Educating Philippine youths in the crafts

Media

Part of The American Chamber of Commerce Journal

Title: Educating Philippine youths in the crafts
Language: English
Year: 1936
Rights
Abstract: Getting jobs, graduates of the School of Arts and Trades hold them—they are making good in the mines.
Fulltext: February, 1936 THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL 9 Educating Philippine Youths in the Crafts Getting jobs, graduates of the School of Arts and Trades hold them—they are making good in the mines C,ur,„, ./ Mr. Gro» Instructor Irmeo Mendosa gives a lesson in lathe work on one of the school's largest steel lathes. The Philippine School of Arts and Trades is one of the best schools in the Islands, as it always has been. Year by year its facilities are enlarged, and from time to time its entrance requirements have been raised until now only high-school graduates are enrolled and no young man patronizes the school who does npt plan making it the apprenticeship to his life’s calling—employment in a trade or craft. Visits to the school, on calle San Marcelino just opposite Meralco’s fine remodeled office building, are always amazing. Equipped with modern tools, driven by electricity, and this produced by the school, the various shops are beehives of industry all day long. Design given basic attention, you marvel at the first rate work, from all departments, turned out at the most moderate cost. Do you stop to think what the school may make for you: anything in iron, anything in wood, anything in bronze, brass, and no doubt silver too. Just now a foundry is being installed, casting pieces up to 1,000-pounds weight. You wish an ornamental iron fence, the school can turn it out. You wish some specially designed brass fixtures, the school will turn them out. Or you wish a bedstead, modern or antique, four-poster or what—leave it to the school’s woodworking department under the painstaking Pedro de Jesus. Graduate of the school where he now heads wood working, De Jesus has been teaching there since 1913 and knows woodwork in all its subtleties. He has in his depart ment every necessary aid. Such are the -unquestioned qualifications of the school’s faculty members. Every man is a master of his art or craft, and devoted to it. Gregorio Sevilla is in charge of iron work. Graduated where he now teaches in 1922, he went on to the University of the Philippines and then took postgraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, after which he worked with the Westinghouse company. Teofilo del Rosario is in charge of drafting. Graduated in 1911, as a finished craftsman he is a graduate of Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburg. There could be no better preparation for a teaching career. Fixtures at the school are the chief clerk, Pedro Cruz, keeper of the records and courteous greeter of visitors, and Ricardo Albang, property clerk, who books the orders and delivers the goods. The careful work of these old employes is productive of high efficiency. Academic instruction under Arthur H. Riss, University of Washington ’27, is adjusted with the vocational courses. Vital is the course in technical English. (We invite the school’s attention to Basic, Oxford’s English language of 850 words, lending itself to supplementa tion with technical terms; and to this end we publish a piece from Benjamin Franklin, in Basic). The school’s superintendent is Leon C. Grove. England manages the practical administration of empire largely with graduates of her classical Eton, whose curious preparation is mastery of Latin and Greek. Similar has been Grove’s preparation for bossing a highly technical and practical school. Before the World War he managed 3 years at Pennsylvania, in mechanical engineering; the war claimed him 2 years, 1917 to 1919, and he did not get back to school, this time at the University of Washington, until 1926, but there he was graduat ed as a Bachelor of Science in Engineering. Meantime he had spent 6 years as a high-school principal in various Alaska towns, and afterward he came to the Philippines and spent nearly 8 years in the provinces as provincial superintendent of public schools before gravitating to his present berth— where he fits nicely. Mrs. Grove is also a teacher, in academic work. The school’s enrollment is 1,100; beginners are rigidly confined to exercises, but farther along many students earn (Please lurn Io page /?) C^„.„ ./ Mr. Grr.r Students learn their crafts on machines quite the capacity of those they will use in commercial shops. 12 THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL February, 1936 surely) to be as polite as her pupils. For the always startling incongruities of such a teaching experience were highly risible. The chapter is one of the book’s best because it tells more of the talented author, as well as of the striving .Japan ese students, than any other. Cherry-blossoms and temples, inns and sukiyaki— many ways and wonders of the country side arc given graceful narrative, with relieving humor occasionally. “But the bowl of brew! It looked like a puree of spinach, it tasted like boneset tea, extra strong, with a touch of strych nine and a strong flavor of quinine.” The little known service of Will Adams, the English mariner whom Iycyasu kept in Japan to father the Japanese merchant marine, is recounted with vivid imagination. Quoted from the Anjin’s (pilot’s) own letter is this reference to the Philippines: “This shippe, in the yeare of our Lord 1609, the King lent to the Gouvernour of Manila, to goe with eightie of his men to saile to Acupulca, which shippe theay found so goode as theay never returned agaun, butt, in ’1611, this Gouvernour returned another shippe in her rooine, with a great present.” Good ships, those the Briton built. Rambling among schools brought out con trasts lucidly set forth. “It always gave me a headache to see the poor little * mites struggling with the ideographs. Think of carrying seveial thousands of those bird-tracky