of the schools and the teachers, education went into a decline. [96] The presence of the children became purely nominal in the triplicate report which the masters and mistresses sent monthly to the government of the province. That report had to be visoed by the parish priests, but the governors received and approved them without that requisite, disdaining and despising the signature of the parish priests. In that the latter understood that the visto bueno [i.e., approval] was a farce, which, taken seriously, lessened the reputation of and gained ill will for them, without any profit to the teachers and municipal captains. Consequently, it was all the same for the results whether they signed the said reports, or did not sign them. But if was painful to contemplate the empty benches in the school, from which those regular and interminable rows of four hundred or five hundred boys, and two other rows of as many or more girls, reduced afterwards to two or three dozen at the most, no longer went to the church after the afternoon class. That happened and we have seen it. It was one, and not of the least serious, misfortunes that came upon the country because of the unfortunate decree in regard to the Filipino municipalities. On the creation of the normal school the government proposed as its principal object the rapid and quick diffusion of Castilian as the bond of union between the mother country and the colony. The end was good and praiseworthy, but a mistake was made in the means by which it was to be obtained, for those means were neither sufficient nor efficacious. Departing even from the false supposition that all the normal teachers constantly directed their efforts to teaching Castilian to the children, nothing serious and positive could be obtained. In the schools the children read and wrote in Castilian, learned the grammar by heart, and some teachers gave the explanation in Castilian also. The teacher asked questions in Castilian, and the scholars replied in certain dialogues, which they learned by heart. [97] But what was the result? The children did not understand one iota of the master's explanation. They answered in the dialogue like parrots, and the few phrases which they learned in the harmonious language of Cervantes, they forgot before they reached home, if not in the very school itself, because they did not again hear them either when playing with their comrades or in their homes, or in the school itself. For the constant and daily presence in the school left much to be desired, especially during the last decade of Spanish rule. Before the creation of the municipalities to which Señor Maura gave the local supervision of the schools, the parish priests visited them frequently. Every afternoon when the boys and girls were dismissed from school they went to the church in two lines, and the parish priest observed and even counted the number of those who were present, and when many of them were absent, they asked the teachers for their