 In his 1980 study of American colonial administration entitled

Social Engineering, Glenn May attempts to minimize such continuity in curriculum,

contending that industrial education ran counter to the most fundamental tenets of

Barrows’ philosophy and consequently received short shrift. Although there is some

validity to this, Barrows did not refrain from praising industrial programs in his later

1914 book A Decade of American Government in the Philippines:

Two interesting features of the public school work which have received had much emphasis are industrial work and athletics. The industrial work in the Philippines consists in instruction in the many beautiful native arts and industries which thus become household employments and contribute to the income of families. This industrial teaching was especially encouraged and standardized for all primary schools by Mr. Frank R. White who became Director of Education in December, 1909, and who died in Manila, August 7, 1913, after nearly twelve years of educational service in the Philippines.52

Even if Barrows evinced ambivalence toward industrial education, the

pedagogical predilections of both teachers and Philippine Commission members

50 Quote in Ibid., 101. 51 Ibid., 103. 52 David Barrows, A Decade of American Government in the Philippines (Yonkers, NY: World Book Co, 1914), 61.

21

demonstrate the continued enthusiasm for the “dignity of labor.” Such attachments

ultimately constrained Barrows’ space for maneuver. “Thomasites,” or the much-

celebrated cohort of 523 American teachers who arrived on the steamship “Thomas” in

1900, exerted a considerable professional presence in Filipino schools throughout this

period and generally accentuated the importance of manual labor.53 The lamentations of

Mary Fee, a female teacher employed first in Iloilo province and later at the Manila

Agricultural and Normal School, exemplified this preoccupation:

The only large practical experience which Filipino leaders have enjoyed has come through their Being land-owners and agriculturalists. But agriculture has not been competitive; and when the land-owning class traveled, it was chiefly in Spain, which can hardly be called a progressive agricultural country. Of men of the artisan class who have worked their way up their own efforts

from ignorance to education, from poverty to riches; of men who have any large available experience in manual labor or in specialized industries, the present Assembly feels the lack.54

Beyond the Thomasites, Barrows also encountered unremitting pressure from his

superiors to expand the scope of industrial education. As early as 1905, W. Cameron

Forbes, the American Governor-General of the Philippines, spoke out on the “absolute

necessity” of manual training, and James Smith, the next Governor General, declared in

his inaugural address that “the facilities for securing a practical education will be

enlarged and extended as far as the financial resources of the Government will permit.”55

This mandate from the highest echelons of colonial administration soon induced the

Bureau of Education to conduct a study on reorganizing industrial education. The

findings would recommend, among other things, that primary schools devote fixed

allotments of time for industrial training ranging from 40 to 100 minutes a day.56 In spite

53 Jane A. Margold, “Egalitarian Ideals and Exclusionary Practices: U.S. Pedagogy in the Colonial Philippines,” Journal of Historical Sociology 8:4 (December 1995), 386. 54 Mary Fee, A Woman’s Impressions of the Philippines (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1910), 48. 55 May, 105. 56 Aurora Calimquim, “The History of Elementary Education in the Philippines, 1898-1941” (Ph.D diss., University of California, 1953), 62-3.

22

of the General Superintendent then, “practical instruction” remained a key pedagogical

priority among teachers and upper level bureaucrats alike.

One other crucial factor undermined Barrows’ campaign to circumscribe

industrial education: the coincidence between his assumptions on race and those of his

adversaries. Although Barrows fervently believed in uplifting Filipino peasants, he also

doubted their capacity for jettisoning the yoke of oppression, writing that “the race lends

itself naturally and without protest to the blind leadership of the aristocracy.”57 Barrows’

pessimistic appraisals of Filipino capacities stemmed from the conceptions of racial

hierarchy similar to those of industrial education proponents. As Paul Kramer shows in

his dissertation “Pragmatic Empire,” Barrows’ formative intellectual training in the

Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago imbued him with the belief that

stasis and inferiority typified the Filipino race.58 This mentality would later thrust the

