Our English advantage, lost and found

We have long been complaining of the deterioration in the quality of our education. Usually, we claim that ours is a failing system simply because our students have a decreasing efficiency in communication especially when we use the English language. Often we hear that our youth are generally, no longer as good in spoken and written English as their forebears. Differently stated, we sweepingly conclude that our education has deteriorated by our faulty English composition.

I am not in complete agreement in the conclusion that the equality of education is retrogressing simply because of our inability to express this foreign language in grammatically correct composition. But, let us just assume it and proceed to raising the question why hoping that after understanding its flawed cause, we shall be poised to rectify its undesirable effect.

About four decades ago, my elementary teachers were, in my hindsight, highly competent. For example, there was this English teacher of mine in far-away Candijay, Bohol, whose grammar and pronunciation could fare very well when compared to that of a college English instructor of modern times.

Sadly, I learned that after my elementary days, my teachers were subjected to unfair treatment. Their pay scale started to suffer in comparison with that of the clerk in the Bureau of Customs, or even with that of the salary of a janitor working at the Government Service Insurance System, or the take home pay of a security guard of the Philippine National Bank. Somehow their dignity was assaulted for the preference of government was seemingly veering away from education. I could not blame my good old teachers if their sense of values was affected by an obvious disparity in compensation.

Driven by the government with a wrong sense of priorities, the good teachers of the past started to fade. That problem worsened when the vacancies they left could not be field up with equally competent successors. I noticed a diminishing number of people wanting to join the teaching profession. Those with the mind and heart who would become good educators were discouraged by a starvation salary that they opted to become clerks or janitors or even security guards.

At about the same time, the national government, perhaps motivated by some kind of nationalism, started making Tagalog, also called the National Language, as the medium of classroom instruction. Unfortunately, the motivation was misplaced. In these islands called Visayas, the Tagalog dialect then, was even more foreign than English. Our teachers, honed by their own college education to communicate in English, had to do some scrambling. Mamaya, mag inusapay tayo, pare!

Along with some enumerable ones, these two factors, to me, formed the dreadful causes why our basic English communication skills were eroded. Our advantage was lost. While the realization came late, the efforts to arrest our slide seemed to be pursued with passion.

There is a present attempt on the part of our education officials to recover lost ground. The regulation no longer making Tagalog as the medium of classroom instruction is in the right direction. More importantly, the re-imposition upon pupils to speak English while in campus is going to reap positive results.

But, to achieve the objective of laying the ground for our students to attain that level of proficiency in English communication, I believe that our teachers, in the first place, have to be re-tooled. Being the inevitable models, they wield strong influence in the way our students speak or write. However, re-tooling is going to be an expensive process. Because it is burdensome for teachers to pay their way to further education with this focus, it is best that our government should shoulder this added cost. A program requiring teachers to attend a serious seminar during the long summer vacation should not strain the addressed by the government rather than by our impoverished teachers. With that done, there will come a time when our people shall regain our lost advantage in English and dominate the world market in most imaginable ways.

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