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.