“humanitarian” Barrows in self-defeating, and sometimes brutal, directions.59 In the

crucible of his 1900 position at the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes for instance, Barrows

brusquely declared that the water cure—or the forcing of water down prisoner’s bodies—

could not have any detrimental effects on Filipinos.60 Furthermore, he expressed little

surprise when Filipinos fell short of his metrics for success. This self-fulfilling prophecy

of sorts prompted Barrows, in his later capacity as professor at the University of

California, to structure lectures around questions like “Are all races—any race except our

own—capable of assimilating Western Civilization. Is their adoption of it bound to be a

57 Quote from May, 98. 58 Paul Kramer, “The Pragmatic Empire: U.S. Anthropology and Colonial Politics in the Occupied Philippines, 1898-1916,” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1998), 169. 59 See the title of Kenton J. Clymer, “Humanitarian Imperialism: David Prescott Barrows and the White Man’s Burden in the Philippines,” Pacific Historical Review XLV:4 (November 1976), 495. 60 Vincente Rafael, White Love and other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 20.

23

mere veneer or is it genuine?”61 In the final analysis, Barrows’ racist affinities with

industrial education devotees ensured the futility of efforts to dislodge “practical”

training from the American colonial curriculum.

The designation of Frank White as General Superintendent in 1909 brought a

fitting coda to Barrows’ tenure. A former Assistant Superintendent between 1903 and

1905 and a longstanding rival to Barrows, White’s appointment ushered in a period of

renewed American commitment to industrial education. The new General

Superintendent acted consistently to redress the perceived deficiencies of literary

education and entrench instruction of a practical nature. This campaign assumed various

forms. White twice adjusted the primary school course of study to include more

comprehensive formulations of industrial pedagogy. He also commissioned circulars

such as The Philippine Craftsmen to heighten awareness of the these developments and to

guarantee that “members of the Bureau’s teaching force will be promptly informed of the

methods employed and the results secured in every industrial experiment which is carried

to successful issue in any public school.”62 Furthermore, White enlisted the legitimating

language of Lemarckian environmental determinism and race:

The physical environment and the previous political and social experience which have developed in the Filipino people, racial characteristics quite different from the American, have likewise created educational problems as distinct from those of the United States as the Malay is different from the Anglo-Saxon…..as a matter of fact a system of industrial instruction has been established in the Philippine Islands. It is consistent, consecutive, and closely adapted to local conditions and needs.63

The increased prominence of industrial education under White thereby testifies not only

to Barrows’ failure at stanching “practical” instruction, but also to his unintentional part

61 Quote from Alidio, 88 62 “Editorial and Official,” Philippine Craftsman 1:1 (July 1912), 66. 63 Quote from Lino L. Dizon, Mr. White: A ‘Thomasite History of Tarlac Province 1901-1913 (Tarlac City: Center for Tarlequeño Studies, 2002), 120-121.

24

in accelerating its ascendance. By alienating White and irritating higher level bureaucrats

with the inconsistency of his own ideas, Barrows furnished ammunition to those who

would implement a far reaching program of industrial education. And as will be shown,

the prevalence of this scholastic philosophy soon insinuated itself among a growing and

important colonial Bureau of Education constituency: Filipinos.

V. The “Filipinization” of the Strange Career: Camilo Osias

The ascent of Camilo Osias to the position of general superintendent of schools in

Bataan, Mindoro, and Tayabas, represented, to many, the apotheosis of the American

colonial tutelary project. For American bureaucrats, Osias embodied the exemplary

indigene. A peasant of modest means from the town of Balaoan, Osias entered an

American public school at the age of 12 and quickly excelled, acing tests and garnering

the attention of teachers and educational bureaucrats alike.64 By 1905, Osias passed an

arduous examination that permitted him to join the select group of “pensionados,” or

Filipinos who could study at universities in the United States.65 There, Osias completed

not one, but two degrees in education from Western Illinois State Normal School in 1908

and the Teachers College of Columbia University in 1910. Osias’ meteoric advance

continued apace upon his return to the Philippines. Becoming the first Filipino

superintendent of schools in 1915 and the first Filipino assistant director in the Education

Department in 1917, Osias went on to produce a series of textbooks entitled The

Philippine Readers. These readers quickly supplanted American books as the definitive

64 Roland Sintos Coloma, “Disidentifying Nationalism: Camilo Osias and Filipino Education in the Early Twentieth Century,” Revolution and Pedagogy: Interdisciplinary and Transnational Perspectives on Educational Foundations, ed. E. Thomas Ewing (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005), 23. 65 Ibid., 27.

