By Carlos H. Conde – MANILA: “We grow our hogs in our own farms so you’re sure to get meat that is grown.”
“The city’s voice is soft like solitudes.”
“He found his friend clowning himself around.”
“He seemed to be waiting for someone, not a blood relation, much less a bad blood.”
Such phrases, lifted from government-approved textbooks used in Filipino public schools, are reinforcing fears that crucial language skills are degenerating in a country that has long prided itself on having some of the world’s best English speakers. At a time when English is widely considered an advantage in global competitiveness for any country, many fear this former U.S. colony is slipping.
English is an official language here, along with the native Tagalog. Yet the U.S. State Department, in its “2007 Investment Climate Statement,” released this month, concluded: “English-language proficiency, while still better than in other Southeast Asian nations, is declining in the Philippines.”
For years now, Antonio Calipjo Go, an academic and a supervisor of the Marian School of Quezon City, a private school here, has waged a campaign against bad textbook English.
“I pity our children who are being fed these errors,” Go said in an interview. “This is one of the reasons why the level of education in our country is worsening.”
Go says he has notified the Philippine Department of Education of dozens of English-language errors in all seven approved social studies textbooks. In January, he testified at a Senate hearing on the subject. And he has written to the World Bank, which has granted an 800 million peso, or $17.5 million, loan to the Philippines government for textbooks.
But when the new school year opened in June, the books were unchanged.
So Go took out advertisements in newspapers detailing the errors. In July, he paid for a full page in the country’s largest-circulation newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, enumerating errors in two textbooks.
He titled the ad “Learnings for make benefit glorious nation of Philippines,” after the movie “Borat,” whose title character has a less-than-perfect grasp of English.
“I do not wish to pick a fight with anybody,” Go declared in his ad. “I only know that if I kept this to myself, the errors that have been in these books all these years will continue to harm the hearts and minds of more generations of Filipino schoolchildren. The errors must be corrected. Now.”
Go estimates that more than 75 percent of all elementary textbooks in public schools contain errors.
“And I am being kind with that estimate,” he said. Aside from the linguistic errors, he finds other aspects problematic, pointing out a textbook that extols the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
Go has been sued for libel by two textbook authors and a publisher, though the lawsuit of the publisher, Phoenix Publishing, has been dismissed. He is undeterred. “I refuse to accept that we cannot do something to solve problems like this,” he said in the interview. “I cannot accept that.”
Go is far from the only person worried about textbook errors and the deterioration of English skills in the Philippines.
Business chambers, foreign and domestic, have voiced concern that the decreasing quality of English could hurt the country’s competitiveness. Three years ago, the European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines launched a campaign called “English is cool!” to address this deterioration.
Last year, the Joint Foreign Chambers of Commerce of the Philippines, in a workshop on how to increase foreign investment in the country, identified “improved English proficiency” as a key area that needed improvement.
The U.S. State Department, in its recent report, said the “the comparative advantages the Philippines once enjoyed vis-à-vis its neighbors in attracting foreign investment need to be restored in order to attract more investment and support higher growth.”
One reason English proficiency, or its lack, has received so much attention here is because of the call-center boom and the fact that Filipino workers with a good command of the language stand a better chance of being recruited for jobs abroad.
For years, foreign governments, particularly the United States, and donor agencies like the World Bank have been providing assistance to the Philippine educational system, and some of the programs have involved the production of textbooks. This month, Australia announced that it was giving a $10 million loan to Manila to improve basic education.
Educators do not deny a problem with the quality of English in textbooks and instruction, but point out that there are other, perhaps more pressing, problems in the schools.
Among these are poor skills in science and math; the lack of teachers, many of whom are being recruited abroad for higher pay; a lack of equipment; and overcrowded classrooms, with some holding nearly 100 students.
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Good work Mr.Go.I hope the politicians will take their part here.
Despite of these, still our 3,000 Pinoy English teachers are still the best in Thailand and to learn good english at their early age is the main reason for Korean couples with small children to flock to our country.
before we get too hardy on english…perhaps we need to wonder why we need to be the best English speakers in the world…
obviously to fulfill the foreign capitalist goal to extract our hardworking people claiming carrying the banner that we are the most intellectually enslaved people and take on the Westerner’s language as our own…
there are even more attempts by the education department to enforce the English language to the early childhood of 3rd grade…this because due to the drop of proficiency in English by the recent examinations and have plummeted the opportunists in government to corrupt their own people…more and more, there is a seems to be a need to perfect our english to fulfill filipino students towards job-oriented schools to be shipped out sooner…
There are more data coming out that colleges are being “outsourced” by technical schools that promise less time before graduation and a dream to get out of the Philippines to work…
perhaps we aren’t even discussing the colonize thinking of our own people. While we strive to become English proficient, we forget that there are languages in our own country which we don’t even know about. Pampanga, Haligaynon, sibuano, etc. languages that are actually in our country we don’t care about, yet when we step in another country, we pride ourselves of being filipino.
we want so much to be westernized (and all for a foreign dominated reason), that we discard our own people’s history, language, and culture.
Too westernized that we forgot to learn (in School), also the language of our neighbors in Asia.
