The triumph of tagalog and the dominance of the discourse on english language politics in the philippines during the american colonial period 2

37
CHAPTER TWO
EXCEPTIONALISM AND ITS FOIL

A curious link exists between quintessential American poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Philippine Governor-General William Cameron Forbes. Emerson, the founder of
American Transcendentalism, wrote copiously about the soul and the self, about slavery and
abolition, racism and sexism. His works, along with the works of Henry David Thoreau and
Walt Whitman, both Emerson’s contemporaries and friends, make up an important part of the
American literary canon. Emerson, a liberal, was an abolitionist and a proto-anti-imperialist.
61

Forbes, a conservative, occupied the most important position in the American imperialist
government in the Philippines from 1908-1913.
Emerson is in fact Forbes’ maternal grandfather.
62
The genealogical connection,
however, is not merely one of blood but of worldview as well. Emerson lived in an age that went
through and was coming out of a civil war. It was an age concerned with defining America as a
distinct nation with a unique culture; concerned with urging Americans to find genius in
themselves rather than in the culture of the civilizations of the ancient Greeks or of the English.
Emerson’s most anthologized essay, “Self-Reliance,” is a paean to non-conformity and to the
celebration of the self. Emerson scholar Ann Douglas describes him as the “chief apostle of the
emerging cult of self-confidence.”
63
In 1837, Emerson wrote:
it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare all…this confidence in the
unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all
preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly
muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be
timid, imitative, tame. . . What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and

thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career
do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts,
and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
64


61
Emerson was critical of the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. See his poem “Ode,
Inscribed to W.H. Channing” and his eulogy for Thoreau.
62
Forbes’ mother was Ellen Emerson Forbes.
63
Qtd in Joel Porte, “Representing America—the Emerson Legacy,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 3.

38

Emerson’s grandson, William Cameron Forbes, inherited the fruits of Emerson’s urgings.
Half a century later, Forbes and his contemporaries certainly believed that the huge world had
come round to them. Self-assured and bolstered by the fact that they had arrived as a world and
colonial power next to the British, their former colonizers, they believed that they in fact
surpassed all colonial powers in their benevolence and in their mission to spread justice and
democracy.
65
They believed that American culture, American politics, indeed, American
imperialism, was exceptional.

Exceptionalism and the Doublethink
America’s involvement in the Philippines began in April, 1898 with the Spanish-

American War. Many historians have investigated the role American strategic needs and
economic ambitions played in the decision to annex the Philippines. Whatever the motives for
annexation, what was remarkable was the development during this period of a kind of, not so
much a doublespeak, as a doublethink, where a military occupation which escalated into the
brutal Philippine-American War was established in order to institute a “benevolent assimilation.”
This doublethink is best epitomized by the now famous (but often misquoted) lines of General
William Shafter: “My plan would be to disarm the natives of the Philippine Islands, even if I have
to kill half of them to do it. Then I would treat the rest of them with perfect justice.”
66

The concept of the doublethink, twin to George Orwell’s more famous “doublespeak,”
refers to the mental ability to accept two contradictory beliefs. America had eyed the imperial
field but entrance into it presented American politicians with a difficult problem. The rhetoric of

64
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret
Fuller: Selected Works, John Carlos Rowe, ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003,
P. 73
65
See Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing
Mission (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006),
139-144 for a discussion of the American middle class mindset of the last three decades of the 18
th
century.
Adas describes this period in which the American colonial officials were raised as a period of new
innovations and technologies (of which, they were constantly reminded, America was making the most
impressive strides in), sharpening class divides, increased consumerism, competition, and urbanization, its
traditional male order threatened by the feminist (first wave, suffragettes) challenge, and of the lionization
of inventors, scientists, and engineers.
66

In the Boston Transcript of January 12, 1900. Qtd in Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother: How
the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippines, (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991), 299.
39
American democracy, born out of its own experience as a colony barred them from entry. The
capacity for doublethink allowed American politicians to rationalize massacre, concentration
camps, “a howling wilderness.” They were the necessary evils in exchange for public health,
public education, public infrastructure. Brutality for benevolence.
Declarations of superior American military strength were almost always asserted
alongside pronouncements of American pure and altruistic aims. In April, 1899, less than a year
after occupation and just a few months after the start of the Philippine-American War, the first
Philippine Commission (The Schurman Commission), tasked with doing a thorough investigation
of the whole Philippine situation in order to make recommendations on the course of action to the
President of the United States issued a proclamation to the Filipino people which was one of the
first formal declarations of American intention in the Philippines. The proclamation, oozing with
statements of good intentions, also reminds the Filipino people about American martial power and
their willingness to use it. It reads: “For, just as the United States stands ready to furnish armies,
and all the infinite resources of a great and powerful nation to maintain and support its rightful
supremacy over the Philippine Islands, so it is even more solicitous to spread peace and happiness
among the Philippine people…”
67
The image and idea of America the Strong and America the
Kind is an easily acceptable and digestible one because it suggests the familiar and comfortable
understanding of a parent who is both disciplinarian and nurturer or the yin and yan of the
forceful man and the caring woman.
Several editorial cartoons, published during the first years of the American occupation,
were quick to pick up on the irony of a ferocious/friendly America and reflect this very same idea.
One such cartoon, published in Puck in January 31, 1900 shows Uncle Sam at the left foreground
looking at and speaking to a group of natives, half-naked and dressed in grass skirts. With arms
stretched out, Uncle Sam has to his right a phalanx of American soldiers with bayonets on their
shoulders and bullet belts on their waist and to his left to a group of school marms in feathered

hats and Victorian dresses carrying school books and slates. The caption reads “Uncle Sam—

