Back to School

Few Philippine school buildings survived the years of war (and the best of those that were left had been taken over for hospitals and by the Army). Some classrooms had neither desks nor chairs. Few pencils, little paper and no chalk was to be had. The books that remained were encrusted with the pastemarks of Japanese censors. This was the Filipino education picture last week, as tens of thousands of children went back to school for the first time since the Jap occupation.

What the war had done to 40 years of patient educational progress was plain to see in battered Manila. Only 20 of the 48 big elementary schools could open. Their makeshift quarters accommodated only a third of the prewar enrollment (112,000). Three of the city's four high schools, which normally served 26,000 students, were hard put to it to take in 4,000. In two of them, students found refugee squatters who refused to budge.

The universities were in even worse shape. The once-handsome campus of the University of the Philippines was a shell-pocked wreck. Santo Tomas University, which had housed civilian war prisoners during the occupation, managed to reopen its law, education, commerce and liberal arts colleges, but most of its halls were filled with hospital beds. Luzon's small private colleges, which once had 22,000 students, reopened with only skeleton courses for their few thousand registrants.

Said the Commonwealth's Under Secretary of Instruction Florentino Cayco: "It is a case of starting all over."

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