#OPINION| Mother Tongues, Power Struggles

By Francisco Angeles Jr.

When indigenous students flurry in classrooms this August, the typical back-to-school fanfares still commence. And on the walls, Buwan ng Wika posters still hang. But come the time classes start, these same students would be met by a grave, dispiriting realization: Beyond this year’s Buwan ng Wika theme, which spotlights native languages, any trace of their mother tongues in public classrooms have been effectively wiped clean.

The learning materials in 19 native languages now gather dust.

This followed on the heels of 240 members of the Philippine House of Representatives approving last February 6, House Bill 6717, which shelves the implementation of Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) for Kindergarten to Grade 3 students.

By that same act, the house denied nearly nine million public school students the kind of education stated in RA 10533 — a law that with wide approval was passed by Congress and reads:

“Make education learner-oriented and responsive to the needs, cognitive and cultural capacity, the circumstances and diversity of learners, schools and communities through the appropriate languages of teaching and learning, including mother tongue as a learning resource.”

Had anyone a few years ago abolished this fundamental doctrine built on revitalizing our indigenous languages, they would have been called irresponsible and treacherous. Yet here we are in 2023 witnessing this blunt smothering of Philippine culture.

This linguistic tragedy can be thanked in no small part to the twisted motivations of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. In his first State of the Nation address, he mentioned the need for constant re-examination of the medium of instruction in schools to maintain the Philippines’ advantage as an English-speaking nation.

The advocacy for the lingua franca is all very well, given our civilization banks on human labor abroad to boost our country’s economic health. But it also causes the collapse of our native languages, which is destructive of civilization itself.

It’s not enough to take the ground that pigeonholing MTB-MLE is justified by the lack of resources to execute the program properly, especially given that the program was only given the green light in 2012.

Of course there would be growing pains. Of course creating sufficient learning materials would be tedious. Of course language perplexities intrude the streamlined implementation of the program. Of course effective teaching in native languages would be no easy feat.

However, the mark of our political distress is that in all the clamor, the government found no better solution than abandoning MTB-MLE rather than allocating more funds and energy into making the program more crystallized.

This decision by the house, so patently self-destructive, ultimately shuts and locks the doors on indigenous students and the rest of Filipino learners a deep connection to their communities’ past — cultural traditions, ways of life, and practices — which helps with the understanding of their present.

Our mother tongues, laced with centuries of history and heritage, are now at the precipice of endangerment, with some well on their way to extinction. According to Ethnologue in 2022, of our country’s 175 indigenous languages, 35 are considered endangered, 11 are on the brink of extinction, and 2 are already extinct. So far as the future histories of the Philippines can be anticipated, we can only expect these numbers to soar following the desertion of MTB-MLE.

As Buwan ng Wika comes to a close and classroom posters come off, we must not let our native languages — caught under the weight of social and economic power struggles — vanish in the hands of the government.