67
Philippine Commission. Report of the Philippine Commission to the President, volume 1.
Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900, p.4.
40
You have seen what my sons can do in battle; now see what my daughters can do in peace.”
68

Another Puck cartoon, issued in November 20, 1901 has to the left, Uncle Sam with both hands
open. One hand carries a stern-looking soldier, rifle in hand; and the other carries a kind-looking
school teacher, schoolbooks in hand. A group of Filipinos—a muslim, a soldier of the
revolutionary army, a “tribal” Filipino, a peasant mother and child face Uncle Sam. The cartoon,
entitled “It is Up to Them,” has a caption that reads “Uncle Sam (to Filipinos)—You can take
your choice; I have plenty of both!”
69
These cartoons depict the Philippine situation at the turn-
of-the-century with a sarcasm that stems from an acknowledgement of the absurdity of this
doublethink. It most likely stems from the persuasion that the means does not justify the ends.
70

On the other hand, the defensiveness with which American officials had to defend the occupation
of the Philippines indicate an opposite position: that the violent occupation was a necessary evil
in order to institute the greater good of extending civilization. This is reflected in a statement
made by Frank Carpenter in describing the Thomasites: “I should say that the coming of this
regiment of teachers was a more remarkable invasion than that of our soldiers.”
71

These seemingly opposite positions, however, are actually rooted in the same assumption.
This assumption is that education is naturally, obviously honorable and righteous as well as

modern and democratic. The doublethink is only a doublethink within the logic of the American
democratic tradition that accepts “justice” and “education” and “civilization” as unproblematic,
universal, and basic values that are the antithesis of the idea of occupation, imperialism, and war.
When education is seen as, not the antithesis but the extension of occupation then this justification
no longer becomes contradictory.

68
Abe Ignacio, et.al. The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons,
(San Francisco: T’Boli Publishing and Distribution, 2004), 69.
69
Ibid, 67.
70
See for example James Blount, an early critic of American occupation of the Philippines. In the
preface of his book he describes his task as exposing the “wholly erroneous idea that where the end is
benevolent, it justifies the means, regardless of the means necessary to the end.” James H. Blount, The
American Occupation of the Philippines, 1898-1912, (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913),
vi.
71
Frank G. Carpenter, Through the Philippines and Hawaii, (Garden City, New York: Doubleday,
Doran and Company, 1929), 49.
41
The inclination to see colonialism as contradictory is evident even today. For many
contemporary scholars, the jury is still out on the legacy of colonialism as the violence of military
occupation is always juxtaposed to the efforts at democratization and modernization. Stanley
Karnow, for example, describes the American public education project as an atonement for its
brutality
72
and that “America endowed the Filipinos with universal education, a common
language, public hygine, roads, bridges, and above all, republican institutions.”
73

[italics mine].
The idea that education is the flip side of the violence of military occupation extends the idea of
colonialism as a contradictory package—of violent military occupation being the inevitable
partner of benevolent social development campaigns—correlates to the concept of the
doublethink.
In the historical study of education, several historians have noted how the American
public school system, so furiously implemented during the first few years of occupation actually
served as an apparatus for pacification.
74
Thus, despite claims of the difficulty of evaluating
American contributions to the Philippines and despite notion of “education versus violence,”
many nationalist thinkers have exposed instead the notion of “the violence of education.”
The doublethink was used not just to defend American military brutality but to
substantiate American economic utilization or, if you will, exploitation as well. Daniel Williams,
who traveled with the Philippine Commission around the Philippines in 1901 and remained for
many years in government service in the Philippines, sees American occupation in the Philippines
as a combination good-works with practicality:
Our occupation of the Philippines was undertaken in altruism, and
critics to the contrary, all our work since then has been directed to the
regeneration of the islands and their people. For those who would
measure the value of our new possessions from a purely selfish
standpoint, however, it might be said our country could not well have
been more fortunate. Students of affairs are unanimous that the center
of world interest, political and commercial, has shifted, or is shifting,

72
Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, (New York: Random
House, 1989). See for example, page 196: “The conquest of the Philippines had been as cruel as any
conflict in the annals of imperialism, but hardly had it ended before Americans began to atone for its
brutality.”

