Curriculum should produce ‘multilingual Filipino,’ says senator

The government should revise the basic education curriculum to produce a “multilingual Filipino," Senator Edgardo Angara said Monday in reaction to a fellow senator’s observation that students nowadays find their Filipino subjects difficult. “This is our opportunity to be able to make a multilingual Filipino. It cannot just be one language. And the Filipino has an easy inclination in learning languages," Angara said during the Senate hearing on Department of Education’s proposed 2012 budget. Having come from the academe, Angara made the statement after his colleague, Senator Pia Cayetano, noted the difficulty of a number of Filipino students in dealing with their Filipino subjects. “There must be a problem with our curriculum," Cayetano said. “We’re raising a generation of educated kids who grew up with the Cartoon Network slang and cannot converse in Filipino," she added.

Senator Antonio Trillanes IV, who was also at the hearing, said Cayetano’s observation could be purely anecdotal as results of the National Achievement Test indicate that students have a decent grasp of the Filipino language. Also addressing Cayetano’s question, Education Secretary Armin Luistro considered the language issue “a real challenge in terms of the curriculum." But Luistro said, “At the end of the day, what is critical is a curriculum where students are able to learn." Language issues gained extra prominence during the commemoration of National Language Month last August after columnist James Soriano wrote that Filipino is allegedly “not the language of the learned." In a number of Philippine classrooms, the Filipino language is also often scoffed at, Kabataan party-list Rep. Raymond Palatino pointed out, with some schools penalizing students who speak in Filipino and other native languages. Palatino has sought an inquiry into this practice. — MRT/KBK, GMA News