"Both the Crown and the Church were solicitous for education in the colonies, and provisions were made for its promotion on a far greater {330} scale than was possible or even attempted in the English colonies. The early Franciscan missionaries built a school beside each church, and in their teaching abundant use was made of signs, drawings and paintings. The native languages were reduced to writing, and in a few years Indians were learning to read and write. Pedro de Gante, a Flemish lay brother and a relative of Charles V, founded and conducted in the Indian quarter in Mexico a great school, attended by over a thousand Indian boys, which combined instruction in elementary and higher branches, the mechanical and fine arts. In its workshops the boys were taught to be tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers and painters." If there was all this of progress in education in Spanish-American countries in advance of what we had in the United States, people will be prone to ask where, then, are the products of the Spanish-American education? This is only a fair question, and if the products cannot be shown, their education, however pretentious, must have been merely superficial or hollow, and must have meant nothing for the culture of their people. We are sure that most people would consider the question itself quite sufficient for argument, for it would be supposed to be unanswerable. Such has been the state of mind created by history as it is written for English-speaking people, that we are not at all prepared to think that there {331} can possibly be in existence certain great products of Spanish-American education that show very clearly how much better educational systems were developed in Spanish than in English America. The fact that we do not know them, however, is only another evidence of the one-sidedness of American education in the North, even at the present time. Our whole attitude toward the South American people, our complacent self-sufficiency from which we look down on them, our thoroughgoing condescension for their ignorance and backwardness, is all founded on our lack of real knowledge with regard to them.