Although, Mr. Go is doing something about it, the problems with the textbooks are just a scratch on the surface. There are just too many underlying problems inflicted by the Philippine government and everyone in it, I don’t even know where to start.
I went to grade school in the Philippines and our PE teacher (yes, it was our PE teacher not our English teacher) forced us to speak English and fined us if we didn’t. I don’t think it was even legal for her to fine us but it benefited me in the end. My parents also encouraged me to read different novels (didn’t matter what it was) so I can improve my vocabulary. Oh, and my father bought me a dictionary so if I didn’t understand the word I was reading, I had the dictionary to go to :-).
I was already 19 when I went to the US back in 1985. I spoke English almost without the prominent “Filipino” accent and frequently I get asked if I was born and raised in the US. It wasn’t the English textbook or schools that made me a good English speaker (I can also spell :-)) but I had my parents and my PE teacher to thank for.
Like everything else, practice makes perfect. I took Italian language courses here in Italy because I thought it was necessary for me to learn how to speak Italian since I currently reside in Italy but no matter how much I learned in school, I still can’t speak Italian because I don’t speak it in a regular basis. Same goes if I went to school to learn “Ilocano” and “Kapampangan.” I am Cebuano and I had to learn Tagalog in school from grade school until college. I learned Tagalog because it was necessary for me to pass and to go to the higher grade. We learn most languages because in one way or another, it’s a necessity for us to do so. I don’t think it a disregard for our own history, language, and culture as Reb_el z. stated above that we don’t know how to speak/learn all the dialects in the Philippines. Additionally, Reb_el Z.stated, “before we get too hardy on english…perhaps we need to wonder why we need to be the best English speakers in the world…obviously to fulfill the foreign capitalist goal to extract our hardworking people claiming carrying the banner that we are the most intellectually enslaved people and take on the Westerner’s language as our own…”
Although, it may seem true for some, I think the word “enslavement” is not the proper choice of word. Most Filipinos in the Philippines really do not have a choice but to work overseas; thus, the OFWs, because the Filipino government can’t provide for its own people. The problems with the textbooks are just a scratch in the surface…there are just too many underlying problems the government need to solve first and unfortunately it’s the Filipino people especially the less fortunate ones that gets the brunt of everything. I don’t think the Filipino people want to be westernized as much as it’s a matter of survival…it’s a way to take care of themselves and their families financially.
…just my thoughts.
great thoughts Drune…
you’re absolutely right, language is absolutely just an attribute to the many problems plaguing our modern filipino society…
just like you, i’m also cebuano, and unfortunately i moved the the US when I was 8…little by little, through organizing with the marginalized sectors, and the filipino community in queens, ny, i begin to take hold of the tagalog language.
aspects of compromise are necessary to ensure survival, but as you point out, lets never forget why we have to make those concessions…the underlying causes have caused us to become deliberately undertakers of foreign languages, even in our own country…
but as you point out, in order to truly ensure survival, one must undergo the mastering of many languages. however, i give you this question, why is our survival threatened? through hundreds of years, haven’t our forefathers forged our survival by now? isn’t our language (provincial) not the carriers of our history?…and in instances like mine, does not remembering or replacing language to assimilate for survival relinquish that forged history?
Reb_el Z, although our forefathers “tried” to forged the survival of the Philippines as a whole, unfortunately, (I think you will agree with me on this) the Philippines will always remain as a third world country with high population growth/birthrates, widespread poverty and will always be an economically underdeveloped country. In addition, the Philippines is a country ruled by “elites” who are wealthy, it’s a country that is economically dependent on the advanced countries and produces primary products for the developed world (to include people); thus, the survival of the people will always be threatened because of the facts stated above. We are forced to learn the different languages of these economically developed countries wherever WE, as the people, are taken to seek more financial stability, i.e. Southwest Asia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, the United States, etc. However, this doesn’t mean we have to forget our native language. In the Philippines, the poor gets poorer and the wealthy gets wealthier. Who can blame the unfortunate ones for wanting to leave the country? I can’t…this is why learning a different language becomes a necessity so they can seek employment from a country that can provide financial stability to them and their families.
Our language is not the “sole” carrier of our history but serves as a reminder of who we are and where we came from in addition to the Filipino blood that runs through our veins (the Filipino culture and traditions, or the Filipino morals and values). I left the Philippines back in 1985 and I still speak fluent Tagalog and Visayan. These languages I will never relinquish because it a constant reminder of who I am and where I came from. I’m very proud to be a Filipino. Like I stated in my initial blog, I don’t think the Filipino people want to be westernized as much as it’s a matter of survival and I don’t think change is going to happen anytime soon…not for the Filipinos and the Philippines.
Drune66, we need you on OUR side. You seem too valuable a potential asset for those with hope to preach that “the Philippines will always remain as a third world country”. The whole term “third world” is so arbitrary anyway. One of the main reasons we remain a part of the “third world” is because of our continued submission to countries of the “first world”. We do not need these countries to sustain ourselves. There is little to nothing that we import from the “Developed countries”. What we do import are non essential commercial items. It is the developed world that relies on the third world for resources that they do not have. It is them that perpetuate the colonization, oppression, and exploitation of our land and people.