73
Ibid, 3-4.
74
See the discussion of “The Miseducation of the Filipino” in chapter one.
42
to the Pacific and to the countries which rib its shores.
75


Williams, who assailed critics of the American colonial government for the provincialism of their
inability to accept “our obligations or opportunities,”
76
unproblematically merges the idea of
utilitarianism that prioritizes results and functionality with an ethics that prioritizes the benefit of
others; two normally contradictory ideas. These “obligations” which Williams saw as their
mission to “minister to the material, mental, and moral uplift of a people”
77
were discussed
always with fervor and with a steadfast and sincere belief in the honesty and integrity of their
mission.
78

The civilizing mission is of course a customary feature of all colonial projects. American
colonial discourse is no different in this respect. American democratic rhetoric, however,
compelled American politicians to envision this civilizing mission as a mission unlike any of its
fellow colonizers; it had to be scripted as exceptional. The narrative of American exceptionalism
included a number of characteristic features
79
including the rejection of the terms “imperial” and
“colonial,” a denial that American occupation was tyrannical and exploitative, an attitude critical

of not just the Spanish colonial methods in the Philippines but of the British and Dutch
approaches in Southeast Asia, and the confidence in the uniqueness and radicalism of their plan to
engineer a brave, new society by the establishment of modern institutions including, among other
things, free, secular, mass, public education.
In several of the speeches that William McKinley gave throughout the United States in
1899 he mentions the war in the Philippines and uses the symbol of the flag to stir his audience
and convey the message of their unselfish objectives in the Philippines. “Wherever we have

75
Daniel R. Williams, The Odyssey of the Philippine Commission, (Chicago: McClurg, 1913),
331.
76
Ibid, 332.
77
Ibid.
78
Williams, for example says: “We acquired the Philippines through conquest and purchase. They
were ours to do with as we pleased, and every historical precedent would have sanctioned their exploitation
as a national asset. Instead, we voluntarily pledged the Filipino people that our administration of the
country would be for their benefit and their protection, and not for our own financial aggrandizement.”
(Ibid.)
79
See Julian Go’s “Global Perspectives on the U.S. Colonial State” in The American Colonial
State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives and Michael Adas’ “Improving on the Civilizing Mission?
Assumptions of United States Exceptionalism in the Colonization of the Philippines” in Itenerario 24.4
(1998).
43
raised our flag,” McKinley proclaimed, “we have raised it, not for conquest, not for territorial
aggrandizement, not for national gain, but for civilization and humanity.”
80

David Barrows, one
of the first Directors of Education in the American colonial government described “the American
colonist, at the end of the century” as being “far separated in spirit and institution from the Old
World” and as being of a “society more democratic and more independent than Europe had ever
known.”
81
The American discourse conceived of the occupation of the Philippine as a project in
the education of a whole population not just for the attainment of literacy but in the complete
acceptance of democratic ideals. Taft, who had been a member of the Philippine Commission
and was soon to be the President of the United States referred to this project in 1907 as an unique
experiment: “We are engaged in working out a great experiment. No other nation has attempted
it.”
82
In 1917, Charles Burke Elliot reprised this sentiment: “America was, by all her political
traditions and theories, committed to the task of educating, not a few leaders, but the entire mass
of common people. Such a thing had never been attempted in the Orient.”
83
McKinley, Barrows,
Taft, Elliott and scores of other American colonial officials, soldiers, teachers, travelers, and even
ordinary citizens who had never set foot in the Philippines, were all disciples of the church of
American exceptionalism whose first foundations were laid many years before by Emerson.
The paradigm of exceptionalism is a good way through which to understand the
unflinching and single-minded language policy of the American colonial government: the sincere
faith in the unselfish philanthropy of the colonial project allowed for a language policy that was
equally confident, strong, and self-assured. This policy, which was staunchly non-negotiable,
was for the implementation of English as the medium of instruction and as official language. The
policy remained virtually unchanged throughout the short but influential forty-eight year
American occupation.

80

William McKinley, “Speech at Cedar Falls, Iowa, October 16, 1899” in Speeches and Addresses
of William McKinely: From March 1, 1897 to May 30, 1900, (New York: Doubleday and McClure Co.,
1900), 305.
81
David Pescott Barrows, A History of the Philippines, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1907),
287.
82
Quoted in Williams, The Odyssey of the Philippine Commission, 346.
83
Charles Burke Elliott, The Philippines to the End of the Commission Government: A Study in
Tropical Democracy, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1917), 224.
44
So convinced were these officials of the radicalism of this project to civilize, modernize,
and democratize the Filipinos through the English language that they rationalized the policy with
horrifying uniformity and pursued and defended it with the conviction and fervor of a missionary.
Contemporary scholars still argue for the difficulty of evaluating the “shining” achievements of
American educational efforts (as well as efforts to implement other modern innovations) against
the violence of the Philippine-American War.
84
Yet even without looking at the commercial and
economic agendas that motivated the occupation of the Philippines, the debate is nullified when
the paradigm of education as an automatic and de facto achievement is problematized.
American’s obsessive efforts at mass, public education through English can be seen as
part of an attempt to implement a new religion. As in most religions where faith trumps logic, so
it was/is with the religion of American democracy whose followers believed/s in the neutrality of
its principles and in the impartiality of the language used to deliver its message. The zeal with
which these principles were pursued and the inconsistent logic used to pursue them (ironically
with the veneer of scientific detachment and rigorous investigation) suggest a similarity, rather
than an exception, to the rule of colonialism throughout the world.

