JOSÉ VASQUEZ AGUILAR was born March 23, 1900 in Barrio Caduhaan, Cadiz, Negros Occidental, the Philippines. After his graduation from Cadiz Central School in 1915, he taught for a year in the one-teacher barrio school of Caduhaan before entering Negros Occidental High School at Bacolod. Graduating in 1920, he left the next year for the United States where he worked his way through college, receiving his Bachelor of Philosophy degree from Denison University in Ohio in 1925. A member of the debating team, he participated in competitions with other colleges, and, in 1924, was elected to Tau Kappa Alpha debating fraternity. That year he also was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, a national scholastic honorary society.

On his return to the Philippines, he was appointed as a teacher of English at Negros Occidental High School. In 1926, he was promoted to Academic Supervisor of Masbate Division and the following year was transferred to Cebu in the same capacity. He stood first in the Division Superintendents' Examination in December 1927 and became Division Superintendent for Camarines Norte in 1928, successively serving in this position in Antique, Samar, Capiz and Iloilo Divisions up to 1954.

Dr. AGUILAR was asked in 1948 to serve as Consultant on Elementary Education to the Joint Congressional Committee on Education and later to the UNESCO Consultative Education Mission to the Philippines. In 1954, he was invited by the Chinese Nationalist government as an advisor on community schools to work for several months with the Taiwan Provincial Department of Education and the U.S. Economic Mission on the community schools of Chutung and Tungshih, pilot projects of a new educational movement in Taiwan.

In April 1954, he was appointed to a full professorship in the College of Education at the University of the Philippines, receiving a grade promotion within four months after taking up his duties.

Awarded a Smith-Mundt Fellowship in 1955, he traveled for two months in the U.S. observing Asian study centers and applied linguistics programs. When the Social Science Research Center, in 1956, was invited to make recommendations to the Philippine Government for framing an economic program, Dr. AGUILAR was named as panel member in the field of community schools. In the same year, he was designated as University of the Philippines observer to the Fifth Annual Assembly of the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession at Manila and attended a workshop for teachers in community schools in Vietnam.

In 1956, Dr. AGUILAR also was appointed Director of the University of the Philippines Extension Division. He was named head of the Department of Education, College of Education, University of the Philippines in June 1958, became Acting Dean of the College in October of the same year and in December was appointed Dean.

In early 1959, he served as Acting Chairman and Project Director of the Community Development Research Council in the absence of the Chairman, and in May retired from government service to accept the Directorship of the Philippine Center for Language Studies.

In recognition of his contribution to Philippine education and community welfare, the Central Philippine University at Iloilo City, in 1952, conferred on Dr. AGUILAR a Ph.D. (honoris causa). He has also received awards from the Philippine Tuberculosis Society (1950), the Southern Iloilo Varsitarians (1951), the Iloilo Press Club (1952), the Boy Scouts of the Philippines (1953), and the Philippine Association of School Superintendents for "distinguished leadership, particularly in the promotion of the community-school movement in the Philippines" (1959). He is a life member of the Philippine Public School Teachers Association and member and past president of the Philippine Association of School Superintendents.

Among his published works on his educational concepts are articles on the case for the vernacular, education for the "forgotten masses," the influence of language in community life, the native approach to education, and the significance of bilingualism in Philippine education. He has written detailed reports on the Iloilo experiment with the vernacular and the development of the Santa Barbara Community School, as well as a monograph entitled "This is Our Community School." Other articles present a retrospect and a forecast on the community-school movement, and discuss conceptual fallacies motivating occupational education and the developing approach to the occupations in the Philippines. Two of his articles describing the community-school idea and its practice were published abroad. The first, "Development of Community School Concepts in Other Countries," appeared in the Fifty-Second Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education in 1953, and the second, "Community Schools of the Philippines," in the 1957 Yearbook of the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Dr. AGUILAR is also the author of a novel entitled The Great Faith, published in 1948, which besides being a story of the occupation period, "attempts to portray faith in cultural roots as they responded to friendly encouragement from a great democratic nation."

Throughout his career as an educator, Dr. AGUILAR has been particularly concerned with reaching the rural folk. Though public education had spread rapidly into the rural districts under the American administration, he felt the gap between what the barrio children learned in the school and the realities of their daily living was too great for them to bridge.

He saw language as one major problem. The second language used in school was a world apart in the rural districts from the vernacular at home. The policy of using English "for common intercourse in business, professional, intellectual, political and cultural affairs" had, Dr. AGUILAR said, "rapidly affected the . . . unification of the upper social level" but "it is naive to claim that it is the language that performed the same function among the large lower social stratum. The context of education transmitted through it does not grow roots in the native soil."