25

teaching tools in public schools, consummating the transfer of responsibility from

colonial tutor to Filipino official. In this trajectory from humble peasant to prominent

pedagogue, Osias seemingly incarnated the American ideal of tutelage. But yet, as will

be discussed in this section, Osias’ espousal of industrial education belied his outwardly

exemplary rise and pointed toward the problematic and ambiguous results of American

colonial education.

At the beginning of his 1971 autobiography Story of a Long Career of Varied

Tasks, Camilo Osias revealingly frames his personal story with a reminiscence of a

speech delivered by the one of the United States’ most illustrious African American

men—none other than Booker T. Washington:

The local newspapers highly publicized the occasion and wrote at length of a guest speaker, a Negro educator of renown—Booker T. Washington. It was a novelty, a veritably extraordinary event to have a Negro speaker. A large multitude attended filling the tent to overflowing. Interested as I was in public speaking, I went to hear a man born a slave and rose to be head of the Tuskegee Institute of Montgomery, Alabama. I was immensely thrilled by when the orator of the day was presented and the multitude gave him a standing ovation and a tremendous applause lasting several minutes. He spoke lengthily recounting his varied experiences many recorded in books such as Up From Slavery and Working with the Hands which were prominently displayed in the local bookstores for sale. He made a deep impression on me.66

By choosing to situate his own life story in the context of Booker T. Washington, Osias

draws on some unsurprising tropes. For instance, the mention of slavery evokes an

implicit parallel between the African American struggle for freedom and the Filipino

fight to overthrow the yoke of Spanish and American imperialism. His discussion of

Washington’s compelling biography also establishes a model for emulation—one that

Osias himself genuinely aspired to. But the reference to Washington’s Working with

Hands alludes to another less obvious aspect of Osias’ comparison: his faith in industrial

education as the best strategy for confronting the realities of global capitalism.

66 Camilo Osias, The Story of a Long Career of Varied Tasks (Quezon City: Manlapaz Publishing, 1971), 13.

26

Throughout his prolific writings, Osias manifested a fervent conviction in the

worth of industrial education for Filipinos. He most explicitly enunciated the virtues of

practical instruction in his 1921 work, Barrio Life and Barrio Education. Focusing on

the social and vocational worth of industrial education, Osias noted that “education, to be

valuable and practical, must fit for individual and social life. That training is most

effective which best fits the individual for his particular vocation.”67 In a similar vein,

Osias also regarded industrial training as the key to integrating disadvantaged barrio

students into the Filipino economy and society, observing how “our educating forces

should send the barrio child into the practical world with the ability and the skill to use

what he has learned.... Vocational education is useful to society as well as the

individual.”68 Osias later expounds in detail the relationship between an industrial course

of study and self-sufficiency among barrio children:

The barrio school exists primarily to assist children to meet their physical, intellectual, moral, social, aesthetic, and economic needs. Industrial arts and industrial work are a great factor in realizing this goal and consequently should have a prominent place in the curriculum….The industrial training of a child helps him, in part, to place himself upon an economic plane slightly

above the plane of mere self-support. This is true directly and indirectly—directly when the vocation which the child later chooses is based upon the industrial training secured, and indirectly when the avocation he pursues is closely allied to the industrial work pursued in schools.69

Osias clearly esteemed the potential of industrial and “vocational” education to assist

peasants in their pursuit of economic betterment.

