PARADIGM SHIFT? A Query on the K-12 Multilingual Education using

the Department of Education Order no. 31 s.2012 & the Mother

Tongue Curriculum Guide

ABSTRACT

Communication is a crucial part of any transaction, especially

in government policies and laws, wherein the implementer and the

policy maker should have a clear-cut vision what a certain

program would look like and have an effect on the country at

large.

In lieu of the major changes in the Philippine education

system, this paper interrogates the background of the

controversial K-12 Education System, shifting from a ten year

educational cycle to a twelve year cycle, mandated by the

Department of Education, by looking at the policy and curriculum

guide that has shaped its implementation, specifically zoning in

the much speculated Mother-Tongue based learning. Namely, these

are Department of Education Order no.31 s.2012 and the K-12

Mother Tongue Curriculum Guide circa December 2013.

As mentioned earlier, this paper looks primarily on the

Mother-Tongue based Multilingual Education, the prime factor of

this newly refurbished education system, to check for certain

themes and patterns that may show unique features,

implementation issues, relations of power between the policy

maker and the implementers, and the like. By looking at such

themes, one could already extrapolate the success, or the lack

of it thereof, of this momentous benchmark of Philippine

education that would affect a single generation, at the very

least. Interviews are made to validate or serve as an assessment

about the implementation of the text.

INTRODUCTION: Getting into our senses

When everyone was in their formative years, one could possibly

remember the lesson about the five senses -- the sense of sight,

smell, taste, touch, and auditory senses. These are lessons all

learners go through, simply for knowing the senses and getting

into it, so to speak, makes one ready for the type of learning

to be experienced soon-after. Experiential learning is about

facilitating and stimulating the five senses and use it as a

stimulus that the learner can incorporate through learning, for

learners forget mostly about the factual, cognitive data, but

remembers what they had felt during a wonderful learning

experience.

In the Philippines, learning in school is of such a

different experience. More than what the students would learn in

classroom instruction, in it, the students had learned the harsh

realities of life in day-to-day school events as it simulates a

microcosm of society, as it should, but not always in a good

sense. Public education is deteriorating, if it has not, and

private education, no matter the quality it provides, dictates a

price to be paid in exchange of the said "quality". It is quite

impressive; still, to notice how Filipinos treat education as

the sole and viable solution to escape the said realities.

It is but common notion that education is the key to most

Filipinos' "success" in life, which education seems like a

crucial one way ticket out of poverty, repression, abuse, or to

the more principled sense of heritage that nobody can take away

from someone. It is nothing but the logical explanation why,

though seemingly cliché, farmers would sell carabaos and farms

just to send his or her son or daughter to the city and acquire

university education. This university education, however, would

not be possible without the strong foundation of a basic

elementary and high school education. Looking at this common

scenario of Filipino life, in this country where the inequality

in instruction between public and private education cannot be

left unnoticed, how can the masses, which primarily depend on

government-subsidized public education, compete with the

products of private educational institutions?

This growing common knowledge about the said disparity

between public and private education was, however, set aside in

2012 as the government admitted that the then current education

system was flawed and it has to be refurbished. From a regular

ten-year cycle, the government willed to have a twelve-year

basic education cycle, as the Philippines is one of the few

remaining countries left in the world to have a ten-year

education cycle (The K-12 Basic Education Program, 2014). A lot

of mixed reactions came from the partnership of parents and

teachers -- the first for the financial issues that would come

after to make their sons and daughters finish basic education

with two more years, and the latter for the they know a lot of

changes would be in effect and so it would be an added burden in

contrast to the meager compensation of teachers -- othering the

students who would undergo such cycle, the basic component and

primary concern of the education system. These reactions would

soon be set aside as Department of Education Policy number 31,

series of 2012 was enacted by April that same year. During the

summer in-service training of teachers, curriculum revamps had

been a talk, and last-minute seminars sponsored by the

Department of Education were held at the Philippine Normal

University to disseminate certain guidelines on the said program

as the policy stated it should be enacted that upcoming school

year 2012-2013. The following year, by May 15th, Republic Act

10533, or the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013, was passed,

making the Department of Education policy the previous year a

law, mandatorily asking for all schools' -- public and private -

- strict and utmost compliance.

During these stressful days for the education sector,

"birth pains" as one euphemistic comment would put it,

curriculum revamps were constant; new grading systems and

evaluating tools to measure learning competencies were cascaded,

and time allotment per subject area was reiterated. One new

offering mandated by the curriculum, however, stood-out because

of its new approach regarding the very medium of education --

the said Mother-Tongue Based Multilingual Education.

A benchmark of the K-12 education, using the said "mother-

tongue" language as the medium of instruction for the students

up until the third grade aims to be a culturally-sensitive

education thrust that would give these young pupils the

necessary acquired language skills for the succeeding years of

instruction using the Filipino and English languages as its

medium. This thrust lies in the idea that language is acquired

if the necessary skills are put in the proper place early on.

This picturesque idea of a culturally-sensitive Philippine

education system is yet bound too many questions for the

internal diaspora of peoples are commonplace, and the languages

used in a geo-political area are not equivocal with the

languages spoken at the household level. Basic observation in an

area -- city or province outside Manila, probably with the

exception of the eight (Agoncillo, 2003), or ten (MCFarland,

1997) major Filipino languages, still uses Filipino or English

to transact in day-to-day encounters and the facility of the

dialect (or the elevated status of a mother-tongue language) is

limited to the household or to know dialect-speaking others.

Strangers would be regarded as such and are addressed in

Filipino or English. This observation would provide enough

empirical evidence to speculate that most of the country behaves

in such way, with regards to language.

With these thoughts in mind, it is only right to

interrogate the validity of the said program or thrust on the

following grounds:

First, the use of mother-tongue languages is a crucial part

of learning for it is not only a taught subject like English, or

Filipino, but also a medium of instruction, and by such,

communication is at peril if the said mother-tongue language is

not the real language spoken at home by the child.

Second, pedagogy relies on the primary communication

between policy maker and implementer. If the policy is

communicated properly to the very implementers in direct contact

with the students concerned, then implementation is not supposed

to be an issue and the whole mother-tongue based learning

pedagogy is in good hands, eliminating the first concern

mentioned above.

It can further be deduced that the primary point of

interrogation of the said program would be on the

communicativity of the policy and guide at hand, Department of

Education Order no. 31 s.2012 and the K-12 Mother Tongue

Curriculum Guide circa December 2013. These said documents were

selected for these were the backbone of the project, and by

writing such documents, the major changes in the education

system was enacted and was state-sanctioned. These documents

would also be the limitation of this study, itself, for the

study will just focus on the preliminary guide for

implementation of the said policy, as well as the curriculum

guide for Mother-Tongue based learning. Another limitation to be

put into consideration is the validity of a curriculum guide, as

such was not crafted to perfection at the moment of publication;

most curriculum guides like the one for Araling Panlipunan, has

underwent several revisions depending on pedagogical issues,

internal political machinations, and countless academic debates

on what and how things should be learned.

It is common-sensical that to assume that the policy and

guide, especially the Department of Education order, to be a

clear-cut way of making the implementers follow the vision and

drive of the state in a way relating to the concept of

'governamentality' and ‘discipline’ (Foucault, 1991) and as

mentioned above, to eliminate the issues regarding pedagogy.

Upon first scanning the document, however, showed that there

were new issues arising from how the document itself was crafted

-- certain assumptions of the policy maker that were left

unmentioned but could be presumptuously expected to have been

understood by the implementers. This theme would be found to

recur and project a different facet, such as unspoken power

relations. More so, there are points of confusion and possible

areas of flaws that were left to be (mis)interpreted by the

implementer, that could jeopardize the whole ambitious project.

The themes mentioned would be the major points of analyses of

the two said documents, and would be cross-referenced with

interviews coming from the implementers – the teachers of Mother

Tongue – to validate and assess, at the same time, the kind of

interpretation the proponent and the teachers grasped from the

text.

The study is, however, limited by the number of Mother

Tongue teachers interviewed, and a more strategic, systematized,

and geo-politically-aligned series of interviews is proposed to

be conducted in the future. These interview findings would then

have to be collated and compared with the message found in the

text of the said documents found in this paper. The scope of the

study is the first three school years the K-12 MTB-MLE

curriculum is implemented; the Department of Education may

conduct their own assessment of the program, if they really plan

on having one that would improve, or disprove the validity of

this undertaking.