The Myth of Exceptionalism
The British language policy for education in Malaya and Burma was viewed quite
differently from the way the Americans viewed their language policy for the Philippines. The
Americans proudly heralded its willingness to share English, en masse, with the colonized; the
British policy, on the other hand, emphasized vernacular education. American colonial officials

84
See the example of Karnow in footnote 72. A more recent example that applies poststructuralist
ideas to American colonial pedagogical efforts in the Philippines is Jane A. Margold’s “U.S. Pedagogy in
the Colonial Philippines” in the Journal of Historical Sociology, v.8, n. 4 (December, 1995): 375-394. By
using newer theories of social practice like those of de Certeau and Appadurai, she argues that the
American teachers actually defeated “the earnest, indigenous attempt by colonial administrators to
dismantle the indigenous structure of privilege in the new possessions, via an educational policy that would
open the schools to the lower classes.” (376). Margold unproblematically accepts colonial official’s
declarations of their earnest intentions and thus accepts the ideology inscribed within it. She thus reaffirms
the idea of colonialism as a conflicted phenomenon that is both destructive and nurturing. Her source for
this essay is David Barrows’ numerous declarations against caciquism, itself an invented American concept
which she takes as an unproblematized fact. James LeRoy defines “caciquism” as “the prime feature of the
village life of the Filipinos” and “the chief obstacle to social and political progress in the Philippines.” He
further describes it as “rural bossism. . .with the color of ‘the South before the war.’” James LeRoy,
Philippine Life in Town and Country, (New York: Putnam, 1905), 172-173.
45
were so convinced of this difference and often underscored the difference and emphasized
America’s remarkable educational project. Bernard Moses, a member of the Philippine
Commission described, in 1902, the American education policy this way: “The effort of
Americans to give the Filipinos a knowledge of English is in marked contrast to the policy carried
out by some of the European nations in their oriental possessions.”
85
Charles Burke Elliott
contrasts what is to him the superior American policy of mass public education in English to the

British policy which reserves education for a few: “In dealing with dependent and backward
people the liberal monarchial states in which representative governments exist assume that the
primary object of public education is to train the men who are to govern the masses. This idea
has dominated the educational work of England in India, Egypt and in the Crown colonies.”
86
W.
Cameron Forbes, likewise convinced of the exceptionalism of the education policy claimed:
“American achievement in the extension of primary education has been notably greater than that
of the British, Dutch, and other colonial administrations.”
87
However, a glance at the British
language and education policies might reveal more parallels and similarities rather than
differences.
The history of the implementation of mass, public education for the whole of the
Philippines is relatively easy to trace as it began with a single act—Act 74 of 1901. It is much
more difficult to trace the history of British educational policy in Burma and Malaya as the
occupation of both areas occurred in stages and various occupied territories held different
statuses. The Straits Settlements, for example, functioned more like colonies while the Federated
Malay States functioned as British protectorates but maintained their monarchs who run domestic
affairs. In Malaya, the policies would vary depending on the initiative/receptiveness of the Sultan
and would vary also for the different ethnic groups. In Burma, there were principally three kinds
of schools—the monastic schools (formerly Buddhist schools that the British government built
upon), lay schools (also schools that functioned prior to occupation and also built upon by the

85
Qtd in W. Cameron Forbes, The Philippine Islands, Volume 1 (Boston and New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928), 440.
86
Elliott, The Philippines, 220.
87

Ibid, 486.
46
British after occupation) and Anglo-vernacular schools (most which were set up by missionaries
also before occupation). Policies also varied depending on the kind of school, the region, and
also for the various ethnicities.
88

This is not to suggest that the Americans “had their act together” or were far more
committed to universal public education than the British were. The Americans came late at the
colonial scene and by the turn of the century the British too had, mastered the art of centralizing
educational policy and administration. In Malaya, a Federal inspector for schools was appointed
in 1897 and by 1906 the Departments of Education of the Straits Settlements and the Federated
Malay States were put under one Director of Education. In Burma, the directive for systematic
intervention in Burmese education began in the 1860s with the proposal of Sir Arthur Phayre to
create public schools by extending the curriculum of the already existing monastic schools. It
would, however, take several years before policy would actually be put into effect. Although the
imperative for public education was felt and policies had been formulated, the political will to
implement these policies were initially wanting. In the Straits Settlements, for example, the
Educational Dispatch of 1854 mandated the governments to focus on providing mass elementary
education in the vernacular. The mandate “seemed rhetorical rather than financial”
89
and it took
almost ten years before the work toward fulfilling the mandate could start. Phayre’s plan for
Burma “languished” and five years after the plan was formulated, only forty-six monastic schools
throughout Burma had adopted it.
90

The Americans are often quick to note the similar lack of political will to promote
education in the Spanish colonizers who had come before them. The report of the Philippine
Commission of 1903 describes the system of public education under the Spanish by compiling a

list of administrative problems that were never properly addressed:

88
The best source for a comprehensive and detailed history of the history of education in Burma
see U Kaung, “A Survey of the Education in Burma Before the British Conquest and After,” Journal of the
Burma Research Society 46 (1963): 9-125.
89
Peter Wicks, “Education, British Colonialism, and a Plural Society in West Malaysia: The
Development of Education in the British Settlements along the Straits of Malacca, 1786-1874,” History of
Education Quarterly 20 (1980): 179.
90
J.S, Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma Netherlands India,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 125.
47
The scheme of primary instruction provided by Spain was
adequate for the purpose of furnishing a fairly good measure of preliminary
education, but the want of proper administration by the local authorities, the lack
of interest in primary studies not directly related to the moral training and
religious instruction of the pupil, the ridiculously small salaries paid to teachers,
the selection of instructors incapable of teaching Spanish and more in need
instruction than capable of imparting it, and the distance of the barrios and
villages from the larger centers of population where the primary schools were
usually located, all united to bring at least partial failure when complete success
should have been the result of the well-intended efforts of Government.
91


The litany of the lack of “well-intended efforts of the Government” is there, of course, to
emphasize exceptional American political will to accomplish the comprehensive educational
program.

