SITUATING LANGUAGE IN THE
SPHERE OF PUBLIC EDUCATION POLICY:
THE NEXT PHILIPPINE EXPERIMENT
Jean Christelle B. Nadate
∗I
Public policies reflect the larger social structures, constructs, and institutions in any given society that are as diverse as they are complicated. They are shaped by the temporal triad of history, contemporaneous realities, and the prospects of progress and change. As such, any legal or policy determination is intrinsically hinged on the processes that shape social consolidation, the public sphere, and the private life.
All the social frameworks that mark modern democracy exist to transform a simple question of policy into a grand debate of where a nation is headed. The network of administration in government, the hierarchy of centralized commands that secure public welfare, the localization of legislative and executive powers that enhances efficiency, the diversity in cultural and indigenous heritage, and the diffused universality of laws and norms all contribute to the accretion of individuals into populations and states and thus, to the aggregation of distinct interests and conflicting goals.
In no small measure is this problem less difficult in terms of public education, one that since time immemorial, has been recognized as a state tool to effectuate communal values, consolidate the ideals of citizenship, affirm cultural integrity, and establish monopolies of thought. And in this scheme of control and reciprocation of authorities, Philippine society is, of course, no exception.
The acknowledgement of this social premise has vested public education and the policies that establish it with national interest and paramount public importance. The Philippines as a state is, in fact, mandated to “[e]stablish, maintain, and support a complete, adequate, and integrated system of education relevant to the needs of society” (Constitution, art. XIV, §2(1)). In fulfillment of this goal, the multisectoral nature and the inherent diversity of Filipino society remain a central theme whereby national educational paradigms are designed. Concretizing policies into programs demonstrate the need to create policies that cut across the multitudes of peoples, families, and cultural identities that compose the country.
∗ Jean Christelle Nadate is taking AB English at the Aklan State University, the
There is a strong recognition of this diversity in Philippine laws and policies. The decentralization of government that followed post-Marcos society introduced a sea change that now outlines the association of a Manila-centric government with more than seven thousand islands in this archipelago (see Local Government Code of 1991). The creation of two autonomous regions further marks this post-colonial segregation (Constitution, art. X, §§15-21; see also Atienza, 2004; Hartigan-Go, Valera & Visperas, 2014; Magno, 2001). The renewed consciousness of indigenous cultural communities’ rights has watered down the “monopoly of legality” that characterize three centuries of foreign subjugation (see, e.g., Nadate, 2014). More recently, the introduction of House Bill No. 4994 for a remodeled southern Mindanao promises to revise the “failed experiment” (Aquino, 2013) of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao as an exposition of historical vindication and the prospect of greater social cohesion (La Viña, 2013; Mendoza, 2014).
Indeed, there is a wave of change in Philippine society characterized by fragmentation, but one carefully crafted to maintain cohesion in the face of autochthony and self-determination. And in its breadth and importance, public education is inevitably caught in the slipstream. Where public education is situated in this scheme of history, culture, and the individual Filipino remains an unanswered question. The experimentation through policy design and implementation is constant to ensure that public goals are attuned to public realities. Public education policy requires greater vigilance or diligence for this “great equalizer” has never been a pacific or simple domain in terms of policy development. As it is keyed to human development and social progress, the facets of politics, economics, the sciences, psychology, and philosophy converge to magnify the effects of educational policies and eventually, filtering these to either policy success or failure.
II
Public education has always been a contentious arena in policy development. The conflict herein ranges from substantive to bureaucratic. On one hand, substantive debates recall ideological and political questions. On the other hand, bureaucracy is tied in the larger spheres of governmental design. The power of the State, the so-called “police power”, authorizes the central government to effect change in either areas (Constitution, art. XIV, §1).
The state intervention on and regulation of the many fields of learning is unquestioned and widely-accepted. After all, “[w]e cannot have a society of square pegs in round holes, of dentists who should never have left the farm and engineers who should have studied banking and teachers who could be better as merchants” (Philippine Supreme Court En Banc, Department of Education, Culture
& Sports v. San Diego, G.R. No. 89572, Dec. 21, 1989).
The critiques of the past and present educational frameworks are telling of this political cloud hovering schools. For instance, Renato Constantino (1970), in his popular essay, called Philippine public education as “miseducation of the Filipinos.” This is a thesis echoed and validated in the seminal research of Canieso-Doronilla (1989) less than two decades after. Doronilla concludes that Philippine public education, with particular focus on primary education, creates a misidentification against national consciousness. In particular, she noted that “it is fair to say that the young respondents [elementary school students] have as yet no conception of what it means to be a Filipino, identifying instead with the characteristics and interests of other nationalities, particularly American” (p. 74).
