PRIVATE TUTORS

Education was quite limited in the Marianas until modern times. Even in the early American administration of Guam and the Japanese administration in the Northern Marianas, the typical Chamorro child could go only as far as the fourth or fifth grade. More education than that was thought unnecessary for a society made up mainly of farmers and fishermen who were destined to be born and to die on the same, small island. You didn't need to know Spanish, nor grammar, nor even spelling, in order to grow corn or catch mañåhak.

Under Spain, colonial officials did, indeed, want some Chamorro men educated a lot more. This select class of Chamorro men would become part of the colonial system, connecting the system with the masses of Chamorro people who carried on with life on the farm and on the shore. In time, a school for girls prepared a select class of Chamorro women to become school teachers to educate some children in the basics. Some wives of prominent men, or daughters of prominent men, received a very good western education, often thanks to being taught in the home and not in the classroom.

But even in the highest schooling possible under the Spanish, one could sometimes only go as fast as the slowest learner. In order to get ahead of everybody else, one sometimes had to resort to private tutoring.

MANUEL CAMACHO AFLAGUE

Besides being a government clerk and official, he tutored others

What one really wanted, in order to get ahead, was a more extensive knowledge of Spanish. It was the language of government and - government jobs, what few there were. But if you landed a job as a clerk in the colonial government that paid a few pesos every month, you didn't have to work in the hot sun to feed yourself. You could pay someone to bring you the food and a cook to prepare it.

It wasn't just vocabulary that mattered. One wanted to learn a bit of history, law, literature and almost anything else that elevated you in people's eyes. Some Chamorros prided themselves, and were admired by others, as knowing a bit of Shakespeare.

Besides Spanish, if you learned English, all the better. English enabled you to do business with British and American whalers and other English-speaking people who came to Guam, some permanently, and many just passing through.

Other than academic subjects, one went to a tutor to learn how to play the piano or violin, or to do special sewing.

Someone like Manuel Camacho Aflague, a Chamorro government clerk and official, who was more than likely tutored himself as a child, made a few more pesos tutoring others when not at his government desk. Other educated Chamorros who tutored were Manuel and Luís Díaz Torres. Some of the Anglo settlers on Guam spread the knowledge of English to a number of Chamorros. Some of the Spanish priests, too, tutored promising Chamorro students.

PÅLE' JOSÉ PALOMO

was privately tutored by Spanish priests, besides getting a classroom education

in the 1840s and 50s

The ambitious parents of these ambitious children paid the tutors with money, if and when they had it. Otherwise, tuition was paid with a basket of taro or a dozen eggs.