The Americans probably did draw an accurate picture of the Spanish efforts at popular
education, albeit drawn from an older model. Although, the Americans would continually depict
Spanish educational policies this way, the depiction is probably not a fair assessment of the case.
By the turn of the century, the British, both in Burma and Malaya, but particularly in
Malaya, had healthy and robust Departments of Education that were churning out dictionaries,
textbooks, new systems of syllabary, establishing schools of higher learning, and actively
pursuing improvements on their current school system. It is entirely possible that the slow start
the Spanish had, would have naturally progressed into comprehensive engagement in education
policy and administration much in the same way that the initial British lethargy over education
turned vigorous at around the turn of the century.
92

Whereas liberal ideas that the State should actively promote the welfare of its citizens
have been around for a long time, the moment when idea and action unify in the field of
education happens in Southeast Asia at the very end of the 19
th
century. This is, perhaps, related
to the beginnings of efforts to forge an organized and unified nation. After all, the demands of the
fledgling nation, as Gellner tells us, are a “level of literacy and technical competence, in a

91
From the Report of the Philippine Commission, 1903, (part 3, pages 889-73). Quoted in W.
Cameron Forbes, The Philippine Islands, Volume I, 415.
92
Gloria Cano argues that the American depiction of the Spanish colonial bureaucracy was based
on 16
th
and 17
th
century sources and that, actually, by the 1880s, Spain had started on a comprehensive

restructuring of its colonial policies. See Maria Gloria Cano Garcia, “The ‘Spanish Colonial Past’ in the
Construction of Modern Philippine History: A Critical Inquiry into the (Mis)Use of Spanish Sources,”
(Ph.D. diss., National University of Singapore, 2005), 78-84.
48
standardized medium, a common conceptual currency” imbibed by its members if they are to “be
properly employable and enjoy full and effective moral citizenship,” which “can only be provided
by something resembling a ‘modern’ national educational system.”
93
Universal public school
with a common curricula and therefore strong and efficient education departments become
essential to the effective administration of any modern society. The mark of this modern society
was that its subjects would transform into citizens.
The Americans came to the Philippines already with that consciousness and therefore
with the strong political will to implement comprehensive popular education. School reform had
just happened forty years before in the United States through the efforts of “common-school
reformers” like Henry Barnard and Horace Mann. These reformers argued for mass public
education through the trope of nationalism and the unified nation and correctly imputed into
public education the ability to transform the youth into good citizens who would preserve social
stability and create a new society. For reformers like Mann, a political education and the creation
of a citizenry that understood government and the rule of law was the principal purpose of public
education. This is evident in an 1848 document where Mann argues for universal public
education:
The partition of the powers of government into the three co-ordinate
branches—legislative, judicial, and executive—with the duties appropriately
devolving upon each; the mode of electing or appointing all officers, with the
reason on which it was founded; and especially, the duty of every citizen, in a
government of laws, to appeal to the courts for redress in all cases of alleged
wrong, instead of undertaking to vindicate his own rights by his own arm; and, in
a government where the people are the acknowledged sources of power, the duty
of changing laws and rulers by an appeal to the ballot, and not by rebellion—

should be taught to all children until they are fully understood.
94


Although reformers like Mann were struggling in the 1840s to get the idea of public education
established, by the turn of the century it would be an established idea. William H. Taft who in
1905 was governor-general of the Philippines, summons up the idea of “common school
education” and argues for it in the Philippines in a manner that recalls Horace Mann:

93
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983),
34.
94
Horace Mann, “Report on the Massachusetts Board of Education” in One Hundred Key
Documents in American Democracy, Peter B. Levy, ed. (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press,
1994), 102.
49
The theory upon which we justify, even on political grounds, the spread
of education is that the more the mass of ignorant people is reduced in number by
diffusing among them common school education, the less likely they are to be led
away by degenerate political fakirs into experiences and projects that can lead to
nothing but disaster.
95


The confidence with which the American exceptionalist discourse projected its strong political
will to implement universal public education was one that was probably based on older Spanish
and British policies and practices. Indeed, during the earlier part of the Nineteenth Century,
America’s own record for universal political education at home was pretty much like that of the
British and the Spanish colonies.

Part of the American discourse regarding their exceptionalism and the role of English in it
is their great fantasy about their unshakable commitment to democracy such that they would
endow a people with a common language, even if it was at the risk of uniting them in resistance to
their colonizer. The journalist John Bancroft Devis in 1905 boldly proclaimed: “The American
theory is this: Although a common tongue may bring rebellion and war, even that is better than a
peace maintained only by denying the Filipino people the first requisite to national progress; and
therefore the introduction of American schools and American teachers.”
96
Cameron Forbes made
a similar claim: “The American government had no fear of danger arising from welding the
Filipinos into a united people by putting them in understanding contact with each other.”
97
There
is great irony in such statements as, of course, quite the opposite of this did happen: America did
violently snuff out a nation that had come about through a common ideal and a functioning
common tongue and that was taking its first steps toward progress. Of course what the
Americans were tapping into here (and once again falsely disassociating themselves from) was
the connection between language, education and the demand upon a colonial power to keep the
local population in check. The great example of the failure of this project at English education
was India where an oversupply of Indians who had received English education (after reforms
initiated by Macaulay in the 1830s) and became a source of discontent.