The cohesion between blood and language, he argued, is of such nature as to defy radical alteration. Taking as the base of the Filipino racial composition the prehistoric Indonesia-Malayan migrations, he saw that the rural communities had yielded little in the field of language to 430 years of Spanish and American political control. The some 43 distinct linguistic groups (and 87 dialect groups) may be regrouped to form l0 larger linguistic units embracing 85 per cent of the people, for purposes of instruction in the vernacular. In this connection, he has stressed the need for research into the anthropology of linguistic groups.

Another problem was the separation of the schools themselves from rural community life. "In spite of its enviable position," he wrote, "the public school is traditionally removed from the people. They know little about it except that the children read and recite from the books in the classrooms and are taught manners as only the teachers know how. On the teacher's part he guards jealously the hermit-like isolation of the school for fear of lay interference in its work . . ." Schools in the larger centers of population had awakened to the necessity of taking into account the problems and needs of the pupils, the home and the community. Home visitations, participation in civic activities, musical programs, garden-day festivals, and the like had become common practice in the towns. "Out of this collaboration there arises an undeclared understanding between teachers and people that the school is their joint concern. Then later, as the people understood . . . that the public school is supported by public funds besides a large amount of voluntary contributions, there came about a more important understanding that the public school is for the service of the people." It has been his aim to nurture a similar understanding in the rural districts.

An opportunity to bring the schools and the people together came in 1938. The report of the community work undertaken under the leadership of Dr. AGUILAR and the public schools in his division is the first recorded beginning of community work in the rural Philippines outside of the community assemblies. "It was an opportunity," he says, "because the project would line a farmer's pocket with twice the coins he had . . . before, and any project of that nature was bound to get a hearing."

"The setting was Aklan, Capiz, a rural area of small landowning farmers, and a region blessed with an even rainfall almost throughout the year. In that year, a farmer . . . experimented on, and succeeded in, the production of a second palay crop . . . The farmer gave me the story of his struggle. The next thing to do before the next planting season came was to sell the idea . . . Who would do it?"

Dr. AGUILAR’s teaching force of 1,200 was scattered all over the province, and he wondered whether they would take the trouble to do missionary work. "Doubling rice production in their community was no more their work—so it was thought at least—than attending to the sick in households. The opportunity, however, was too good to miss. A specially talented farmer had done something revolutionary and he needed organization such as the network of schools to spread the idea. The teachers took up the challenge . . ." By 1940, second cropping had become an established practice in the province.

This first success in group dynamics convinced Dr. AGUILAR that "the old tao, he of the lowly, struggling mass, was capable of social and economic achievement. If he did not contribute more to his community and nation, it was because he had need for leadership . . . on the spot."

He asked himself why this project succeeded and other approaches had flourished and died. One answer was "the hidden power of group action." Also both of the two previous attempts to reach the rural folk—community assemblies and civico-educational lectures—were government-sponsored, "they emanated from Manila and were top heavy with words" and Dr. AGUILAR concluded that "sooner or later the verbiage would shoo away the tao whose sense for the practical mere words could not challenge."

His Capiz experience with the second palay crop, and with sanitation and home improvements was characterized by the "drive" on a province-wide scale and was blue-printed at the provincial capital. The individual school participated but did not develop a community personality. Though second cropping had yielded to this method of attack, less tangible changes would require an effort "as continuous as the life of the community itself."

With this background and two years of general preparation in Iloilo after his transfer there, he concentrated experimental educational effort in two communities Santa Barbara, a poblacion, and Tina, a barrio, in the midst of low lying hills. "Limited only by the capacity of the teachers to lead, the school was to discover the personality of its community, invest itself with that personality as a starting point and move step by step, the community with it, in a steady process of self-improvement. Thus, while inspiration might flow from the top, the struggle to build up human resources was to be waged at the bottom . . . engaged in by the teacher, the common tao, and his child." The use of the vernacular in the lower grades as a primary medium of instruction was linked with the community-school program by the work performed by the "little teachers."

In putting the community-school in operation, Dr. AGUILAR gave attention to general rather than to specific improvement in community life, emphasizing the educational purpose of such generalized activities. A variety of innovations were being tested simultaneously to capture the imagination and cooperation of the children, out-of-school youth and adults in the community, including off-campus classes, partnerships in farming between father and sons, the "learn one, teach one" plan for the "little teachers." The community-school idea was not new, but here was the first broad and sustained application of the scheme in the Philippines.

