One of the enduring hallmarks of American colonial rule in the Philippines was the establishment of a public school system criticized by scholars over the years for having been a tool to subjugate the minds of Filipinos by neglecting local knowledge and culture as well as repressing most forms of nationalism. This “miseducation” of the Filipino people is often argued to have continued long after Philippine independence in 1946.

However, efforts of Filipinos to shape a national identity that was independent of American policy were present during the colonial era, even among those who worked within the colonial bureaucracy. A culturalist form of nationalism characterized the efforts of elite Filipino intellectuals to mold the identity of an infant nation under the so-called “tutelage” of America. It is a form of nationalism often absent in the common reductivist view of American-trained Filipino intellectuals as miseducators of their countrymen. The recent identification of this form of nationalist heralds a need to revisit the works of Filipino nationalists in the 1930s, reading them with fresh eyes and thereby discovering new ways of appreciating their contributions to the history of Philippine national thought.

One such intellectual was Dr. Encarnacion Alzona. This study revisits her writings on Filipino education and culture from the 1910s to the 1960s, examining her contributions to Philippine nationalism under a lens of nationalist internationalism. A reading of her doctoral dissertation, published articles, and public speeches reveals that Dr. Alzona’s educational philosophy does not easily fit within the neat boundaries of yesteryear’s nationalist historiography. Her understanding of the relationship between nationalism and education—as well as their role in the formation of new generations of Filipino citizens—consistently portray the need to appreciate the perspectives of other nations to locate Philippine history within the broader history of mankind. This situates her in a more nuanced position outside the easy binary categorization of being either pro- or anti-American imperialism.