Situating Language in the Sphere of Publ
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
Philippines. Her research interest focuses on language planning and policy, as well as public
primary education policy analysis. This short essay is part of her preliminary literature synthesis
for her ongoing undergraduate thesis on the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education
Program of the Philippine Department of Education in the province of Aklan.
∗
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 legitimacy of this power is self-reflexive as instructional content in
primary education are seldom questioned and easily imbibed. As a case in point,
academic freedom is only enforceable for institutions of higher learning, and not
for primary education (Constitution, art. XIV, §5(2)). There is no authority to
deviate from the prescriptions of the Department of Education for the
curriculums of elementary schools.
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).
The utilization of the local lingua franca or the mother tongue as a
medium of instruction means that “Filipino should cease to be a medium of
instruction except in places where it is the mother tongue of the majority of
learners. [It] de-links the national language question from the issue of medium of
instruction. . . . [P]ut in another way, Filipino can still remain the national
language even if it ceases to be a medium of instruction” (Id.).
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).
E. L. Hohulin. (1993). “The First Language Component: A Bridging
Educational Programme”, Philippine Journal of Linguistics 24(1): 1-21.
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).
T. Ruanni F. Tupas. (2011). “The New Challenge of the Mother Tongues: The
Future of Philippine Postcolonial Language Politics”, Kritika Kultura 16: 108-121.
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
Philippines. Her research interest focuses on language planning and policy, as well as public
primary education policy analysis. This short essay is part of her preliminary literature synthesis
for her ongoing undergraduate thesis on the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education
Program of the Philippine Department of Education in the province of Aklan.
∗
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 legitimacy of this power is self-reflexive as instructional content in
primary education are seldom questioned and easily imbibed. As a case in point,
academic freedom is only enforceable for institutions of higher learning, and not
for primary education (Constitution, art. XIV, §5(2)). There is no authority to
deviate from the prescriptions of the Department of Education for the
curriculums of elementary schools.
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).
The utilization of the local lingua franca or the mother tongue as a
medium of instruction means that “Filipino should cease to be a medium of
instruction except in places where it is the mother tongue of the majority of
learners. [It] de-links the national language question from the issue of medium of
instruction. . . . [P]ut in another way, Filipino can still remain the national
language even if it ceases to be a medium of instruction” (Id.).
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).
E. L. Hohulin. (1993). “The First Language Component: A Bridging
Educational Programme”, Philippine Journal of Linguistics 24(1): 1-21.
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).
T. Ruanni F. Tupas. (2011). “The New Challenge of the Mother Tongues: The
Future of Philippine Postcolonial Language Politics”, Kritika Kultura 16: 108-121.