things in your head. . . .” “A fearful clatter and soon a half a hundred schoolboys will appear on a run. . . rigidly requiied as a means to increase the stature of the Japanese race.” “The old Japanese maxim, that the pupil must never walk within seven feet of his teacher lest he tread upon his shadow, is figuratively still in practice.” Trained to repression of emotion, the Japanese offered perhaps their best expression of feeling (and so can be gauged the measure of a country by the observant visitor) at times of national catastrophe. The author recounts Tokyo’s shock upon the assassination of Prince Ito, who had risen from the peasant class to his high place. This chapter on funerals includes the unique ESTABLISHED 1812 ------- 7 ~ EFF^EF-------Capital (Paid) - U.S. $127,500,000.00 Surplus - - - - ” 30,000,000.00 Undivided Profits ” 11,898,088.99 -------- =FEEE =-------COMPLETE BANKING SERVICES' MANILA OFFICE National City Bank Building incident of a Buddhist service for Edward VII of England. And the gentle Empress Haruko was taken on her last journey in the night, as prescribed by custom, by lantern light. Stratford Company of Boston arc the publishers. _____ The Colt revolver is as well-known as the telephone, yet the life of its inventor was shrouded until the recent discovery of voluminous cor respondence; whereupon Jack Rohan has written Yankee Anns Maker: The Incredible Career of Samuel Colt. Starting as a medicine-man, Sam Colt soon engaged in mass-production business firearms, and the times were for him. The Seminole War, the expanding west, the Civil War—these made the name famous, and the man a fortune, even to the point of establishing a business in England. Steel-Dictator is by H. O’Connor, famed for his Mellon’s Millions. “What the steel stock holders do not know—what the consumer of steel, the small businessman who admires or fears steel, the workers or labor leaders do not know”, carefully documented, is the author’s theme. The blood and iron of steel form a basic world industry, and every citizen’s life is affected by policies controlling it. Inflation is come to America, says L. L. BAngas, in his The Boom Begins, a limp paper outline-form discussion in three parts: The Monetary Aspect of Business Fluctuation, The President's Problems, and An Appreciation of the Stock Market Situation. Quickly readable, with graphs, this book gives the European slant, from a man whose sense of the market Fortune calls uncanny. George Seldes needs no accolade as a vivid writer; his Sawdust Caesar contains facts snatch ed from under the noses of Fascisti. Sensational the book is, and must be, for Mussolini dreams of an African empire and is undaunted by ob stacles. Seldes writes objectively, is perhaps unsympathetic to Latin timbre. All these are at Philippine Education, but at least two of them will be out of stock soon. Educating Philippine Youths (Continued from page 9} much of their support from the commercial work their skill produces. Graduates of the school this year will number 410, of whom 110 will be graduated in the secondary course and some 300 from the technical courses such as woodworking, automobile repair, machine shop, marine and stationary engine operation, practical electricity, radio mechanics, building construction, plumb ing, drafting. It was 2 years ago that conversion of the school into one purely technical began, with gradual elimination of the secondary course. The last first-ycar high-school class admitted will be graduated next year. This has raised the school’s technical standards materially; the old practice of boys flunking out of other schools turning to this one as a last hope is quite dead, with ample schooling and native intelligence prerequisite to enrollment. While the change lessens the commercial work turned out, and hence the school earns a lesser portion of the cost of its support than it once did, the careful craftsmanship imparted makes up more than the difference. The youths now enrolled arc in earnest. Nor docs anything reflect better the real spirit of the school, pi ide of the students in their alma mater, than the field of outdoor sports in which the school always has a crack baseball team and some topnotch track-and-field men. There arc a base ball diamond and tennis courts at the grounds. Here then are hundreds of young men, selected, preparing for industrial employment in the Islands; and the records show few failures among aspirants who land jobs. Pause a moment to pay tribute to old Amigos del Pais under whose benevolent auspices the school was founded in 1889 as the Escuela de Artes y Oficios, equivalent to its English name today. Though interest soon lagged, as the revolution came on, and had closed prior to the end of the Spanish regime, at one time he boasted 1,700 students enrolled in printing, carving, carpentry, masonry, ceramics, blacksmithing, shoemaking, tinsmithing, wheelwrighting, and commercial branches. The good premises and buildings the school has are gratifying. Solidly built and roofed with tile, the shops and all other buildings arc most presentable from the outside. Out of the chaos within, due to dynamic interest and ac tivity, emerge the school’s ordered products and skilled graduates. Some of the best American educators ever employed in the Philippines have headed this school, anong them Dr. W. W. Mar quardt, later to be Director of the Philippine public school system. Every director has taken the interest in the school that the present one exhibits, Dr. Luther B. Bewley. So the school stands what it is, a leading element in Philippine modern education—a credit to the Islands in every way. But the school contrasts with what Manila’s city schools offer. Graduating into high school and going on in the city schools, boys find no vocational courses at all; in these schools the one choice is the academic course preparatory to college. IN RESPONDING TO ADVERTISEMENTS PLEASE MENTION THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL