Finally, passing over many other more or less insignificant reasons,
the enumeration of which would be interminable, let us close this
dreary list with the principal and most terrible of all: the education
of the native.

From his birth until he sinks into his grave, the training of the
native is brutalizing, depressive and antihuman (the word 'inhuman'
is not sufficiently explanatory: whether or not the Academy admit it,
let it go). There is no doubt that the government, some priests like
the Jesuits and some Dominicans like Padre Benavides, have done a
great deal by founding colleges, schools of primary instruction, and
the like. But this is not enough; their effect is neutralized. They
amount to five or ten years (years of a hundred and fifty days at most)
during which the youth comes in contact with books selected by those
very priests who boldly proclaim that it is an evil for the natives
to know Castilian, that the native should not be separated from his
carabao, that he should not have any further aspirations, and so on;
five to ten years during which the majority of the students have
grasped nothing more than that no one understands what the books
say, not even the professors themselves perhaps; and these five to
ten years have to offset the daily preachment of the whole life,
that preachment which lowers the dignity of man, which by degrees
brutally deprives him of the sentiment of self-esteem, that eternal,
stubborn, constant labor to bow the native's neck, to make him accept
the yoke, to place him on a level with the beast--a labor aided by
some persons, with or without the ability to write, which if it does
not produce in some individuals the desired effect, in others it has
the opposite effect, like the breaking of a cord that is stretched
too tightly. Thus, while they attempt to make of the native a kind of
animal, vet in exchange they demand of him divine actions. And we say