| September
03, 2001
The Thomasite
experiment
By Michael L. Tan
LAST Aug. 21 was
the 100th anniversary of the arrival of the Thomasites, 523 mostly young
Americans who came on a ship named the Thomas. Earlier, President
William McKinley had ordered the establishment of a system of primary
instruction for Filipinos and the introduction of English as a common
medium of communication.
The Education Act of 1901 authorized the colonial government to recruit
American teachers to help establish the new educational system. The
government offered salaries higher than the going rates in the United
States. More than 8,000 Americans applied, including 80 former soldiers
who had chosen to stay on as teachers in the Philippines after the
Filipino-American war. The rest had to be transported from the United
States: 48 arrived in June 1901 on the ship Sheridan while 523 came on
the Thomas. More were to follow in the next year, swelling the total
number of American teachers to 1074.
Who were these Americans, and what motivated them to come to the
Philippines? We have some clues from a book, "The Log of the
Thomas," describing the teachers and their voyage across the
Pacific. (Excerpts from that book are posted on a website dedicated to
the Thomasites: www.thomasites100.org.)
The Thomasites came from all over the United States, the largest numbers
coming from the more cosmopolitan areas such as New York, California,
Massachusetts and Michigan. They came from all kinds of schools,
including Ivy League universities such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
Many were young, some fresh out of school. But there were also older
teachers, with many years of experience and with impressive backgrounds,
including, for example, one C. Goddard, who had a master’s of law
degree from the Catholic University.
The Thomasites’ interests were certainly varied. We learn from the
ship’s log that they lugged in musical instruments and telescopes. The
Thomasites also had a sense of humor: "The Log of the Thomas"
included observations about co-passengers such as flies, fleas and
German cockroaches. One Thomasite wrote a poem about someone flirting
with a woman making "goo-goo eyes" who, it turned out, was
rolling her eyes from seasickness.
There were 141 women among the Thomasites, an impressive number when you
consider this was the turn of the 20th century. The composition of the
Thomasites tells us about the uneven pace of women’s emancipation in
the United States at that time: states like Alabama and Georgia only had
male teachers but California’s contingent had 24 women, outnumbering
the 17 men. One wonders about how headstrong some of these women may
have been and the impact they had on young Filipinos.
The Thomasites included a few families, that is, husband and wife teams,
some with children. From Hawaii, there were the Townsends and Hilts,
each with three children. From Washington state, there were the Davises,
who brought their five children. (The ship’s log also mentions there
were two cats and three dogs on board the Thomas. I don’t know if they
were pets that came with any of the families.)
What spurred these Americans to come over, sometimes with their
families? It was probably the notion of the "white man’s
burden" to uplift their "little brown brothers" in
America’s first colonial enterprise. "The Log of the Thomas"
features a poem written by Carrie Rice Shaw, who saw the Thomas as it
sailed off to the Philippines. Shaw imagines the islands "Where
dark-hued children playing/Beneath their sunny skies." Her last
paragraph captures the Americans’ sense of manifest destiny: "And
on the deck was Destiny/And Love all silence-shod/And true-eyed Faith,
transmitting/The messages of God."
Not all of these teachers were fired by this sense of mission. One of
the Americans described his colleagues as "a regiment of
carpetbaggers, come to exploit the country in their small way."
Letters from one of these teachers, Blaine Free Moore, showed him to be
more interested in mining adventures than in teaching. He had little
love for Filipinos, describing his pupils in Tarlac as "170
wriggling, squirming, talking barbarians" and Filipino teachers at
a provincial normal school as "brown half-savages."
It would be unfair, of course, to generalize from this one character.
The American teachers did have to make great sacrifices. Within the
first 20 months after the arrival of the Thomasites, 27 of them died of
tropical diseases or were murdered by bandits. Glenn Anthony May in his
book, "Social Engineering in the Philippines," writes about
how the Filipino-American war had left the country in shambles, so
teaching conditions were difficult, some places without any school
houses. Salaries were often delayed, and were paid in Mexican pesos,
which was constantly being devalued.
There were conflicts with the Catholic priests, who suspected that the
mostly Protestant American teachers were out to proselytize young
Filipinos, and with Filipino maestros accustomed to older teaching
methods of making students read aloud and memorizing everything by rote.
So, while one could argue that the American teachers were important
tools in training young Filipinos to accept their new colonial master,
they also brought in new teaching methods which encouraged Filipinos to
be more critical and inquisitive.
More than a hundred of the Thomasites stayed on even after their
assignments, some for the rest of their lives. These included A. V. H.
Hartendorp, who founded the Philippine Magazine, Mary Fee who wrote the
book "An American Woman’s Impression of the Philippines"
(reprinted some years back by GCF Books), and Austin Craig who became an
authority on Rizal. Some of those who stayed married locally and raised
their families here.
If some of these Thomasites had lived on to the 21st century, it would
have been interesting to get their thoughts about that experiment they
launched a hundred years ago, an experiment to bring, as another poem
dedicated to the Thomasites goes, "culture and truth" to the
islands.
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