While the content of his writings frequently hearkens back to American exponents

of industrial education like Booker T. Washington, Osias also attempted to translate this

foreign pedagogical idea into local idioms. Osias’ decision to invoke Andres Bonifacio,

a peasant leader of the 1890’s Katipunan movement for independence from Spain,

67 Camilo Osias, Barrio Life and Barrio Education (Yonkers, NY: World Book Co., 1921), 78. 68 Ibid, 78 69 Ibid., 72.

27

represents an especially telling example of these efforts. Bonifacio occupies a special

place in Filipino history. In his seminal social history Pasyon and Revolution, Filipino

historian Reynaldo Ileto argues that Bonifacio consciously set himself apart from more

“Westernized,” elite advocates of independence and presented himself as the defender of

the Filipino lower classes.70 The execution of Bonifacio in 1897 amid war with the

Spanish dramatically enhanced this reputation. In Barrio Life and Barrio Education,

Osias consciously sought to harness industrial education to this subaltern revolutionary

heritage:

The industrial courses are efficient means of inculcating in the minds of youth the dignity of labor. Andres Bonifacio said, ‘Diligence in the efforts to earn means of subsistence is the genuine love for one’s self, one’s wife, son, daughter, brother, sister, and compatriot.’ More directly than any other single feature of the course of study, the industrial work makes for productive work and guides youthful power along profitable lines.71

By associating industrial education, however diffusely, with Bonifacio’s martyrdom on

behalf of peasant Filipinos, Osias made a deliberate effort to imbue “vocational training”

with populist legitimacy.

If Osias hoped to propitiate Filipino peasants through the populist rhetoric of the

Katipunan, other countervailing strains of thought suggestive of colonial racial ideology

also inflected his writings. The educator sometimes indulged in observations that

smacked of a belief in hierarchies of race, calling into question the extent to which he

genuinely spoke for all Filipinos. Describing for instance the inhabitants of Mindoro, the

seventh largest island in the archipelago located off the southwestern coast of Luzon,

Osias wrote of “my experience with the Mangyans, a group of people scattered in the

forests of Mindoro, more advanced than the Negritos in Bataan.” Betraying a worldview

70 Reynaldo Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979), 30. 71 Osias, Barrio Life and Barrio Education, 85-86.

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tinted by the anthropological ideas of his American colleagues in the Bureau of

Education, he duly recorded how “a delegation of these simple creatures of nature

appeared one day in my office in Calapan” before considering these human curiosities at

greater length:

They were scantily dressed and all were males. They had a petition contained on a split piece of bamboo on the surface of which were etched what they wanted in their own characters, which, as far as I know, have no parallel or equivalent in any other form of writing. Their peculiar alphabet has long subsisted.72

Osias also displayed a marked deference to the authority of Euro-American observers. In

spite of his own peasant upbringing, Osias summarized the living conditions of the barrio

by quoting from a European anthropologist’s deprecating observations that “these houses,

which are always built on piles on account of the humidity of the soil, often consist of a

single shed, which serves for all the uses of a dwelling, and are the cause of great laxity

and of filthy habits, the whole family sleeping therein in common, and every passer-by

being a welcome guest.”73 Such comments on the Mangyans and the “conditions of the

barrio” leave some doubt as to whether foreign attitudes clouded Osias’ perceptions and

analyses of the very people he appealed to.

Another illuminating passage in Barrio Life and Barrio Education engenders even

greater suspicion about the assumptions that animate Osias’ advocacy of industrial

education. Although he perhaps made the pairing unintentionally or subconsciously,

Osias managed to imply a correlation between the average barrio resident and common

criminal by seamlessly gliding between peasant student and prisoner in his narrative:

For many years to come, however, the great majority of the barrio boys and girls will follow the industrial pursuits and their education will have accomplished much for them if it makes them skilled instead of unskilled workers. Our paupers and criminals are recruited from the army of the unskilled. In Bilibid and other well-regulated prisons the energies of the prisoners are directed

72 Osias, Story of a Long Career of Varied Tasks, 136. 73 Quote from Fedor Jagor, Travel in the Philippines, in Osias, Barrio Life and Barrio Education, 41.

