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A return to sanity
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By Fr. Ranhilio Callangan Aquino
This paper recently reported that a House bill that endeavors to enhance the use of English in instruction?and so abandoning the ill-advised existing bi-lingual policy? is steadily gaining support. Now, that is good news and, to me, a promising sign of a return to sanity in basic education. I have never wondered about the cumulative decline in the quality of basic education in the Philippines. Students who come to college with pathetic levels of comprehension and virtually inability to express themselves are the pitiful victims of policy-makers who have made of the education of elementary and secondary school students in this country an on-going, often pointless and fruitless experiment!
The policy of dividing up the subjects of elementary school into those taught in English and those taught in so-called Filipino was simply insane. Whatever our hang-ups and unresolved puerile complexes in respect to English might be, the fact is that the world speaks English. Even the French have tacitly admitted? in French of course?that their language is no longer the language of diplomacy and of international law. Of course, law students in the Philippines still continue mouthing French phrases that have left their vestiges in international law such as compromis d?arbitrage and travaux preparatoires, massacred in their pronunciation principally by the professors themselves! In the People?s Republic of China, Korea, and Japan? not to say anything of the countries of Eastern Europe?English teachers are in demand. On one of my visits to Rome, a friend took me to the Parioli District for Mass with Filipinos. Most of them were employed as domestic helpers. I asked them why the Romans liked them a lot, and they had one very simple answer: Aside from being hard-working, they were also asked by their Roman employers to teach their children English. I wondered briefly about the future of Rome if it depended on Filipina domestic helpers for the language education of its future citizens, but when I was reminded that the usual Filipina DH was a college graduate, then I was glad that at least in this respect, history has shifted the center of the earth from Rome to the Philippine archipelago! The point is that in most parts of the non-English world, among proud civilizations, there is an almost mad rush to learn English. And I find it insane that in the Philippines, we were taking several steps to forget it!
In arguments on this theme it is commonly pointed out by the champions of Tagalog?that has, as ?Filipino,? masqueraded as the national language? that Scandinavian countries, China, Japan and Italy have done well without English. There is first of all a fallacy involving history tucked into this non-argument. These countries? histories have not included a chapter of American occupation. Ours has. We can rave and rue about that now but that would make us only more stupid, because the future comes to pass by a creative and hopeful appropriation of what has been, not by wallowing in regret. A second fallacy consists in equating the disparate. There is no shortage of Chinese literature, and there is an abundance of works of science in Chinese. The same thing can be said of the Scandinavian countries and of Korea. Where are the treatises in science, law, philosophy and medicine in Tagalog that our students need? Where are the learned tomes in the language of that region surrounding Manila? And if the retort is to start writing in these language, then my question will be: Why should we? Why should we go through the arduous and thoroughly pointless task of translating legal tomes, medical texts, scientific treatises into a language that the world quite frankly does not care about and will never care to learn? Why should we not rather hone our skills in that language that will give us a toe-hold on the dizzying developments in science, technology, philosophy and jurisprudence in the rest of the world?
Andrew Gonzalez, whose word many took to be the last in matters of language, once argued at an educators? conference I attended that when students mix Tagalog and English in that unhappy blend called ?Taglish? that only indicates that they have developed proficiency in both! Any attentive teacher will tell you that Gonzalez was simply wrong, no matter how revered his memory might be to some. Students mix English with Tagalog because they have a few English phrases in their rather modest linguistic repertoire and many favored, well-worn Tagalog expressions readily used in everyday speech. But the poisonous fruit of that poisonous tree that bi-lingual education has been is evident: students unable to comprehend, and therefore unable to research with consequently nothing of their own to write. Research among college students today means ample and abusive use of the ?cut and paste? icons of Microsoft Word or some similar program with parasitic dependence on the gems and garbage indiscriminately offered by the Web.
Will we be less Filipino by adopting an aggressive English-as-medium-of-instruction policy? English may trace its roots to the Anglo-Saxon tribes a world away from us, but it has become by now a heritage of many nations of the world. Why should tapping into common heritage make us less Filipino? Is our sense of nationhood so fragile, so tenuous that it should take the posture of linguistic xenophobia? I distinctly recall that one of the key arguments in favor of bi-lingualism was that it is best that students learn in the language closest to them. If one goes by that line, then the language closest to the school-child?s life will be the language of the region ?Ilocano for most of Northern Luzon (and certainly Ibanag for a good number of Cagayanos and Isabelinos), Cebuanos for a large swathe of Visayas and Mindanao, and Ilonggo too. That Tagalog is now spoken almost throughout the entire length of the archipelago is to be attributed to the imperialistic policy of making the language of Manila the language of the entire country. While we are so quick to decry cultural invasion in other respects, there was hardly a whimper of protest as the policy-makers in Manila saw to it that the language and the culture of the Ibanags, the Pangasinenses, the Hiligaynons, etc. faded into oblivion in the face of relentless and government-sanctioned advances of Tagalog.
One thing more. In the past, a doctoral student was always required to enroll in at least six units of a foreign language. For one reason or the other, it seems that CHED has not insisted on this requisite. I cannot, for the life of me, understand how one can engage in that degree of scholarly research that warrants the title of doctor or a ?PhD? or a ?DSc? after one?s name without familiarity with other languages that opens to the graduate student an ampler field of research. The point is to broaden opportunity and increase the breadth of available research material. I am grateful for this return to sanity?the return to English, and this time I hope our English teachers will teach English well. There is every reason to be proud of a Filipino nation that speaks English! I do not see any contradiction in terms or in concepts in that.