95
Quoted in John Bancroft Devins, An Observer in the Philippines or Life in Our New
Possessions, (Boston: American Tract Society, 1905), 205.
96
Ibid, 191.
97
W. Cameron Forbes, The Philippine Islands, Volume I, 439.
50

The British vernacular policy was a direct result of this. In Malaya, the colonial official
most associated with this policy is Frank Swettenham, the first Resident General of the Federated
Malay States. He articulated his policy on language in education in this way:
The one danger to be guarded against is to teach English indiscriminately. It
could not be well taught except in a few schools, and I do not think it is at all
advisable to attempt to give to the children of an agricultural population an
indifferent knowledge of a language that to all but the very few would only unfit
them for the duties of life and make them discontented with anything like manual
labor.
98


English or education in English is, here, seen as having the power to create discontent and
vernacular education as the answer to maintaining order. The Americans were well aware of the
British policy and used it as a foil to their own belief in themselves as the apotheosis of
democracy. As one of the colonial officials who traveled around the Philippines with the
Philippine Commission said of the English policy: “this policy may create a single tongue to
criticize us and to demand our withdrawal, we are big enough to take the risk and to meet it when
it comes.”
99
Striking in such proclamations of willingness to allow democracy to happen (also
footnote 36 and 37 above) is that they all refer to a possible challenge to the American order that
is to happen in the future and their willingness to respond in appropriate democratic fashion.
Their past record of despotic response to criticism and Philippine unity is erased. Indeed, the
American strategy for introducing the soldier side by side to the teacher indicates a policy that
sees education as, in the least, a force to maintain order. Colonial officials at the turn of the
century, be they the British in Malaya or the Americans in the Philippines recognized in
education, be it in English or in the vernacular, a powerful tool for containment.
The manner by which the Americans and the British acknowledged their awareness of the
power of education to actually “contain” and create good and loyal colonials differed greatly.

Whereas statements made about the education policies during the military government openly
acknowledged the importance of education in the pacification of the Filipinos, official statements
regarding education by the American civil government were always very careful to stress

98
Quoted in Rex Stevenson, Cultivators and Administrators: British Educational Policy Towards
the Malay: 1875-1906, (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1975), 57.
99
Daniel R. Williams, The Odyssey of the Philippine Commission, (Chicago: McClurg, 1913),
133.
51
America’s disinterest in advancing an American agenda. American justifications for public
education from 1902 onward resound with the ideals of preparing the Filipinos for democracy.
100

There is also much insistence on the content of the education being sensitive to Philippine culture
(use of local fruits and flowers as examples, use of local children’s names rather than “John” and
“Mary,” etc.) as the education reports of 1910 shows.
101
The projection of a “neutral” America in
education took its cue from the discourse of the American presence in the Philippines which, most
of the time, could not admit that America was indeed an imperial power.
In William McKinley’s speeches one often finds this denial of imperial objectives as this
one, delivered on February 16, 1899 (just a few days after the start of the Philippine-American
War) shows:
Our concern was not for territory or trade or empire, but for the people
whose interests and destiny, without our willing it, had been put in our
hands…no imperial designs lurk in the American mind. They are alien to
American sentiment, thought, and purpose.
102

Twenty-three years later, Francis Burton Harrison, Governor General of the Philippines from
1913-1922, declared:
There is no room in the United States Constitution for colonies; officially
speaking, we have none. Alaska and Hawaii are territories; Porto Rico and the
Philippines dependencies, or insular possessions. Guam, Samoa, the Virgin
Islands, the Canal Zone—all are naval or military stations. Perhaps that very
freedom from fixed ideas and red-tape has enabled our Government to make a
swifter development of policy than is possible in the European colonial offices.
103


This is in stark contrast to the British attitude, which embraced its imperial status and reveled in
their Queen as the Empress of the British Empire.

100
See, for example the 1902 Report of the Philippine Commission that identifies the objectives of
public education to be to “contribute materially to the emancipation of the dependent classes and to the
development of that personal independence which is at present almost wanting in the great mass of people,
but which is necessary to the maintenance of a liberal government.” Quoted in W. Cameron Forbes, The
Philippine Islands, Volume I, 440.
101
Chapter four of this thesis has a more detailed discussion of this. Lewis E. Gleek, Jr. also has a
very long and defensive discussion of this issue in American Institutions in the Philippines, pages 109-113.
Gleek argues that the textbook material was “overwhelmingly Filipino” even as he reasons that the “values
represented by the selections were unmistakably American.” (page 111) See also Isabel Pefianco Martin’s
study of the American textbooks as tools of the state apparatus.
102
William McKinley, “Speech at Dinner of the Market Club, Boston, February 16, 1899” in