29

along productive channels, for experience has shown that productive labor is a good curative measure for poverty and crime. If it is so, then vocational training which makes for productive labor must be a still better preventative measure in our social life.74

By saying “our paupers and criminals are recruited from the army of the unskilled,” Osias

effectively criminalized the barrio students and described them as fodder for a life of

theft. “Productive labor” thus constituted a “curative” for both the criminal and the poor.

This equation of unskilled laborer and criminal exposes how biases and flawed

presuppositions, rather than an astute analysis of the conditions of the tao, provided the

overriding impetus for Osias’ belief in industrial education.

While testimony from Filipinos themselves on the subject is scarce, pieces of

evidence gleaned from the American colonial accounts corroborate the thesis that

industrial education offered little for barrio inhabitants and actually stimulated their

animosity. In 1924, the Philippine Assembly commissioned Paul Monroe, a professor at

Columbia University and eminent authority on education, to conduct a survey on the state

of schooling in the archipelago.75 His findings stingingly rebuked industrial education:

At present the industrial work of the school is subject to widespread criticism. Many of the teaching staff are not sympathetic with it. In many cases the children have little interest in it. Frequently the parents and patrons of the school neither understand its significance or have much faith in it. Responsible political authorities question its importance. In many places where the support is thrown upon the provinces, industrial and trade schools have been closed and the expensive equipment has been disposed of at a great loss to the system. There is grave danger that the achievements of the past will as well as a great educational force of the future are in danger of being lost. The suggestions contained in this report are designed to obviate such a catastrophe.76 Moreover, Monroe presented an even more damning critique later on in the survey when

he argued that “these inadequacies relate, in considerable degree, to the want of a direct

relationship of the work to the actual conditions and needs of the particular communities 74 Ibid., 77. 75 Encarnacion Alzona, A History of Education in the Philippines, 1565-1930 (Manila: University of the Philippines Press, 1932), 211. 76 Paul Monroe, A Survey of the Educational System of the Philippine Islands by the Board of Educational surveys: Created under Acts 3162 and 3196 of the Philippine Legislature, (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1925), 61.

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in which the schools are located.”77 This lambasting of the absence of a “direct relation”

represented a startling and very revealing deviation from the prevailing colonial wisdom.

For the most part, American bureaucrats remained enamored of the idea of industrial

education. Even Monroe himself hewed to the line that authorities should persevere in

their pursuit of “practical” pedagogy, arguing not for the abolition of this “essential”

project but for its reform.78 This rare departure from preconceived notions and rosy

assessments illustrates the extent to which industrial education generated dissatisfaction

among the masses of Filipinos.

Camilo Osias’s campaign to extend industrial education encapsulates all the

complexities and ambiguities of American schooling in the Philippines. In one sense,

Osias embodied its triumph, an impoverished Filipino student who scaled the heights of

the colonial bureaucracy to attain rank, distinction, and even celebrity. In his success,

moreover, he was not alone. As Dan Doeppers reports in Manila, 1900-1941, the rapid

expansion of the educational bureaucracy opened up new opportunities to a broad range

of Filipinos throughout the period and played a pivotal role in fostering a small but

significant middle class.79 However, in another sense, Osias also personified colonial

schooling’s limitations. Even though he would later emerge as a distinguished advocate

of independence and co-authored a book with Manuel Quezon demanding the exit of

American officials,80 Osias’ pedagogical philosophy unmasked problematic assumptions

whose origin ultimately rested in the racist milieu of the turn of the century United States.

77 Ibid., 279. 78 Ibid., 279. 79 Dan Doeppers, Manila, 1900-1941: Social Change in a Late Colonial Metropolis (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1984), 61. 80 See Camilo Osias and Manuel Quezon, Governor-General Wood and the Filipino Cause (Manila: Manila Book Company, 1924).

