USA • September 2026. The Miseducation of the Filipino: Why Renato Constantino's Essay Still Speaks to Every Fil-Am. renato constantino, miseducation of the filipino, filipino american history month, fahm 2026, colonial mentality, decolonization, thomasites, american colonial education philippines, english medium of instruction, philippine history, fil-am identity, tagalog, 9/30.

Decolonization • FAHM 2026

The Miseducation of the Filipino: Why Renato Constantino's Essay Still Speaks to Every Fil-Am

Written in 1959 and printed in 1966, Constantino's essay argued that American colonial schools were built to win Filipino minds, not free them. As Filipino American History Month begins, it is the reading list's first assignment.

PinoyBuilt illustration — a primer, a ship, and the thread between them. Not an archival photograph.

On June 8, 1966, the Weekly Graphic in Manila printed an essay that its author had written seven years earlier. Three months later, on September 12, I was born in Makati. I grew up in Marikina inside the school system that essay was written about, and by second grade I was reading Rizal and Bonifacio, proud of what the Katipunan had been. I did not know then that a historian named Renato Constantino had already asked the question that would follow me from Marikina to Chicago to Vallejo: who decided what Filipino children would be taught, and why?

The essay was called "The Miseducation of the Filipino." Sixty years after it first saw print, it remains his most widely read essay, and still one of the most uncomfortable things a Filipino can read about his own schooling. Its argument is simple to state and hard to unsee: the public schools the United States built in the Philippines were not a gift that happened to arrive with an army. They were part of how the army won. As Filipino American History Month opens tomorrow, there is no better place for a Fil-Am family to start than here, with the essay that taught generations of Filipinos to read their own education as evidence.

📌 Did You Know?
Filipino American History Month is held in October because the earliest documented Filipino presence in the continental United States came on October 18, 1587, when Luzones Indios came ashore from a Manila-built galleon at what is now Morro Bay, California. The Filipino American National Historical Society has observed the month since 1991. Congress recognized it by resolution in 2009, 2010, and 2011, but national recognition has never been made permanent.

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🇵🇭 Tagalog Word of the Day
Kamalayan — ka-ma-LA-yan
Awareness; consciousness. Constantino's whole project was about kamalayan: an education that leaves Filipinos aware of their country's problems and of who benefits from them. Miseducation, in his telling, is schooling that fills the head with facts while leaving the kamalayan asleep.

A Seven-Year Wait and a Long Afterlife

Renato Reyes Constantino was born in Manila on March 10, 1919. He became a historian, a newspaper columnist, and a teacher at the University of the Philippines, and he spent his career arguing that Philippine history had been written from the wrong side of the ship. In the 1950s, according to his profile at Bantayog ng mga Bayani, state intelligence agencies had already branded him a security risk. In 1972 he published The Marcos Watch, a collection of his critical columns. With his wife Letizia, he later wrote A Past Revisited, a history of the Philippines told from the side of the Filipino people rather than their rulers. He died in 1999.

"The Miseducation of the Filipino" was written in 1959. It did not reach print until June 8, 1966, in the Weekly Graphic. That same year it appeared in his collection The Filipinos in the Philippines and Other Essays from Malaya Books, and in 1970 it was reprinted in the first issue of the Journal of Contemporary Asia. Bantayog ng mga Bayani credits his writing with shaping the thinking of countless young Filipinos who went on to oppose the Marcos dictatorship. For a boy born in 1966 who would grow up to be anti-authoritarian from Marcos Sr. onward, that is not a coincidence I can ignore.

The essay opens with a premise rather than a complaint. Education, Constantino wrote, is a weapon for a people trying to win economic emancipation, political independence, and a cultural renaissance. Philippine education therefore had one job: to produce Filipinos who understood their country's problems, understood the solutions, and cared enough to work and sacrifice for them. Everything that follows is a measurement of how far the system fell short of that job, and why.

📖 Read the Full Essay (PDF)

Hosted by UC San Diego's Early Academic Outreach Program. This copy is the 1970 Journal of Contemporary Asia reprint (Vol. 1, No. 1).

Capturing Minds: The Classroom as a Front Line

Constantino does not begin with the Americans. He begins with the Japanese. During the Second World War, he notes, the Japanese occupation was brutal and the Filipinos were never conquered, because resistance lived on in people's hearts. Japan's propagandists understood the problem: had the occupation lasted longer, the children schooled under it would have grown up conditioned to serve the empire. Military victory is not conquest. Conquest is complete only when the conquered stop wanting to resist.

