Primary instruction cannot be considered in a backward state, and,
indeed, I believe that, in proportion, there are more persons who can
read and write in these islands than in España, and in some [other]
civilized countries. [120] In each village there is a suitable
building for the use of a school, to which all the children must go
except during the months of sowing and of harvest. The master, and
other expenses, are paid from the communal fund. In view of this I
have wondered at seeing in many foreigners the strange belief that
the government does not permit the learning of reading and writing;
for I can assert that, in the archives of Manila I have found many
old and recently-dictated decrees, with a spirit diametrically
the contrary, which repeatedly enjoin the teaching of the Castilian
language. Women also share in this benefit, and I have found girls who
lived not only far from the capital, but in an isolated house distant
from the village, and, notwithstanding, they had learned to read and
write. One must confess, however, that they scarcely know other books
than those of devotion, especially a poem entitled the Pasion de Cristo
[i.e., Passion of Christ]. Besides the said schools, which are equal
in number to the villages and the schools of some private masters,
[121] both in the chief cities of the provinces and in the capital
where their number is very considerable (there being among them not a
few of music and drawing), there are found in Manila various public
institutions of education for men and women. In regard to them one
can form a correct judgment by the following explanation.