Anyone who has attended a Spanish school will know that children find great difficulty in mastering certain syllables. These are ca, ce, ci, co, ga, ge, gua, gui, etc. It is because Filipino children do not understand the reasons for such irregularities. Nor do they know the cause for the changes in value of the sounds of certain consonants.
In the old times, blows fell like rain. Many pupils were whipped every day. Sometimes the schoolmaster broke the ferule and sometimes he broke the children’s hands. The first pages of their primers fell to pieces from long and hard use. The children cried. Even the monitors had to suffer at times. Yet those syllables which cost the children so many tears are of no use to them.
Those syllables are necessary only in the learning of Spanish, which language in Rizal's time only three boys in a thousand ever really learned. These three learned it in Manila, by hearing Spanish spoken, and by committing to memory book after book. Rizal often wondered what was the use of learning it at all when in the end one spoke only Tagalog. But he kept his wonder to himself. He felt that to try to make reforms in the Philippines at that time would be to embark on a stormy voyage.
After he grew up, he had to write letters in Tagalog. He was shocked at his ignorance of its spelling. He was surprised, too, to find the same word spelled differently in the different works which he consulted. This proved to him how foolish it was to try to write Tagalog in the Spanish way. The spelling in use during that time by all Filipino scholars was a great improvement over the old style. Rizal wanted to place the credit for this change where it belonged. These improvements were due to the studies in Tagalog of Dr. T. H. Pardo de Tavera alone. Rizal had only been one of the most zealous champions of the change from the Spanish style.
Source: Rizal's Own Story of His Life