By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
Except for “education quality,” the 10 reasons cited by Firth McEachern, Elizabeth Calinawagan, and Ched Arzadon in their article “10 reasons why mother tongues in schools should be saved,” (August 31, 2020) have nothing or very little to do with the main and common reason Filipino children go or are sent to school which is to try and get themselves an education so they could find a decent job someday or at the very least, make their lives and that of their future children better than that of their parents.
Even granting the remote possibility of the Mother Tongue policy delivering on all the nine other concerns, of what good is the feat when well into the ninth school year of implementation, the policy is not only failing to fulfill its promise to improve education quality but is in fact, contributing to the rapid deterioration thereof? If the Mother Tongue policy is hurting the pupils as I have proven in my first two responses to the articles of the authors – “Non-readers multiply under the Mother Tongue policy” (November 9, 2020) and “Mother Tongue wreaks havoc on English proficiency” (November 17, 2020) – what does it matter if the policy succeeds with the other nine concerns?
For one, how could non-readers and frustration level readers estimated to make up 30 percent of the basic education population have gained and be gaining anything at all from the Mother Tongue policy?
In fact, contrary to the intent of the authors to prove the importance of retaining the Mother Tongue policy, their trotting out the nine other reasons is a giveaway that the policy has no leg to stand on. All they could have done is enumerate the accomplishments of the policy but here they are citing irrelevant reasons some of which verge on nonsense.
Imagine stating that the scrapping of the Mother Tongue as medium “will result in many situations in which children are not able to freely use their native languages, as they will be pressured to use English and Filipino only. This was the status quo before the mother tongue policy, and it is a violation of children’s rights.” Do they have evidence to back the silly bugaboo? I still have to hear of any instance when any school child complained he was being prohibited from using his first language and given the fact that there are 83 indigenous cultural communities with their own distinct dialects in the region, the Cordillera would be logically prone to this situation. In fact, Filipino adults fondly remember their teachers who strictly prohibited dialects in their classrooms saying that the policy helped develop their English competence at an early age.
Same goes with their warning that removing the mother tongues and shifting to bilingual/monolingual education system is an attack on linguistic diversity and goes against the Universal Declaration of Cultural Diversity. Must school children bear that burden of preserving cultural diversity when they are already hard pressed learning how to read under the Mother Tongue policy? If the preservation of languages is the concern, couldn’t the concerned government agency just deal with it? And by the way, for more than a century with the English and bilingual medium of instruction policies we were still able to introduce the Mother Tongue policy in SY 2012-2013 and the DepEd’s latest inventory of languages in the country is at 180. Do the three apologists know of any dialect getting extinct due to the two previous language policies of the government? (“DepEd to improve mother tongue-based multi-lingual education implementation,” Manila Bulletin, March 2, 2020)
It is also premature for the authors to speak about the pie in the sky aim of the DepEd Mother Tongue policy to “make children multilingual and multiliterate, so they can speak and write in their own language (mother tongue), the national language and English” because at the moment, at the very least, 30 percent of the student population are non-readers and frustration level readers many of whom could not even write properly and spell (“Handwriting, spelling skills in public schools degenerating,” Manila Times, September 12 and 19, 2019). If the authors and the DepEd have any problem with that, we can validate even in the NCR.
The authors also warned that the distribution of the production of learning materials all over the country will be discontinued and will revert to the old situation where such are written in English and Filipino and the printing centralized in Manila. Should children bear the consequence of a foolish decision of the DepEd and other quarters involved in bringing the Mother Tongue policy to life and getting it adopted for use? Is the introduction of Mother Tongue about creating textbooks and decentralizing the production and publication thereof, etc., and not about the education of children first and foremost?
At the end of the day, what matters is the quality of education the policy delivers to learners and as we have already proven in our two initial responses to the pro-Mother Tongue articles of the authors, the MTB-MLE only made things worse in the areas of education where it was supposed to be superior to the Bilingual Education Policy (BEP). Apart from the evidence we have presented, after almost two weeks, the authors have not responded to the challenge for a joint validation of the assessment of some teachers that the quality of education in public schools has deteriorated by two grade levels since SY 2012-2013 with the Mother Tongue as the main culprit. If the policy is defensible, for sure, we could already have heard from them that they will take the dare.
Let me reiterate the challenge: “Relative to this, some public school teachers I have talked to said that the quality of education slipped by two grade levels since the introduction of the Mother Tongue policy, clarifying that there are other factors but that the new language policy is the most devastating. I am inviting the authors, the DepEd, and others interested in the truth on the effects of the policy for a joint validation of the allegation. We can go straight to the heart of the matter by holding spelling drills for Grade 6 public school pupils using Grade 4-level English words and by testing their comprehension with Grade 4-level paragraphs.”
I do believe that everyone agrees that the proof of the Mother Tongue policy is still in the pudding. After the eighth school year of implementation, it is common sense and urgent to find out and discuss the actual effects and benefits of the program, if any, and not just be suspended in the realm of theories, researches and intents 99 percent of which are not borne by what is happening in the classrooms. **
