The Dark Side of Education Reforms? Musings on MTB-MLE

by Rommel A. Curaming

Preliminary Note: My first degree is in Secondary Education (major in Social Studies/History) and I am glad and grateful to have spent the first nine years of professional life as a classroom teacher, at the Philippine Science High School-Diliman and Colegio San Agustin-Makati. During much of this time, I also did part-time lecturing at the History Department of De La Salle University-Manila. Looking back, I've realized that the seeds of my interest in knowledge politics were nurtured during those years when, forced by circumstances, I came face to face on daily basis with the the various modes and phases of knowledge production, consumption and transmission whose politics were deeply concealed by  routine school activities. With this and the next post, I pay tribute to the memory of the late Dr. Ma. Luisa C. Doronila, my professor at College of Education, UP Diliman, to whom I owe much intellectual debt. It is a pity that I didn't manage to see her again to let her know before she passed away.  In a 32-hour, 2-unit credit capstone course simply called Senior Seminar, she adroitly tied together not only all the major strands of educational processes but also, and more importantly, what the synergy of all the seemingly innocuous pedagogical practices and ideas means to homo politicus among us in the batch. For me, it was an awakening: the educational may indeed be (cryptically) political at the same time.

Borneo, the world’s third largest island, is a haven for those studying languages. With enormous linguistic varieties in the island, common are places where many people understand and use three or more languages in their daily life. Among other things, this makes Borneo a veritable laboratory for examining the fascinating world of multilingualism.

A colleague at UBD, Dr. James MacLellan, had a seminar recently on efforts to maintain and revitalize indigenous minority languages in Borneo. The specific communities or cases covered include Dusun and Tutong in Brunei, Kadasandusun and Iranun in Sabah, Bidayuh in Sarawak and Kenaytn in West Kalimantan. I am not a language or linguistic person, but I have found in these fields a fertile ground for a productive exploration of the intricacies and fundamental roots of knowledge politics, my main interest. After all, the much derided and at the same time celebrated (at least in some quarters) onslaught by poststructuralism-postmodernism-postcolonialism of the scholarly world is not called “linguistic turn” for nothing. “It’s language, stupid!”, so I remember overhearing one saying in jest to another during a discussion on the crisis of representation in history held some time ago.

The seminar was engaging and informative and one among other aspects of the discussion that caught my keen interest was the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE). It is, so the presenter had noted, one of the avenues by which indigenous minority languages may be ‘saved’ from the threat of language shift, if not downright extinction. It then crossed my mind that the Philippines and Timor Leste were among countries that have, rather boldly, adopted the MTB-MLE framework recently. The Ministry of Education in the Philippines announced that starting school year 2012-2013, which began in June 2012, MTB-MLE would be carried out as part of the newly instituted K-12 Basic Education Program. Its counterpart in Timor Leste envisions next year, 2013, as the start of the program’s implementation. As expected the decisions were met by mixed reactions in the two countries.

In the Philippines the announcement generated, among other things, skepticism. This is particularly rife among some classroom teachers, principal and head teachers who know very well the tightly constrained situations on the ground which effectively circumscribed any effort at reforms, particularly the high-sounding ones that the government has initiated since decades ago. On the other hand, as evident in media coverage the announcement elicited enthusiastic support from many groups and individuals, particularly from the progressive, liberal blocs in the academia, NGO communities, legislature, media as well as in the bureaucracy. The decision has been viewed as an enlightened policy that was long due and that it would address the deeply rooted problems in education. In an article I have co-written on the case of Timor Leste, which will appear as a chapter in a book to be published by Palgrave on Language, Identities and Education in Southeast Asia, my co-author and I have echoed the research findings on the sound pedagogical basis for MTB-MLE. The use of mother-tongue in the first few years of basic education will, so researches show, serve not only as a mechanism for facilitating a less painful, may be even more effective, transition to literacy in another language/s; it is also key to establishing a stronger foundation for students’ cognitive and psycho-social development. In addition, the desire to maintain or promote local cultures and identities, so trenchant and widespread in various places where intellectuals are acutely aware and are wary of the ‘threat’ of globalization, may also be served.

What is often missed amid the celebration of progressivism is the deeply concealed political consequences, or implications, of educational reform efforts, such as MTB-MLE.There is no doubt  the support thrown into MTB-MLE by progressive scholars and intellectuals in the Philippines and elsewhere is fueled by good intention. The side effect, however, may be gleaned in the danger posed by educationalizing the otherwise political and social problem. The adoption of MTB-MLE creates an unintended impression that all along it is the  medium of instruction that is “the problem,” thus obscuring the more fundamental factors rooted in the material and political conditions in the country. The question for instance of high attrition rate and the relatively poor educational outcomes among those who survive may be explained, if viewed from the lens of MTB-MLE, as a result of the non-use of the mother tongue at a crucial stage of a pupil’s cognitive development. The government officials, politicians and other stakeholders who should have allowed more budget to education—to build more schools, to pay higher salaries, train and hire more qualified teachers, to produce more and better textbooks--can only find solace in this line of argument. I can imagine them laughing their way out of accountability. What makes education sector such a vulnerable target and concurrently an effective agent of escape goating, and what can educators do to help prevent it, will be the focus of my next post.