While this misidentification has been attributed to many factors within the public education milieu (Constantino, 1982; Mulder, 1990), one thing is certain: postcolonial language politics has a significant influence on the contents of Philippine education. As cogently observed by Tupas (2011, p. 117):
As late as 2003 during which former Gloria Arroyo issued a memorandum that would put English back as the “sole” medium of instruction in the country, the issues raised did not substantially advance the ideological structure of the debates. Those in favor of English as the main languages of instruction justified it on grounds that English is the language of globalization, social mobility and global competitiveness; those against it (thus in favor of the “bilingual” status quo) argued that Filipino, the mother tongue and the national language, would be more effective in facilitating learning among pupils and in fostering national unity and nationalist consciousness. The charge against Filipino came from “non-Tagalog” critics who claimed that Filipino is divisive and is indicative of Tagalog imperialism. The ideological genealogies of these arguments can be traced back to the linguistic battles of the 1930s, early 1970s, and mid 1980s during which questions about national language and medium of instruction framed the debates. In all these, “the mother tongue” argument was central to many positions.
In the midst of this fragmentism, the challenge of effecting a public education that is “complete, adequate, and integrated” is, therefore, made more exacting; more so in light of its compulsory nature as required by the national Charter (Constitution, art. XIV, §2(2)). Public education policies are, therefore, beholden to the language debates that backdrop textbook production, teacher training, curriculum development, and all the myriad of processes that are directed by the Department of Education for the primary and secondary education. The dysregulation caused by these adamant positions, “these politics of inclusion and exclusion,” (Tupas, 2011, p. 116) on instructional language has bolstered a compromise: the use of the “local lingua franca” (Id., p. 114).
This program (where mother tongues are utilized) has actually been put in place in many indigenous cultural communities’ education, as well as minorities and non-formal education (Dekker & Young, 2005; Hohulin, 1993). This educational strategy merely expands an already-working program to the mainstream educational regime (Tupas, 2011, p. 114). Put differently, it is an adoption of working models of localization in the larger scheme of Philippine society: a reflection of the trend of controlled fragmentism, as prominent and controversial as the large and multi-sectoral legal and political changes already mentioned.
This nation-wide engagement for public primary education, where the mother tongue is the medium for instruction, has only been formalized in the recent years. Its incipient status as a national policy, rather than what used to be an agglutination of sporadic and marginalized programs, now sees effective institutionalization. This movement understandably creates new questions and issues, from its design to its implementation, down to its outcomes, effects, and impact.
The reasons for its introduction have not been purely ideological, of course; the pedagogical value of mother tongue-based education is widely acknowledged. Whether the Philippines can replicate the successes demonstrated by the mother tongue-based education system remains to be seen.
REFERENCES
Benigno S. Aquino III. (2013). Speech of President Benigno S. Aquino III on the Framework Agreement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (Oct. 7, 2013).
Maria Ela L. Atienza. (2004). “The Politics of Health Devolution in the Philippines: Experiences of Municipalities in a Devolved Set-Up”, Philippine Political
Science Studies 48: 25.
Lisa Ann Burton. (2013). “Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education in the Philippines: Studying Top-Down Policy Implementation from the Bottom-Up”, Doctor of Philosophy thesis, University of Minnesota (May 2013).
Leticia Constantino. (1982). World Bank Textbooks: Scenario for Deception
(Foundation for Nationalist Studies).
Renato Constantino. (1970). “The Mis-education of the Filipino”, Journal of
Contemporary Asia 1: 20-35.
Diane Dekker & Catherine Young. (2005). “Bridging the Gap: The Development of Appropriate Educational Strategies for Minority Language Communities in the Philippines”, Current Issues in Language Planning 6(2): 182-99.
Maria Luisa Canieso-Doronilla. (1989). The Limits of Educational Change: National
Identity Formation in a Philippine Public Elementary School (Quezon City: University of the
Philippine Press).
Naomi Fillmore. (2014). “Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education Policy and Implementation in Mindanao, Philippines”, Master of International and Community Development thesis, Deakin University (May 2014).
Kenneth Hartigan-Go, Marian Theresia Valera & Mary Kris N. Visperas. (2013).
A Framework to Promote Good Governance in Healthcare,Asian Institute of Management
Working Paper 13-021 (July 2013).
Antonio La Viña. (2013). “The Creation of the Bangsamoro: Issues, Challenges, and Solutions”, Philippine Law and Society Review 2: 3-44.
Cielo Magno. (2001). The Devolution of Agricultural and Health Services, Philippine
Social Watch Report.
Vicente V. Mendoza. (2014). The Bangsamoro Bill Needs the Approval of the Filipino
People, Statement before the House of Representatives Ad Hoc Committee on the
Bangsamoro Basic Law at the hearing on H.B. No. 4994 (Oct. 28, 2014).
Niels Mulder. (1990). “Philippine Textbooks and the National Self-Image,
Philippine Studies 38: 84-102.
Allan Chester Nadate. (2014). “Constitutional Redemption and the Road to Recognizing Indigenous Filipinos in a Transplanted Charter”, Philippine Law Journal
88(3): 640-50.
R. Ricento & N. Hornberger. (1996). “Unpeeling the onion: Language planning and policy and the ELT professional”, TESOL Quarterly 30(3): 401-427.
B. Spolsky. (2004). Language Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). B. Spolsky. (2011). Language Management (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
