Back to the future

By Noralyn Mustafa



PRESIDENT Macapagal-Arroyo wants English restored as the primary medium of instruction in the country.

That's about the best piece of news that has come to us here in the hinterlands in recent times.

Perhaps very few among Tagalog-speaking people realized that the constitutional provision imposing Pilipino or Filipino as the medium of instruction in schools was seen by us non-Tagalogs as a rather oppressive, divisive and alienating law.

The more extreme view saw it as another attempt of the "Christian government" at "neo-colonization" with the corollary intent of pushing ethnic and tribal communities, limited already as they are in their access to sources of information, further down the pit of illiteracy and ignorance, from which the possibility of social mobility would be next to impossible.

This is ironic of course, considering that a primary rational behind the law was the idea that we needed a "common language" to unite us as a people.

But we are as divided, if not more so.

This was almost instantaneously evident in the reaction interviews conducted by a television network soon after the President issued the order Wednesday during her speech in an educational institution.

Those interviewed were as usual, divided in their opinions, although there were more of those who objected than those in favor.

But then again, the interviews were conducted in the streets of Metro Manila. So what else could we expect?

Ironically too, the point raised by at least two respondents, a student and a teacher, regarding the difficulty of teaching (and learning) Araling Panlipunan (Social Studies) in English, would be the very argument of non-Tagalog-speaking students and teachers against the use of Filipino; that aside from learning the subject matter, they would have to learn the language in which it was taught.

Believe me, at the risk of being tarred and feathered by so-called "nationalists," it is really much easier for us non-Tagalog speakers to love our country by learning about it in English.

Sometime ago, I had an interesting discussion with a well-known history professor of the University of the Philippines who was one of the lecturers in a conference on local history, namely because I had raised the problem of comprehending their lectures which were mostly in Filipino, the academic kind, delivered before a generally Bisaya, Chabacano and Tausug-speaking audience.

He insisted on the same line of thinking, that is, that we as a people really needed a national language that would bind us all against all odds, and the rest of the country just had to learn it as a matter of patriotism.

I did not bother to point out the obvious, which was how our greatest nationalists spoke and wrote in languages not their own, and how present-day would-be patriots advance their causes with such terms as imperialismo, passismo, ideolohiya, etc. or Hispanized English words.

Instead I argued with another common line of thinking, that is, as even its staunchest advocates admit, Filipino lacks the vocabulary to translate scientific and political concepts, not to mention the humanities.

(I recall once listening to a member of the national language commission being interviewed on national television, who actually said that they were "in the process of finding words for scientific terms, for example, 'valve' is 'bulba'").

Precisely, the professor said, the national language was still developing and we had to give it time to come into its own.

But precisely also, I said, we didn't have the luxury of time in a fast developing world, with technology progressing not just by leaps and bounds but with speeds that blur.

And those who advocate Tagalog or Filipino as a common language, have no cause to worry, unless they have not been listening well.

Local movies and television have accomplished the objective of a common language so effortlessly that even the Abu Sayyaf in the jungles and the Badjao in his houseboat could speak Tagalog fluently.

Maybe over a period of time college students, ill-equipped in the English language after graduating from the elementary and secondary levels with Filipino as the medium of instruction, can learn to use such terms as "bulba" in their lab classes, but how do you take them to the logic and the wisdom, the music and the rhythm, the nuances of language and emotions, the intimations of the sublime, the glimpses of infinity, yes, the genius of Plato, Descartes, Dante, Milton, Emerson, Blake, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Homer -- to name only a very few -- when they have to run to a dictionary at every other paragraph?

Recently I browsed through a publication of a local college and wept.

To try to get to the bottom of this very sorry scheme of things, I dug up a copy of our high school paper, and I could only say a prayer of gratitude for all those wonderful teachers who taught us how to speak and write correct English to comprehend World and Philippine History and to behold the greatness of the men and women who directed the course of humankind through the ages, for the well-written and well-printed books they taught us from, and for growing up here in this place where you don't get ridiculed for being pa-ingles-ingles.

It was, in the truest sense, education for the future, which is now.

I can wish nothing less for the youth of Sulu and all non-Tagalog-speaking students.

In their behalf, Thank You, Madam President.

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