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12Colonial education and the shaping of Philippine literature in English Isabel Pefianco Martin Introduction In 1928, an American school teacher in the Philippines reported that many of his students’ compositions had incorporated the ‘indelible impression’ of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s romantic poem Evangeline. The teacher noted that in these compositions: One nipa1 shack had acquired dormer windows with gables projecting and was surrounded by primeval mangoes and acacia. A mere tuba gatherer had a face which shone with celestial brightness as if he ambled home with his flagons of home-brewed tuba.2 Every fair maiden in the class was endowed with eyes as black as the berry that grows on the thorn by the wayside as she strode to church with her chaplet of beads and missal, this last word usually being spelled ‘missle’. (Annex Teacher, 1928a: 7) What this American teacher had observed was perhaps a rather early instance of the cultural cloning of the Filipinos, and after the Philippines’ independence from the United States in 1946, it has been claimed that many Filipinos continued to behave like so-called ‘brown Americans’. What specific strategies did the American colonizers use to create this ‘brown American’? The answer may be found in the language and literature education prescribed by the colonial educators, as the success of American public education in the Philippines may be partly attributed to the AngloAmerican canon of literature introduced in Philippine classrooms. However, this literary canon would not have been as potent without the powerful partner of colonial pedagogy. Together, canon and pedagogy produced a certain type of language and literature education that created standards for Philippine writing. Cumulatively, canon, pedagogy, and the power of American public education in the Philippines resulted in the relegation of Philippine writing in English, as well as writing in the native languages, to the margins of the Philippine cultural experience. 246 Isabel Pefianco Martin Establishing the colonial canon When the Americans arrived in the Philippines in 1898, they took pains to undo the knots that the Spanish colonizers had left in the country after occupying it for 300 years. On August 13, 1898, a few months before American forces officially occupied Manila, American soldiers had already begun to teach in Corregidor (Estioko, 1994: 186). It is assumed that their first lesson was English. Less than a month later, on September 1, 1898, Fr. William D. McKinnon, the chaplain of the American military forces, opened seven schools in Manila (Martin, 1980: 117). It was no accident that the first teachers of English in the Philippines were American soldiers, as public education was introduced by the Americans as an essential component of military strategy. In the aftermath of World War Two, the American General Douglas McArthur also highlighted the importance of education to the US military, when he declared that: ‘The matter [public education] is so closely allied to the exercise of military force in these islands that in my annual report I treated the matter as a military subject and suggested a rapid extension of educational facilities as an exclusively military measure’ (UNESCO, 1953: 74). Throughout the American colonial period, English was systematically promoted as the language that would ‘civilize’ the Filipinos. It was the language that the colonizer introduced to the colonized so that the latter would be able to participate in a society determined by colonialism. It was educational policy to systematically exclude the native languages from formal schooling. Such a policy was institutionalized through the heavy use of instructional materials of Anglo-American origin for language instruction. Throughout four decades of American public education, Filipino students were exposed to a canon of literature that included works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as those of Shakespeare, George Elliott, Matthew Arnold, and the romantic poets. Meanwhile, Filipinos were using their own languages outside the schools. When the Americans arrived in the Philippines in 1898, the Filipinos already had a literature in Spanish and in the native languages. In fact, even before the 300-year colonial rule of Spain, oral literature existed throughout the islands in the form of songs, proverbs, riddles, myths, and epics (Lumbera and Lumbera, 1997: 1–5). By the end of the nineteenth century, as Spanish colonial rule began to weaken, literature throughout the islands consisted largely of religious poems and essays published by the Catholic Church, as well as secular and revolutionary literature that survived through oral tradition and circulated manuscripts (Lumbera and Lumbera, 1997: 42–46). This...

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