31

This colonial influence wound up distorting Osias’ vision and estranging him from the

mass of his tao compatriots. As a result, popular discontent with industrial education

intensified, enrollment in public schools stagnated at one million after two decades of

explosive growth,81 and caciques continued sending their children to a range of private

schools.82 Even as Filipinos of all classes began to move away from their “benefactors”

and reject their educational and political promises, Filipinos increasingly found

themeselves in separate public and private schools—in sum, socially segregated. The

legacy of misguided, misinformed colonial policy still drove Filipinos farther apart.

Therein lay the sad irony of colonial education and American colonization.

Conclusion

In the American imaginary, colonial education and the expansion of a general

system of free public education constituted the touchstone of the exceptional American

imperial project. In contrast to what they saw as the elitist and self-aggrandizing

approach of their European counterparts, who usually restricted access to collaborationist

elites, Americans imagined that they would ensure the availability of primary education

to all. Cacique and tao alike would intermingle and profit from the bounty of American

knowledge. And to some extent, this American imagining did not stay entirely

imaginary. Americans created a school system without parallel in the Euro-American

colonial world in terms of the breadth or depth of its reach, penetrating down to the lower

81 Alzona, 209. 82 Dionisio C. Tiongco, “Private Education in the Philippines under American Auspices, 1898-1935: A Study in Educational Policy and Administration (M.A. thesis, National Defense College of the Philippines, 1978), 59.

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classes and extending out into the Filipino hinterlands.83 Urbanites and rural peasants,

Taos and Caciques, all attended the colonial schools in significant numbers. This

educational policy was of a piece with American promotion of electoral democracy at all

levels of Filipino society—municipal, provincial, and federal. Nowhere else did colonial

authorities permit their subjects to vote for village mayor, assemblyman, and colonial

governor. In politics, as in education, Americans did in fact construct something distinct

within the annals of imperial history.

However, in spite of these avowedly benevolent projects, the exceptionalism of

American colonialism did not pan out exactly as its progenitors imagined. Class

stratification dramatically worsened throughout the period, opportunities for peasants to

own their own land dwindled, and what Benedict Anderson termed a “solid, visible

‘national oligarchy,’” consolidated its power.84 Elections—which relied on limited

franchises anyways—quickly became the preserve of elite landholders swapping favors

and graft payouts, and asserting their political and economic predominance over the

colony. Universities, the “capstone” of the education system, rarely enrolled anyone

outside this privileged elite. In the gap between imagination and actions, Americans had

somehow produced a colonial structure that mirrored those produced everywhere else.

As the strange career of colonial schools in the Philippines illustrates, racist

assumptions and ideology intervened in the United States’ grandiose schemes and

scuttled any hope of an egalitarian colonial utopia. Unable to understand their “charges”

83 See Bruce Cumings, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 85. Here he discussed the high enrollment rates in Japanese colonial schools in Korea and Taiwan—a notable contrast from European educational projects directed at small elites. 84 Benedict Anderson, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines: Origins and Dreams,” Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures, ed. Vincente Rafael (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 11.

33

beyond the “Negro” lens, American educators and colonial authorities could not truly

envision purposive Filipino actors capable of realizing their own aims and dreams. They

were, in their view, fundamentally a tropical, indolent people. Hence, American

pedagogues imported industrial education, a pedagogical program riddled with racist

assumptions and as ill suited to the needs of Filipinos as it had been for African-

Americans in the American South. Elite caciques and peasant taos recoiled from this

program and actively worked against it, as elites fled to private schools and the lower

classes militated against industrial education at every opportunity they had. In the

process, caciques and taos moved farther beyond the reach of American power even as

they moved apart from one another. The ironies of colonial schooling’s ambiguous

legacies abound. Thus, even as Americans established an admittedly unique, nay, even

revolutionary educational and political superstructure, their understanding of race, which

made Booker T. Washington’s industrial education so attractive, ultimately encouraged

the same class inequities and elite-led nationalisms characteristic of almost every other

colony in the world. The public primary school system in the Philippines was thus

emblematic of the United States’ distinct, but wholly unexceptional, experience of

colonization.

34