IF WE are to follow Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) Chairperson Prospero de Vera III’s take that Filipino language and literature are “important building blocks” and are therefore better ascribed to the preparation of “senior high school students to be university-ready when they graduate,” we’ll see that the chairman may be missing out on something in the whole idea of higher education.
Here’s more: “Filipino cannot merely be taught as a subject, but must be used in oral and written forms across academic domains,” the chair said.
He is right about using Filipino across academic domains. Citizens must learn to express concepts in their own language. But he is wrong about Filipino being unteachable as a separate subject.
We do not know how far the gentleman had weaned himself from the thick of academic work, but anyone in institutions of higher learning know that the teaching of Filipino as language and literature in college assume an objective that is far different from being merely “building blocks.”
In college where the cognitive level of students are way higher, language is not disregarded as merely tools for communication, but facilities for higher thinking. The learning of language becomes self-reflexive, critical, and what better material can be had but one’s own body of literature. Students read through language via their poetry, fiction, song, drama, and in doing so understand their country’s people better, their soul, identities, cultures, representations, dreams, even their conflicts and contradictions.
De Vera said the non-mandatory inclusion of Filipino and Panitikan in the college curricula allows wider space for “innovative reforms” and “academic freedom.” Universities and colleges can now include proficiency in other Philippine languages such as Ilocano, Cebuano, Waray, and even “Asian languages that will make graduates regionally and globally competitive.”
Well and good, but maybe in the ideal world. That the subjects had become non-mandatory, institutions would expectedly opt to drop the whole idea of Filipino and Panitikan in the roster altogether. It would be savings for the school with a good number of general education teachers from the rank and file.
So that’s how we slowly erode one’s pride in one’s language and spirit. We’ll have an education that totally misses out on the importance of imbibing at the right age one’s language and literature, and merely emphasizes language’s consumerist function.