Why reform PH language education policy via constitutional reform

The Philippines is the only country in the world where it dedicates the month of August as the National Language Month or “Buwan ng Wika.” However, despite our government’s effort to celebrate language diversity in our country, there is still inequality when it comes to which languages should be taught in basic and higher education curricula, and which languages should be used for official government and private business correspondences. For more than a century already, there have been different schools of thought about which particular language should be prioritized by the government, especially in the education system. In the past 10 years, however, the Department of Education (DepEd) has implemented the Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) with the premise that children learn more abstract ideas if the language of instruction in the primary school level is the one they comfortably speak the most or known as a first language-based education.

Despite the implementation of the MTB-MLE, there are technical and financial hurdles to teaching local languages in regular primary schools, mainly the lack of standardized orthographies in some local languages and the on-ground parent and teacher opposition to MTB-MLE for economic utilitarian reasons that mastering local languages by children would not assure getting high-paying jobs that require professional proficiency in the English language.

I believe that children learn abstract things if they are taught in their first language, but DepEd should accept the reality that nowadays, there are plenty of Filipino children whose first language is English, so DepEd should formulate a curriculum that caters to these children whose first language is English and do away with the usual paradigm that English cannot be a first language in our country.

I propose that we should institutionalize teaching non-English foreign languages like Spanish and Mandarin at all levels in basic and higher education if we want to produce a Filipino foreign language speaking pool that is capable of communicating with native speakers in Spanish and Mandarin, and speaking foreign languages is the new niche in the BPO industry that our country should maximize with.

However, institutionalizing foreign language education, especially Spanish, would require amending the 1987 Constitution by reinstating the official language status of Spanish that had been removed during the deliberations of the 1986 Constitutional Commission which I believe was a big mistake, aside from retaining foreign equity ownership restrictions of locally based enterprises in the Constitution.

I hope our legislators will consider this language education reform proposal and file the necessary bills institutionalizing foreign language education in primary and secondary schools.

Joseph Solis Alcayde Alberici,

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