Speeches and Addresses of William McKinley: From March 1, 1897 to May 30, 1900, (New York:
Doubleday and McClure Co., 1900) 185-193.
103
Francis Burton Harrison, The Corner-stone of Philippine Independence: A Narrative of Seven
Years, (New York: The Century Company, 1922), 7.
52
In the British colonial government, there was little effort to hide that the objectives of
education were to create, as Macaulay famously declared, citizens who were “English in taste,
opinions, morals, and intellect.” In Burma, this effort would never be more apparent than in the
creation, in 1916
104
, of the Imperial Idea Committee whose objective was to “make every scholar
and student. . . feel that he is a member of a world-wide empire comprising members of numerous
races and nationalities professing various religions, and all united under His Majesty the King
Emperor.”
105
The Committee, formally known as the Standing Committee on the Imperial Idea,
was to do its work of fostering loyalty to the British empire through the schools through such
activities as “the widest possible distribution of portraits of their Majesties and the Royal
Family,” “provisions for the Union Jack for all schools,” “parades and loyal speeches,” “teaching
of songs and poems inculcating the imperial spirit,” “a song suitable for Burma as part of the
Empire,” “history, geography and reading lessons on the structure, growth, extent, importance
and meaning of the Empire, and the relation of Burma to the Empire,” and “the preparation of
suitable text-books.”
106
To ensure that the work of the Committee was to be disseminated in all
schools, the Committee itself would be composed of the most important officials in Burmese
education: principals of the colleges, all inspectors of schools, deputy commissioners from each
of the eight divisions of Burma and the superintendents of government-aided schools.
107

The
openness with which the intentions of Empire are stated here distinguish itself from the policy
American colonial policy statements that become increasing dense as colonial relations move
from military to civil government
108
and then toward independence.

104
Aye Kyaw explains that the Imperial Idea Committee was born during the First World War
because colonial authorities had to ensure their subjects’ loyalty during war time. See Aye Kyaw, The
Voice of Young Burma, (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University), 13.
105
Proceedings of the Government of Burma in the Education Department, No. 14E-42, dated the
5
th
of July 1916. The series and accession numbers from the National Archives of Myanmar are 1/15 (E)
4035. There are district reports for the Imperial Idea Committee all the way up to 1925 in the Archives.
106
Ibid.
107
Proceedings of the Government of Burma in the Education Department, No. 14E-57, dated the
18
th
of June 1917. The series and accession numbers from the National Archives of Myanmar are 1/8 674.
108
See also Paul Kramer’s explanation for the refinement of the quality of American racism as the
American government in the Philippines moves from military to civil in Blood of Government: Race,
Empire, the United States, and the Philippines, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006),
191-207.
53

American education policy makers would increasingly deny the attempt to Americanize
Filipinos through education yet, as a testimony given by Camilo Osias to the American House of
Representatives shows, the concern of the House for a love and respect of America was quite
similar to the concern of the Imperial Idea Committee. In 1930, Osias, Philippine Resident
Commissioner to the U.S., was asked to address the House and provide proof that public
education in the Philippines was fostering respect and loyalty to America. Osias, provided visual
evidence of the display of the American flag over the Philippine flag (as mandated by law) in
Philippine public schools. Armed with a number of school books, Osias also gave testimony by
citing page numbers of the schoolbooks that carried the Star-Spangled Banner, and selections
about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and numerous other selections that were
“lessons inculcating patriotism.”
109

It is important to note that at around the same time that the Imperial Idea Committee was
thinking of was in which to further emphasize the grandeur of British rule in Burma, the
American legislature was in the process of formulating the Jones Law which was the law that
would formally ensure Philippine independence (though exactly when this would be granted was
not stated). Though on first blush this may indeed suggest an exceptionalism and a prescience of
the end of the colonial world order, it is not so. This “end,” as the succeeding chapters of this
thesis will show, was really the beginning of a time when political agenda and ideology would be
increasingly denied or unstated and policies would be formulated around a web of knowledge
newly produced. One of these newly-produced knowledge was exceptionalism itself.

Autonomous History and the Altruistic Colonial Official
History has not always written up education efforts as tools of containment and the
impulse to institute education programs as coming from a desire merely to suppress a local
population. There are stories as well of genuine respect for the local culture and heroes with
sincere efforts toward eradicating ignorance. In Malay education history, the role of this hero is

109

Speech of Hon. Camilo Osias, in the House of Representatives, February 1, 1930. In Reel 019,
Image 4 of the Quezon Papers, Philippine National Library.
54
often assigned to R.K. Wilkinson, the first Federal Inspector of Schools (beginning 1903).
Wilkinson is often depicted as a true Malay scholar who was adept at both Malay and Chinese,
had a vast knowledge of Malay history and literature and a deep respect for the culture, had
published a Malay-English dictionary and various other scholarly work on Malay culture. He is
credited with the promotion of the publication of various Malay books and with the
standardization of Romanized Malay. Rex Stevenson describes Wilkinson this way: with his
scholarship and practical educational experience, there went an intellectual breadth, perception
and sensitivity that singles him out from contemporary Malayan administrators and education
officials.”
110
William Roff, likewise depicts him as someone who “possessed one of the most
able intellects among British Malayan officials of the time, allied to a real love for and sympathy
with Malay people”
111
and as someone who manifested “qualities rare for the time in their relative
freedom from ethnocentricity of judgment or moral patronage.
112