In 1952, Dr. AGUILAR sent in a request to the Director of Public Schools for an evaluation of the work of the schools in his division. The Director appointed from the General Office the chiefs of the adult education, curriculum, evaluation and research, instruction, and vocational education divisions to undertake the task. Their report states that "the committee saw in this undertaking a challenge of vital importance. For the first time a school division took the initiative of requesting an appraisal of its school program and activities (indicating) the progressive spirit of the teachers, faith in the program for which they have labored so long, and an open mind so essential to long-range planning in education. Again, the Committee, saw . . . a high sense of educational leadership, willing to submit itself to a test for the validity of its program and eager to assert itself and its achievements, all in the interest of an adequate and satisfying school system."

The Committee found that the teachers who had borne the greater burden were overwhelmingly in favor of continuing the community scheme and believed the integrative-activity program was generally effective in developing the growth of children. It was convinced that the public schools of Iloilo had favorably affected living conditions, even in the poorest communities. In community beautification, success had been mostly on the purok, or district level. There was "palpable evidence" that the children were being educated for a life based on work and people seemed to be retaining better customs and usages than in the past.

What particularly marked the program was "the determined, reasoned-out push by the teachers and parents working more closely together here than in other provinces." The Committee was impressed by the freedom the Superintendent had given to his teachers, principals and district supervisors, after he had laid out the underlying philosophy, to work out their own program to suit local needs. "The Division Superintendent has reinterpreted leadership," the report stated. "What he seems to have lost in his official or hierarchical standing seems to have been added to the status and the freedom of his teachers, bringing the Superintendent and teachers close together. This does not mean the Superintendent has abdicated . . . he has merely allowed for the full use and development of the intelligence of . . . his teachers. Such group action is a healthy environment for democracy."

In its examination of the use of the vernacular in the primary school, the Committee found the experimental group superior in personality—more dominant, extroverted, emotionally and soundly mature—and more interested in their schools, as evidenced by the greater number surviving from the first to the fourth grade. The personal and native approach through Hiligaynon had relieved the teachers of the many traditional drudgeries of teaching for they "could speak heart to heart with the adults and the young." The experiment proved that the barrio people could learn effectively and acquire skills easily relating to their occupations, health and citizenship duties when they were taught in their vernacular. It seemed reasonable, the report concluded, to generalize and extend the use of the vernacular as a primary medium of instruction in the primary grades and to further develop the community-school program.

The achievement in Iloilo would not have been possible except for the full support of the Bureau of Public Schools. In keeping with its policy of decentralization and democratization, Superintendent AGUILAR was encouraged and allowed great freedom of action so long as his work was not in contradiction to the laws of the land.

Believing in the changing nature of things human and natural, Dr. AGUILAR saw the masses stirring without "an adequate educational ballast to keep them steady," and recognized as his challenge the development of an instructional medium that would connect with their basic needs. There were many drawbacks—inadequate facilities, a too rapid expansion of classes everywhere beyond the ability to equip and finance, the sheer weight of tradition and apathy—still, propelled by vision, orientation work and painstaking effort, the schools of the Iloilo Division became a laboratory of the community-school idea and the program of adult education through the community-centered school.

While the Iloilo Division is credited with having initiated the new movement in Philippine education, there were many other experiments in those early years of the Republic that contributed along with Dr. AGUILAR’s to what is today known as the Philippine Community School. This scheme is "unique and distinctively Filipino in making use of the unitary approach in which both the child and adult are embraced in the total school program, providing opportunity for the process of interaction between the school and the community which logically secures a stronger driving force for the growth and development of both the child and the adult. Furthermore, the narrow program of adult literacy alone is bypassed by the Philippine program which aims not only at making the adult literate but also a more healthy, God-fearing, law-abiding and more productive member of the social group."

August 1959
Manila

REFERENCES:

"Adult Education in Action." Philippine Association of School Superintendents.Yearbook, 1951.

Articles by Dr. José Aguilar published in the Philippine Journal of Education. Manila, 1947-53.

"An Evaluation of the Philippine Community School for the Last Five Years." Philippine Association of School Superintendents. Quarterly Bulletin, 1955.

"Education in Rural Areas for Better Living." Philippine Association of School Superintendents. Yearbook,1950.

Philippines. Bureau of Public Schools. Evaluating the Iloilo Community School Program. Manila, 1954.

______. Philippine Community School Leadership Seminar. Manila, 1956.

"The Sixth Milestone." Manila, ICA & Education in the Philippines. 1956.

UNESCO Education Mission to the Philippines.Report. 1949.

Interviews with colleagues and others acquainted with community schools in the Philippines.