This does not mean,however, that nothing that was taught was of any value. We became literate in English to a certain extent.

In exchange for smattering of English, we yielded our souls. The stories of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln made us forget our own nationalism. The American view of our history turned our heroes into brigands in our eyes, distorted our own vision of our future. The surrender of Katipuneros was nothing compared to this final surrender, this levelling down of our last defense. Dr. Chester Hunt characterizes this surrender well in these words: The program of cultural assimilation with a fairly rapid yielding of control resulted in the fairly general acceptance of American culture as the goal of Filipino society with the corollary that individual Americans were given a status of respect.

This, in nutshell, was (and to the great extent still is) the happy result of eraly educational policy because, within the framework of American colonialism, whenever there was a conflict between American and Filipino goals and interests , the schools guided us toward action and thought which could forward American interests.

Goals of American Education

The educational system established by the Americans could not have been for the sole purpose of saving the Filipinos from illiteracy and ignorance. Given the economic and political purposes of the American colonial policy . The Filipinos had to be trained as citizens of an American colony.

...Phlippine Education was shaped by the overriding factor of preserving and expanding American control. To achieve this, all separatist tendencies were discouraged. Nay, they had to be condemned as subversive. With this as the pervasive factor in the grand design of conquering a people, the pattern of education, conciously or unconciously, fostered and established certain attitudes on the part of the governed. These attitudes conformed to the purpose of American occupation.

An Uprooted Race

The first and perhaps the master stroke in the plan to use education as an instrument of colonial policy was the decision to use English as the medium of instruction. English became the wedge that separated the Filipinos from the masses of their countrymen. English introduced the Filipinos to a strange, new world. With American textbooks, Filipinos started learning not only a new language but also a new way of life, alien to their traditions and yet a caricature of their model. This was the beginning of their miseducation, for they learned no longer as Filipinos but as colonials.