2 - Go Back to Class: The Medium of Instruction Debate in the Philippines

Summary

INTRODUCTION

To understand the challenges faced by language policy-making and implementation in the Philippines, we need to examine the complex dynamics of “the coexistence of nationalist aspirations, sub-national group loyalties, and pragmatic concerns in a multilingual country” (Hau and Tinio 2003, p. 319). For the whole of the twentieth century, during which the search for a national language was deemed essential to the Filipinos’ search for their own identity, these competing demands exposed both the various layers of power relations in the country, as well as the limiting and liberating conditions that created such relations. In a sense, all stakeholders to the problem of language in the country — no matter if this was a question of medium of instruction, official language, or national language — would configure their own positions out of these competing claims, either to defend their privileged positions or to demand more access to the various resources of power in society, such as quality education, economic mobility, and political representation.

The bitter debates on the national language that ensued during the writing of the Philippine Constitution in the early 1970s were a case in point. Region-based, ethno-linguistic animosity between rival elites appointed to write the constitution resurfaced; prior to this, from the 1930s onwards, Tagalog (renamed Pilipino in 1949) 1 became the national language mainly through the workings of a Tagalog-speaking national leadership. Gonzalez (1980) describes the event that revived such bitter animosity; it was the opening of the pre-Convention meeting originally meant to discuss the procedural rules for the Constitutional Convention:

The name tags and titles of the delegates, together with the districts were written in Pilipino; the opening procedural talk was given in Tagalog. When this happened, pandemonium reigned in the convention hall. The non-Tagalogs took exception to what they perceived as high-handedness and questioned, as a point of order, the use of Pilipino…(M)any asked for translations, and when non-Tagalogs were recognized, they began speaking in their own vernaculars, adding Babel to bedlam (p. 136).