"The most effective means of subjugating a people is to capture their minds." — Renato Constantino, "The Miseducation of the Filipino"

Then he turns that lens on the United States, and he lets the Americans testify for themselves. During the Philippine-American War, General Elwell Otis pushed to reopen schools, choosing and ordering the textbooks himself, while officers were detailed as school superintendents and enlisted men as teachers. General Arthur MacArthur, recommending a large appropriation for schools, described it as intended "primarily and exclusively as an adjunct to military operations" meant to pacify the population. Constantino draws the obvious conclusion: from its very beginning, the Philippine public school system was a means of pacifying a people who were defending a freedom they had just won from Spain, against an invader who had posed as an ally.

The framing mattered as much as the schoolhouses. President McKinley issued his Benevolent Assimilation proclamation on December 21, 1898, at a moment when, as Constantino points out, Filipino forces controlled the country except Manila. The word "benevolent" did the work that rifles could not. If the new rulers were saviors, then the Filipinos still fighting them were not patriots. They were obstacles to progress.

December 21, 1898McKinley's Benevolent Assimilation proclamation. Filipino forces hold the country except Manila.

Before 1901Soldier-teachers reopen schools under U.S. military command during the Philippine-American War.

January 21, 1901The Philippine Commission passes Act No. 74, creating the Department of Public Instruction.

August 21, 1901The U.S. Army Transport Thomas reaches Manila carrying hundreds of American teachers, the Thomasites. English is the medium of instruction.

Up to 1935Under the Jones Act, an American vice-governor heads the Department of Public Instruction. Only under the Commonwealth does a Filipino take over.

1959 / June 8, 1966Constantino writes "The Miseducation of the Filipino"; the Weekly Graphic publishes it seven years later.

The Thomasites and "a Second Army of Occupation"

The best-known chapter of this story is the arrival of the Thomasites, the American teachers named for the transport ship that carried them across the Pacific from San Francisco. They reached Manila on August 21, 1901, to build out the public schools, teach basic education, and train Filipino teachers, all in English. They were not the first: soldier-teachers had been reopening schools since the early months of the American occupation, and the Philippine Commission had created the Department of Public Instruction under Act No. 74 that January. But the Thomas carried the largest contingent, and the name stuck to every American teacher who followed. Historians have since traced their work into the provinces, including a study of the American-sponsored public schools of colonial Kabikolan from 1901 to 1921, the region my own family comes from.

Many Thomasites were sincere, and many Filipino families remember them warmly. Constantino does not deny that. His point is about the system they served. He quotes the American writer Charles Burke Elliott, who described the teachers sailing on the Thomas as "a second army of occupation." That was not Constantino's insult. It was an American's own description, written with pride.

The Department No Filipino Could Run

One detail in the essay deserves far more attention than it gets. When the Jones Act expanded Filipino self-government, offices across the colonial government were steadily turned over to Filipinos. Education was not one of them. Article 23 of the Act placed the Department of Public Instruction under an American vice-governor appointed by the U.S. President. Until 1935, an American ran Philippine education. By the time a Filipino took over under the Commonwealth, Constantino observes, there was no longer any need for an American overseer, because a generation had already come of age thinking like the people who had designed its schooling.

English as the Wedge

Constantino calls the choice of English as the medium of instruction the master stroke. English separated Filipinos from their past, and later separated educated Filipinos from the masses of their own countrymen. With American textbooks, children learned not just a new language but a new way of life, alien to their own traditions. It was the beginning of their education, he writes, and at the same moment the beginning of their mis-education, because they no longer learned as Filipinos but as colonials. The new generation learned the lives of American heroes, sang American songs, and "dreamt of snow and Santa Claus."

He is careful not to pretend nothing of value was taught. Filipinos became literate in English to a degree, more people could read and write, and the country became more conversant with the outside world. His complaint is the price. In one of the essay's most quoted lines, he puts it bluntly: "In exchange for a smattering of English, we yielded our souls."

The deeper damage, in his account, was to democracy itself. Under Spain, learning had belonged to a narrow elite, the ilustrados. English was sold as the language of democracy, the tool that would dissolve that elite. Instead, it produced new ones: a small group fluent in English, a larger group that half-understood it, and a great mass of Filipinos who were made to feel that national problems were spoken about in a language that did not belong to them. Leaders addressed the people in generalities. The people, Constantino argued, learned to leave everything to their leaders. A language meant to open the republic ended up walling it.