It is interesting to note how Wilkinson is lionized by these historians, sometimes at the
expense of other colonial officials. Roff, for example, compares Wilkinson to his successor, R.O.
Winstedt and finds Winstedt wanting. According to Roff, Winstedt was “a man of very different
caliber from Wilkinson [who] showed a fundamental lack of concern for Malay intellectual
development.”
113
Roff’s strong critique of Winstedt is based almost solely on his 1917 report on
vocational education.
114

This report is striking proof of the links in educational trends and ideas
throughout Southeast Asia during this time. Winstedt spent a few weeks traveling through the
Philippines observing schools and the program for vocational education and the report is the

110
Stevenson, Cultivators and Administrators, 104.
111
William R. Roff, The Origins of Malay Nationalism (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press,
1994), 130. Originally published in 1967.
112
Ibid, 131.
113
Ibid, 139. Many a scholar on Malaya would disagree with him. John Bastin, for example,
called Winstedt the “last and greatest of the British ‘colonial’ scholars of Malaya” who had “stayed longer
in the country than many of his predecessors, and his interest in Malay studies have been more
comprehensive and penetrating. See “Sir Richard Winstedt and His Writings” in Malayan and Indonesian
Studies: Essays Presented to Sir Richard Winstedt on his Eighty-Fifth Birthday, ed. John Bastin and R.
Roolvink, 9 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).
114
Proceedings of the Legislative Council of the Straits Settlements for the year 1917. Number 22,
“Report by Mr. R.O. Winstedt, Asst. Director of Education, S.S. and F.M.S., on Vernacular and In
Vernacular and Industrial Education in the Netherlands East Indies and the Philippines.” Winstedt’s has a
curt and rather humorous description of the language of instruction in the Philippines: “The curriculum on
the theoretical and academic side is simple in all the courses of study. The note of it is English, more
English, still more English. English is the only language taught.” (page c109)
55
outcome of this visit. Roff saw this report as evidence of Winstedt’s narrow view of education.
Says Roff: “Nothing in his 1917 report strikes one more than the absence of any thoughtful
reflection on the aims and effects of vernacular education (such as had been demonstrated by
Wilkinson), or of any concern at all beyond the practical aims of British colonial rule.”

115

A very curious parallel exists in the lionization/demonization, as well, of two American
education officials of the same time. In Social Engineering in the Philippines, Glenn May
depicts David Barrows, Director of Public Instruction (like Wilkinson, also beginning 1903) as
being very much part of a Jeffersonian tradition in his belief in universal education as a
precondition for development and progress and in his belief in a “’literary’ education for young
Filipinos, to emphasize academic subjects at the expense of manual training.”
116
The narrative
May constructs around Barrows concerns his defense of liberal education. “In line with the
superintendent’s predilection for literary education, the new course of study prescribed heavy
doses of reading, writing, spelling and phonetics.”
117
Much like Roff, Glen May underscores
Barrows’ singularity by criticizing his successor, Frank R. White. Under Frank White, May tells
us, “the principal aim of the schools was no longer to create literate, independent-thinking citizens
but rather to prepare Filipinos for productive labor.”
118
May also tells us that White, quite unlike
Barrows, wanted to put emphasis on intermediate education rather than on primary education and
reports that Barrows had “chosen to eliminate intermediate schools rather than barrio schools,”
and that White was willing “to expand intermediate education at the expense of primary
education.”
119

The historiographic parallels are actually not that uncanny when one considers that both
Roff and May were writing under the rubric of “Autonomous History,” a movement that, as Roff
himself describes, attempts to contrast itself from “existing dominant colonial historiographies,
which were primarily concerned to delineate, and often to justify the activities of the

115
Roff, 139.
116
Glenn Anthony May, Social Engineering in the Philippines: The Aims, Execution, and Impact
of American Colonial Policy, 1900-1913, (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1980), 98-99.
117
Ibid, 99-100.
118
Ibid, 113.
119
Ibid, 121.
56
colonizers.”
120
What Roff and May manage to do here is to create their own exceptionalism of
sorts. Their narratives create the character of the sincere colonial official who is the exception
within the colonial structure with their foils, their successors, as examples of the more typical
colonial officials concerned only with the efficient running of the colonial machinery.
The technique they employ is to present the interests/missions of Wilkinson and Barrows
(primary education, promotion of Malay culture) as self-evidently good without much situating it
within the much larger context of the web of policies, educational philosophies and colonial
politics. Taken out of their context, these interests/missions contribute to creating a picture of
remarkable individuals, shining examples of humanity within an oppressive order. Yet, as later
chapters will show, at least in the case of Barrows, the other parts of the picture that had been left
out in this Autonomous History narrative will help to restore Barrows as a right and proper
colonial official.
What Roff and May manage to do is to suggest, however, is that in history, as in
historiography, there exist many, many links in approaches and thought currents between the
British and American colonial officials. Exceptionalism is a great myth; not born but made.

120
Roff, xix. Harry J. Benda, one of the pioneer scholars associated to the Autonomous History
movement wrote the Foreword of Roff’s book. Social Engineering in the Philippines was May’s PhD thesis
at Yale under Harry J. Benda.