Indio:Bravo//

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Just wanna add to that another excerpt from the same Rizal article. The ‘natives’ here referred to Filipinos under Spain in the late 19th century:

From the La Indolencia de los Filipinos:

From his birth until he sinks into his grave, the training of the native is brutalizing, depressive and antihuman (the word ‘inhuman’ is not sufficiently explanatory: whether or not the Academy admit it, let it go). There is no doubt that the government, some priests like the Jesuits and some Dominicans like Padre Benavides, have done a great deal by founding colleges, schools of primary instruction, and the like. But this is not enough; their effect is neutralized. They amount to five or ten years (years of a hundred and fifty days at most) during which the youth comes in contact with books selected by those very priests who boldly proclaim that it is an evil for the natives to know Castilian, that the native should not be separated from his carabao, that he should not have any further aspirations, and so on; five to ten years during which the majority of the students have grasped nothing more than that no one understands what the books say, not even the professors themselves perhaps; and these five to ten years have to offset the daily preachment of the whole life, that preachment which lowers the dignity of man, which by degrees brutally deprives him of the sentiment of self-esteem, that eternal, stubborn, constant labor to bow the native’s neck, to make him accept the yoke, to place him on a level with the beast—a labor aided by some persons, with or without the ability to write, which if it does not produce in some individuals the desired effect, in others it has the opposite effect, like the breaking of a cord that is stretched too tightly. Thus, while they attempt to make of the native a kind of animal, yet in exchange they demand of him divine actions. And we say divine actions, because he must be a god who does not become indolent in that climate, surrounded by the circumstances mentioned. Deprive a man, then, of his dignity, and you not only deprive him of his moral strength but you also make him useless even for those who wish to make use of him. Every creature has its stimulus, its mainspring: man’s is his self-esteem. Take it away from him and he is a corpse, and he who seeks activity in a corpse will encounter only worms.

malacanan:
“The evil is that the indolence in the Philippines is a magnified indolence, an indolence of the snowball type, if we may be permitted the expression, an evil that increases in direct proportion to the periods of time, and effect of misgovernment and of backwardness, as we have said, and not a cause thereof.” [Read the entire text here]
TODAY IN HISTORY: In 1890, Jose Rizal’s “The Indolence of the Filipinos" was published in the La Solidaridad. It was printed in 5 installments, which ran from July 15, 1890 to September 15, 1890. [img via]
The essay was Rizal’s effort to educate his countrymen by revealing truths about their own faults as well as arousing the Spaniards to the defects in their colonial system.