I can?t think of anything more hilarious than the House of Representatives debating Rep. Eduardo Gullas?s bill demanding that English, and English alone, be used as medium of instruction in Philippine schools. His bill proposes to do away with the bilingual policy that dates back to 1974.

What makes it hilarious you?ll know if you?ve listened to the House debates, some of which have been aired on TV. They would positively make an elementary English teacher cringe. My apologies to my Cebuano friends, but I don?t know why Cebuanos, or their officials, like to imagine, they stood first in line when God, or the Americans, distributed English. There?s little evidence of it. Accent is the least of their problems.

Of course Miriam Santiago is neither a representative nor a Cebuano, she is a senator and an Ilonggo, but, Jesus, can you imagine a whole new generation of Filipinos speaking like her?

What makes it even more hilarious, of the kind that hurts when you laugh, is that the House of Representatives should be in any position to debate the virtues of language when it has proven itself only to be a Tower of Babel. That is a pit that harbors many tongues, not of them harboring the most essential element of any language, without which communication is not possible. That element is truth. That House speaks the language of power, it speaks the language of money, it speaks the language of selfishness and greed. But it does not speak the language of truth.

Neither English nor Tagalog ? nor indeed Cebuano ? will be able to help that.

The bill?s premise is wrong to begin with. The decline of English in these parts has nothing to do with the bilingual policy in education. It has to do with the decline in reading, a habit few congressmen have been known to indulge in. Even English-speaking countries have experienced a decline at least in good English, if not in English itself, from reading falling into disrepute among their inhabitants. Add to that the language of text messages and the deterioration is complete.

In fact we do have the most compelling reason to adopt a bilingual policy. This point is largely ignored in our periodic debates about whether to use English or Tagalog as the medium of instruction, if not indeed as the national language. It?s a point I myself have largely ignored until the last dozen years or so.

It hit me like a ton of bricks in a media conference abroad some years ago. I was astonished to learn how we truly stuck out as the odd man in Asia even in media. Elsewhere in Asia, the mass circulation newspapers are in the local languages, mass circulation meaning several million copies or so a day for each of them. Our mass circulation newspapers are in English, and our combined broadsheets do not even reach a million copies a day.

The knee-jerk reaction is to say: So why don?t we publish local-language newspapers and so produce mass circulation ones? But you realize that there precisely is the rub. Whether we like it or not, we do have a bilingual practice, if not policy, in language. We speak in the local languages, but we read (and write) in English. Some do speak in English, it is their first language, but they are few and far between. Most of us speak in Tagalog or some other local language ? I speak in Tagalog, English and Bicol in that order, Bicol being last simply because I have few people to talk with in it ? but read newspapers, books, and other materials in English.

Two things prove the wisdom of the bilingual policy beyond a shadow of doubt. One is the death of English on prime time TV news, and two is the death of Tagalog in broadsheets. No one produces an (exclusively) English-language TV newscast now because it has no audience, and no one produces a Tagalog broadsheet now (tabloid is another matter entirely, and best left for another day) because it has no audience.

To insist that the kids speak in English to express themselves in schools, or that the teacher teaches Science and Math in English and require students to answer in the same language, is to insist that the tail wag the dog. It is not only cruel, it is idiotic. All the studies show that kids learn best in their own language, and conversely that they learn hardest in a foreign one. Filipino kids trying to learn Science and Math in English do double the work Japanese kids do in trying to learn Science and Math in Japanese, or Thai kids do trying to learn Science and Math in Thai. And the results show it. Filipino kids do poorly in both as compared with Japanese or Thai kids.

But just as well, to insist that kids read and write in Tagalog or the other local languages is to insist that the tail wag the dog. I know it?s a cumbersome process speaking in Tagalog and the local languages and reading and writing in English, but the alternative is worse. I doubt many Filipinos will be able to make the transition to reading and writing in Tagalog, as those who tried to publish Tagalog-language broadsheets have learned the hard way. Things are not going to get easier with the Internet.

The bilingual policy in education remains a most intelligent and enlightened policy, taking stock as it does of existing realities and building on them. I suspect the fetish with English with some Filipinos, congressmen included, isn?t just practical, it is colonial. It goes back to Jose Rizal?s time when the ?indios? [natives] were denied Spanish, which gave us the idea that being able to speak the language of the colonizer made up for our snub noses and dark skins. It does not.

In any case, Mark Twain was right: It is better to keep quiet and look like a fool than to open your mouth and confirm it. It is also better to not speak English and look like a fool than open your mouth and confirm it.