THE CUBA REVIEW 



17 



Interior of school house illustrated on opposite page. 



tion through a Secretary of Pubhc Education, Provincial Superintendents and other 

 appointed officials. Reform came quickly. The superior school age limit was raised 

 from nine to fourteen years. Normal and summer schools were established. Two thou- 

 sand five hundred teachers were improvised with text-books translated from the English. 

 The university and the provincial Institutos were put upon a modern and practical basis. 

 The School of Arts and Trades, a mere workshop under Spain, was made an effective 

 technical school where young men could really learn a mechanical trade, and special 

 courses and schools, English for any who desired, drawing and modeling for artists, 

 and cutting and sewing for girls, were made a part of the system. 



Cuba welcomed all this with tremendous enthusiasm, too much, says the writer, "as 

 a child with a new toy," and it did not last. To two men, General Leonard Wood and 

 Lieutenant Matthew E. Hanna, U. S. A. Governor-General and Commissioner of Educa- 

 tion respectively of Cuba, is due the placing of this system in successful operation with 

 its many innovations and radical changes. Lieutenant Hanna traveled continuously over 

 the island, visiting the remotest places, instructing and imparting his own enthusiasm 

 to the public, to teachers and pupils, and at the end of his administration of three years 

 his department was able to make perhaps the most interesting and creditable showing 

 in all Cuba's exhibit at the Buffalo Exposition. No American, of all that then or after- 

 ward labored for Cuba, came nearer to the hearts of the Cuban people. He left his 

 system working, but when the Americans withdrew, it lost the support of those who had 

 established and knew how to operate it. It came in conflict with old, fixed Spanish ideas, 

 and yielded here and there, relaxing in hours of work, overlooking incompetency and 

 carelessness in teachers and officers. Influence was allowed to dictate appointments and 

 compulsory attendance was waived until in a few years the new system was almost 

 overwhelmed. The writer expresses no surprise in this lapse ; in fact, expected it. He 

 gives as reasons the impossibility of completely adapting the Ohio law to Cuban condi- 

 tions and also that education was prescribed to the Cubans as to the Indian, Negro and 

 Filipino, in too great quantity, with the same result in every case — "the patient's stomach 

 turned" ; also that among Spanish-speaking people education has always been scholastic 

 in character, abstract, theoretical, unpractical, regarded more as an "accomplishment" 

 than as a weapon in the struggles of life ; as individualistic, not national or popular, 

 and its tendency is to care for the higher and neglect the common branches, to fill the 

 universities and abandon the schools. It kept out almost everything in manual, me- 

 chanical, industrial and agricultural training, when in fact these constituted Cuba's great- 

 est need. Down to Spain's last day in Cuba there was but the beginning of one little 

 school in the line of practice or application. The work of the Americans would have 



