Filipino child who entertained the faintest suspicion that it was possible for him to make a fool of himself.  Nor is the attitude of dissent among Filipinos limited to those who express themselves.  It is sometimes very trying to feel that after long-winded eloquence, after citation and demonstration, you have made no more real impression upon the silent than upon the talkative, and that, indeed, the gentle reserve of some of your auditors is based upon the conviction that your own position is the result of indomitable ignorance.  One of my friends has met this spirit in a class in the Manila High School.  A certain boy insists that he has seen the iron head of a thunderbolt, and although he makes “passing grades” in physics, he does not believe in physics.  He regards our explanations of the phenomena of lightning as a parcel of foolishness in no wise to stand the test of his own experience, and nothing can silence him.  “But, ma’am,” he says, when electricity is under discussion, “I am see the head of a thunder under our house.”  This young gentleman will graduate in a year or two, and the tourist from the States will look over the course of study of the Manila High School and go home telling his brethren that the Filipino children are able to compete successfully with American youth in the studies of a secondary education.  I myself had a heart-breaking time with a sixth-grade class in one of the intermediate schools of Manila.  The children had been studying animal life and plant life, and could talk most learnedly about anthropoid apes, and “habitats” and other things; but they undertook to convince me that Filipino divers can stay under water an hour without any diving apparatus, and that the reason for this power is that the diver is “brother to a snake”—­that is, that when the mother gave birth to the child, she gave birth to a snake also, and that some mysterious power remains in persons so born.

Filipino children are not restless and have no tradition of enmity between teacher and pupil to urge them into petty wrong-doing.  Their attitude toward the teacher is a very kindly one, and they are almost uniformly courteous.  Their powers of concentration are not equal to those of American children, and they cannot be forced into a temporarily heavy grind, but neither do they suffer from the extremes of indolence and application which are the penalty of the nervous energy of our own race.  They are attentive (which the American child is not) but not retentive, and they can keep up a steady, even pull at regular tasks, especially in routine work, at which American children usually rebel.  In fact, they prefer routine work to variety, and grow discouraged quickly when they have to puzzle out things for themselves.  They will faithfully memorize pages and pages of matter which they do not understand, a task at which our nervous American children would completely fail.  They are exceedingly sensitive to criticism, and respond quickly to praise.  Unfortunately the narrow experience