He reached back to two witnesses. The first was Najib Saleeby, a scholar of Philippine languages who wrote in 1924 that Tagalog, Bisaya, and other Philippine languages share one linguistic family closely enough that speakers could learn to understand one another quickly, and who warned that replacing them with English as the basis of all instruction was an ambition no empire in history had achieved. The second was Rizal himself. Constantino quotes Simoun in El Filibusterismo warning Filipinos who begged for Castilian that they were asking to kill off their own originality and subordinate their thoughts to other brains. What Rizal said about Spanish, Constantino concluded, had proven equally true of English.

This is the part of the essay that lands closest to home for any Fil-Am family. When my sister Joy and I arrived in America in 1976, we made a pledge never to forget our Tagalog. We were children; we did not have Constantino's vocabulary for it. But we understood instinctively what he was arguing: that a language is not just a tool for getting by. It is the place where a people does its thinking. I made the full case for that in why every Fil-Am family must keep Filipino alive, and Constantino is the intellectual ancestor of that argument. He did not say Filipinos should stop learning English. He said a foreign language is learned best after a child has mastered his own, and that a student forced to think in a borrowed tongue learns to memorize instead of to reason.

History Rewritten: Spain the Villain, America the Savior

If language was the wedge, history was the map. Constantino describes a curriculum in which the lives of Philippine heroes were taught while their nationalist teachings were glossed over, and in which nationalist resistance leaders, with Macario Sakay as his example, were presented as brigands and outlaws. Spain was the villain. America was the savior. The atrocities of the American occupation, he notes, including the "water cure" and the reconcentration camps, were passed over in the textbooks Filipinos grew up reading.

The past before the conquerors fared no better. Filipino students, he writes, studied their own ancestors as though they were strange and foreign peoples who happened to settle on these islands, with whom they had only the thinnest connection. They read about their own history like tourists. That is why PinoyBuilt keeps returning to the evidence of what came before, from the Laguna Copperplate Inscription, the Philippines' oldest written record, to the long accounting of Spain's own legacy in a Filipino's answer to the empire question. Decolonization is not about swapping one villain for another. It is about refusing to read our own story with a visitor's eyes.

Constantino's demand, in his own words: "Philippine history must be rewritten from the point of view of the Filipino." He was not asking for propaganda in reverse. He was asking that Filipinos judge their colonizers objectively, seeing their virtues and their faults alike, instead of treating centuries of colonial status as a favor from above.

Training Consumers, Not Builders

The essay's economic section is where Constantino is at his sharpest and most modern. Control of a colony's economic life, he argues, is basic to colonial control, and the United States was notably subtle about it. Free trade was presented as a generous gift. Schools taught America as a benevolent nation that came only to rescue Filipinos from Spain and spread liberty and democracy, while the economic motives of the occupation were never discussed. The proof that this education worked, he says, was how little most Filipinos of his time understood about American economic interests in their own country.

He was precise about how the classroom did it. When schools did try to teach appreciation for things Philippine, the picture they offered was a pretty, idealized countryside, as unreal as an Amorsolo painting: the carabao, the smiling farmer, the barrio lass, the nipa hut. That picture did harm in two ways. It taught that the Philippines was destined to be an agricultural country and should never try to industrialize. And it hid the actual poverty, disease, and hardship of rural life, so that educated Filipinos never understood the need for real agrarian reform.

Meanwhile, cheap American goods flowed in duty-free, consumption habits were shaped around them, and Filipinos took satisfaction in the fact that their raw materials could pay for American products. Constantino captures the result in a story about attitudes before the war: Filipinos looked down on goods "Made in Japan," unable to believe an Asian country could match America or Europe. His conclusion about his own countrymen was harsh. Schools had taught Filipinos that they were by geography and by nature an agricultural people, and so they never imagined that they too could build.

Constantino names the end product directly: colonial mentality. He uses the phrase to describe educators who feared opposition to a national language but saw nothing wrong with a foreign one. The concept has outlived him and crossed the Pacific with the rest of us. Psychologists of the Filipino diaspora have studied it in Fil-Am communities, and PinoyBuilt first took it up a decade ago with EJR David on immigration, colonial mentality, and kapwa. When a tita praises a child for being "mestiza-looking," or a family quietly ranks imported over local without ever asking why, Constantino would recognize the lesson plan.

