“AMONG 79 participating countries, the Philippines scored the lowest in reading comprehension in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), according to the results released Dec. 3, 2019.”
We’re the bottom sweepers. Sad.
But that is as expected with the misinterpreted and misimplemented Mother Tongue-based medium of communication for beginning learners and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2010.
These are two laws that had good intentions. But as we know, the road to perdition is full of good intentions.
In mother tongue, the intention was that the child will learn using the language he uses at home. The bright guys in the Department of Education thus decided, Mindanao, except in indigenous communities and maybe in Zamboanga where their native tongue is distinctly Chabacano, is Cebuano. Of course, we aren’t! That’s actually why Davao conyo came to be. We are a mish-mash binignit lamaw of just about every mother tongue, we gape in incomprehension when a Cebuano talks.
Teachers, students, learners, and the general non-Cebuano public alike.
The learners and the teachers then start school learning an entirely foreign language that is not English. The spirit of the law was forgotten even before the law was implemented as the focus was to print as many Cebuano textbooks and teacher’s manual, not to make the lessons comprehensible for all -- teachers and learners alike.
“Culture supplies us with knowledge we don’t know we know, that operates invisibly to shape our understanding of the world,” wrote Grant MacCracken in the book Chief Culture Officer. He illustrates this by citing a taxi driver in North Carolina who had a book “Common American Phrases in Everyday Contexts: A Detailed Guide to Real-Life Conversation and Small Talks”.
To an American (and the English-speaking, non-Tagalog-speaking, Davao conyo-comprehending Cebuano mongrel Dabawenyo child), it’s easy to understand when someone says, “That’s the last straw.”
Now, he wrote, imagine a person who just recently arrived in the United States from Gambia who is still struggling to know American English...
Now, imagine our learners, Davao conyo all, who are even surprised that the Tagalogs do not know what a “binignit/benegnet/benignet/binegnit” is, now made to learn in his first three years in school in Cebuano. We cannot even agree on how to spell binignit! Thus, the very foundation of education -- comprehension -- has just been sacrificed.
Throw in the no child left behind policy that was interpreted as punishing teachers who fail a student, and we get the PISA ranking we deserve.
What does Senator Cynthia Villar want to happen because of that? Disband low-quality schools and give incentives to high-performing schools. Another cobblestone to the road to perdition, a tapal-Vulcaseal solution. By the way, it was her husband Manny Villar who authored the No Child Left Behind Act of 2010 where the objectives (with 2010 as marker) clearly states:
“By the year 2014, all Filipino children of compulsory age must have completed elementary education;
“By the year 2018, all Filipinos must have obtained and completed high school education.”
Therefore, everyone passes both deserving and not and the country becomes the bottom-dweller nine years later. What to do? Next time! I’ve ran out of space.
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