ABSTRACT
A student like Jose 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. The idea that seized upon Rizal and was always growing in his thoughts was that he ought to do something to help his people out of the prison-house of ignorance and tyranny in which they sat the bound captives of a preposterous social organization. This was enough to mark him apart from students that went to the Ateneo only because their parents told them to go. Upon a mind like Rizal's, enlisted for freedom, susceptible to all things heroic and idealistic.