What Constantino Actually Asked For

It is easy to read the essay as only a diagnosis. It is also a prescription, and a demanding one. Education, Constantino wrote, must be understood not as the acquisition of information but as the making of a person who can function usefully within his own society. That means education cannot be separated from a particular country at a particular moment. It is a fallacy, he argued, to assume that what makes a well-educated American is the same as what makes a well-educated Filipino. The United States was an industrial power, master of its own house, and could afford to teach internationalism. The Philippines had only recently emerged from colonial status and still had to complete its political and economic independence. It needed an education built for that task.

"The education of the Filipino must be a Filipino education." — Renato Constantino, "The Miseducation of the Filipino"

Concretely, he asked for three things. First, instruction in the national language, because children taught in their own tongue learn more easily and think more freely. Second, Philippine history rewritten from the Filipino point of view, and Philippine economic problems taught in the light of nationalism and independence. Third, a citizenry that knows its country's problems well enough to defend its sovereignty, rather than one that recites Rizal anecdotes without ever connecting his teachings to present problems. He also worried about the wider culture: about American films, comics, and news services that could drown out whatever small gains a Filipino education might make.

It is worth being fair to the other side of this argument, because Fil-Am families know it by heart. English opened doors. Generations of Filipino nurses, seafarers, engineers, and caregivers built lives abroad partly on the strength of it, and many parents in our community will say plainly that it was the best thing their schooling gave them. Constantino's essay does not erase that experience. It asks a harder question about it: who designed the doors, which way do they open, and what did we leave on the other side to walk through them? A family can be grateful for English and still ask why Tagalog was never given the same respect in its own country's classrooms. Both things can be true.

Why It Belongs in Filipino American History Month

Filipino American History Month exists because the roles of Filipino Americans have been overlooked in the writing, teaching, and learning of United States history. That is FANHS's own reason, written into the 2009 congressional resolution. It is the same complaint Constantino made about Philippine schools, aimed at American ones. On both sides of the Pacific, Filipinos have had to fight to be taught their own story.

For a Fil-Am reader, the essay also explains something about our own arrival. Many of us, or our parents, came to America already fluent in its language, already raised on its heroes, already expecting its seasons. The miseducation did not stay in Manila. It boarded the planes with us. It shows up when a second-generation kid feels that Filipino history is something optional, a heritage-night extra rather than American history, which it is. It shows up when an immigrant parent decides the children will be better off without Tagalog. Constantino gives us the long view of those choices: they did not start with us, and they were not entirely ours.

Chicago taught me the opposite lesson early. At St. Sebastian Catholic School, International Day put food from every culture on the same table, and the city itself was full of people who openly acknowledged that they or their ancestors came from somewhere else. In a city like that, nobody had to forget where they came from in order to belong, and being an American and being a Filipino were never competing loyalties. Constantino would have added a warning, and he would have been right: knowing where you come from requires knowing who told you the story, and why.

Reading Constantino in 2026

Some of the essay's specifics belong to its time. It was written before the Philippines' later language reforms, before the overseas-worker economy took the shape we know, and before the diaspora grew into the community that celebrates FAHM today. Readers will argue with parts of it, as they should. But its method has not aged at all. Ask who designed the curriculum. Ask whose interests it served. Ask what it taught you to admire and what it taught you to look away from. That method is the core of decolonizing the mind, and it is the same move PinoyBuilt asks of every story it covers: whose power set these terms, and who paid for them?

I built this site in part as a cultural compass for my three children, so that one day they, and their own children, can learn two things here: what is right, and who their lolo was. This is what I believe on both counts. Love the country you live in, and hold it accountable, especially when it has power over people who have none. That is not anti-American. It is the most American thing a Filipino can do, and it is the most Filipino thing an American can do. Constantino ends his essay by saying that Filipinos must now think "of ourselves, of our salvation, of our future." This October, read the whole thing. Then hand it to someone younger.

Sources

• Renato Constantino, "The Miseducation of the Filipino" — full text, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1970), via UC San Diego EAOP
• HathiTrust catalog record — "The Miseducation of the Filipino," reprinted from the Weekly Graphic, June 8, 1966
• Bantayog ng mga Bayani — Constantino, Renato Reyes
• Social Science Diliman (University of the Philippines) — Renato Constantino as a public intellectual
• Inquirer USA — August 21, 1901: The arrival of the Thomasites
• The Journal of History — American-sponsored Public Schools in Colonial Kabikolan, 1901–1921
• Filipino American National Historical Society — Filipino American History Month Resolution
• NBC News Asian America — Joint House, Senate Resolution Urges Recognition of Filipino American History

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J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.

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