Add Filipino in college?

I am often asked, both privately and publicly, why I – of all people – am against adding at least one Filipino subject to the new General Education Curriculum (GEC) that will take effect in 2018.

After all, I was responsible for including three subjects on Filipino in the old GEC. I use Filipino in my public lectures. I use Filipino in my twice-weekly column in a tabloid. I used Filipino exclusively in my classes in literature and literary theory at De La Salle University before I retired, as well as in my post-retirement classes at Ateneo de Manila University and the University of Santo Tomas. I have also written quite a number of books in Filipino.

I even led the group of citizens that sued the previous President in the Supreme Court because she wrote an unconstitutional memo mandating the sole use of English as medium of instruction in our public schools.

Why, then, am I against the current demand to add a Filipino subject in college?

I have two reasons.

First, whenever I am asked which language should be used as the medium of instruction in Philippine Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), I unhesitatingly reply, “Filipino.” I strongly believe that Filipino should be used not only in most (if not all) subjects in the GEC but also in most (if not all) major subjects in college.

We have plenty of empirical evidence that Filipino works as a medium of instruction and scholarship in higher education.

Ateneo pioneered the use of Filipino in teaching; the names of Fr. Roque Ferriols, S.J., Rolando Tinio, and Bienvenido Lumbera come to mind. There were and are numerous teachers in the University of the Philippines using Filipino in their classrooms. At La Salle, Filipino has been used as a medium of instruction for mathematics, science, engineering, economics, and humanities subjects. At PNU, PUP, and other top universities, Filipino is being routinely used as medium of instruction for various college subjects.

There are also a lot of books and articles written in Filipino that can be and have already been used in teaching all kinds of college subjects. In fact, the scholarly journal published in the Philippines that consistently gets the most downloads on the Web from users inside and outside the country is “Malay,” a journal that is written entirely in Filipino. As a language for research and scholarship, Filipino has long proven its worth.

Those advocating the addition of a subject on Filipino in the GEC argue that, first, college students are not yet ready to use the language and therefore need to study it some more, and second, that the language itself is not yet ready to be used as a medium of instruction in college because it has not yet been fully intellectualized. (Intellectualization means having enough vocabulary and grammatical sophistication to handle higher learning.)

If I agree to the addition of a subject studying Filipino in the GEC, I would be contradicting myself.

I cannot say, on the one hand, that Filipino should be used as the medium of instruction for college subjects and then say, on the other hand, that students are not yet prepared to use the language in their classes.

I cannot say, on the one hand, that Filipino should be used as the medium of instruction for college subjects and then say, on the other hand, that the language is not yet ready to be used as a medium of instruction and still needs to be fully intellectualized.

As you can see, I am logically bound by my advocacy for Filipino as medium of instruction to insist that the K to 12 curriculum will sufficiently prepare students for higher-level use of Filipino and that the language is already sufficiently intellectualized to be used extensively as a medium of instruction.

The second reason comes from the nature of the core subjects in the GEC. These core subjects are all interdisciplinary. The study of Filipino is a discipline. In fact, students can earn not only an undergraduate degree in Filipino, but even a master’s degree and a doctorate degree. There are college departments of Filipino, two of which are even called Centers of Excellence in Filipino. (Centers of Excellence are chosen on the basis of their excellence in particular disciplines.)

If a subject is devoted to the study of Filipino, then that subject is, by definition, disciplinal. Being a disciplinal subject, it cannot be one of the core subjects in the GEC. (A course on Filipino, of course, may be offered by an HEI as a major course, but not as a GE course. In fact, many upper-level courses on Filipino are offered for students majoring in Filipino.)

The question of adding a subject on Filipino in college, therefore, has nothing to do with nationalism. It has everything to do with propagating the use of Filipino and not stopping teachers from using it in college classrooms.

My stand is clear and simple: I am against the addition of a core subject in the GEC on the Filipino language because I am for the use of the Filipino language as the medium of instruction in most, if not all, college subjects. We should not try to win a battle but lose the war.