For the times and the place the Ateneo was a good school, by general consent the best in the Islands, in some respects matching well with an inferior preparatory school in America. When the Jesuits were allowed to return to the country from which they had been banished, they brought with them new ideas of education into a region where for two hundred years such imports had been rare. For all that, education at the Ateneo was not to be had except at the price of a struggle. There was no suggestion there, at least, of Tennyson’s idea of a row of empty pates and kindly Instruction tumbling in the sciences. A student like Rizal, reputed in his second year to be the hardest working in the institution, seemed like a soldier fighting in doubtful trenches; education to be won, as it were, by hand-to-hand conflict. Years afterward Rizal wrote in his own vivid style a description of the manner in which wisdom was imparted in even the highest Philippine seat of learning, from which wonder grows to amazement that there were in those days any educated Filipinos. It reveals them again as of iron will and unmatchable persistence. No such dogged resolution in chase of knowledge is now required of any people; the pursuit of learning under difficulties, it may well be called. A Filipino reading it now may be excused if he is moved somewhat to hold up his head among the nations. Every fact that one of his countrymen added to his store he must wrest from the hard hands of prejudice and desperate chance. As to this, the Ateneo was not so bad as the rest, but bad enough. Within even its halls was as yet no emancipation from the notion that the student is the scum of the earth and the professor sent to scourge and chasten him. At Santo Tomas, whither Rizal was later transferred, this variant of purgatory was at its worst; tuition dwelt in the Lower Silurian. Rizal’s description is of the session of a class in physics. The discerning reader will conclude that it is the transcript of a personal experience: