The Spanish Schools of My Boyhood

From the introduction which Doctor Rizal put to his Spanish version of an article on “The Transliteration of Tagalog”. His advocacy of the English style used in other Malay countries as more akin to the genius of Filipino dialects was considered extremely unpatriotic by most Spaniards.

You perhaps attended a village Spanish school to learn your letters. Possibly, you have had to teach the letters in Spanish to others smaller than yourself. In either case, you must have noticed what I have, that children find great difficulty in mastering certain syllables. These are ca, ce, ci, co, ga, ge, gua, gui, etc. It is because Filipino children do not understand the reasons for such irregularities. Nor do they know the cause for the changes in value of the sounds of certain consonants.

In the old times, blows fell like rain. Many pupils were whipped every day. Sometimes the schoolmaster broke the ferule and sometimes he broke the children’s hands. The first pages of their primers fell to pieces from long and hard use. The children cried. Even the monitors had to suffer at times. Yet those syllables which cost the children so many tears are of no use to them.

Those syllables are necessary only in the learning of Spanish, which language in my time only three boys in a thousand ever really learned. These three learned it in Manila, by hearing Spanish spoken, and by committing to memory book after book. I often wondered what was the use of learning it at all when in the end one spoke only Tagalog. But I kept my wonder to myself. I felt that to try to make reforms in the Philippines at that time would be to embark on a stormy voyage.

After I grew up, I had to write letters in Tagalog. I was shocked at my ignorance of its spelling. I was surprised, too, to find the same word spelled differently in the different works which I consulted. This proved to me how foolish it was to try to write Tagalog in the Spanish way. The spelling in use today by all Filipino scholars is a great improvement over the old style. I want to place the credit for this change where it belongs. These improvements are due to the studies in Tagalog of Dr. T. H. Pardo de Tavera alone. I have only been one of the most zealous champions of the change from the Spanish style.

This account was given Captain Carnicero, the Spanish commander of the Dapitan district where Rizal was in exile, in 1892.

My father was a friend of the owners of the Kalamba estate. He was intimate, too, with the manager in charge of the plantation. Frequently, important visitors came to the plantation house. Then the manager asked my father for whatever he needed. He very often asked for a turkey, and my father gladly gave it to him. The poultry yard at our house was always full of turkeys because my father was a fancier of these fowls.

But one season there came some epidemic and almost all the turkeys died. Only a few pairs, which were being kept for breeding, were left. Just at this time the manager one day sent for the customary turkey. Naturally my father had to tell the messenger that he had no turkeys to spare, because the greater part of them had died. This reply made the manager furiously angry. He wound up his abuse by saying, “You will pay for this in the end!” A few days later my father received a note from the manager, saying that he was going to raise the rent on the land which my father occupied. He said the rent would be one-third more than father was then paying.

The reason for this decision was clear. It was because my father had refused to give the manager the turkey. The proof of this was that no other tenant received any such notice.

Father paid this increase on the day set, without a single word of protest, being among the first to pay. But after a few months, there came another note. In it the manager gave notice that the rent would be doubled. This, he said, was because my father was growing rich from the rented land where he had installed machinery for making sugar.

My father could not pay this price. Then he was summoned to appear in court; and finally the alcalde ordered him to leave the land. So he lost his houses and machinery, all because of a turkey.