RELATED LITERATURE: Using prior knowledge

Before anything else, there is a need for the project’s

introspection by looking at the Philippines’ history of language

plans that were implemented from the Spanish Colonial times, up

to the present K-12 Mother Tongue language instruction. Only by

doing such introspection will one be able to understand where

the current education program of the state is situated, and its

probable trajectory.

In the latter years of the Spanish colonial era, actions

were taken as the monarchs in Spain, through the viceroy of

Mexico, urged that the natives be taught the Spanish Language.

The reforms of 1863 and the Moret Decree paved way for the

introduction of primary schools (Gonzales, 2003). These schools

were called Escuela Publica del Nino y Ninas, and by 1868, there

were already three grade levels in these makeshift schools

(Canete, 2009). It was said that by 1898, there were 2000 of

these schools and only two per cent (2%) up to six per cent (6%)

of the population was said to have been fluent in Spanish.

The language plan at this era was said to be hardly

explicit, as the education system was inchoate and highly

elitist (Gonzales, 2003).

In the American era, an initial assessment made by McKinley

and Root, through the two Philippine Commissions, showed the

great but obvious shift from Spanish to English, as the

sponsored language of the state even though there were no laws

to support it. The English language, according to McKinley and

Root, showed that it should be propagated as the way of the

democracy, as it was the language of government and competence.

Lastly, English was suggested, and was used, as the language of

education – dubbed as the language of advancement (Gonzales,

2003).

As mentioned, the language plans in this era was geared

towards civil service and education though there was no

formality in this scheme for there was an absence of laws or

agencies to promulgate the language plan rather than the ones it

was already incorporated in.

In 1936, however, during the second year of the

Commonwealth under the American flag, a National Language Law

was authored by Norberto Romualdez, and the following year,

there has been a creation of a National Language Institute for

the development of a national language -- technically, this

“national language” was the Tagalog language of the people of

central Luzon (Gonzales, 2003). Perhaps this proposition of

Romualdez came from an American linguist in the name of Frank R.

Blake, who have suggested that Tagalog be the basis, if not the

“national language” itself, of the archipelago due to its

richness of form and its literary potential. It is also as the

language of the capital city, and fusing different Filipino

languages into one would be impracticable. This would be

seconded by big names such as Eulogio B. Rodriguez -- who

proposed that Tagalog be the basis of the national language

though it should be developed by Filipinos, themselves, rather

than wait for the Americans or other foreigners to do it for

them, and Manuel L. Quezon -- who said teaching English to

Filipinos seems futile and, ultimately, he would endorse Tagalog

to be the national language to replace English in 1937. It would

take effect in 1946, after the Second World War (Frei, 1959).

In the Japanese Occupation, from 1942-1945, learning

Nihongo was mandatory, and after the war, instructions in

schools went back to English from 1946 to 1974. By then,

Nationalists have proposed a bilingual scheme, in order to

incorporate Pilipino (formerly Tagalog) as the other official

and national language, through the department Order no. 25,

s.1974, or the Implementing Guidelines for the Policy on

Bilingual Education, issued by then the Department of Education,

Culture, and Sports (Espiritu, n.d.). The bilingual scheme was

reiterated in 1984, and in 1987 through the formulation of the

new Constitution. By then, the name of the national language

that was Pilipino, was renamed Filipino (Gonzales, 2003). This

language plan would be used until the present, until around 2013

during the onset of the K-12 Mother Tongue scheme for language

instruction.

Mother Tongue-based education, defined as when the students

would facilitate learning through the practice of the language

used at home, also has its long history. The project is not a

new idea after all, as it traces its roots back to 1953, when a

UNESCO-sponsored study had experimented in Iloilo, the use of

Hiligaynon as the language of instruction for young learners.

These experiments were said to be successful, as it had resulted

to the creation of a Vernacular Education Policy, which was

planned thoroughly but was never fully implemented from 1957 to

1974. It was an ambitious plan, as it would have been a test

case for the eight major languages, or the languages most used

in the country, and the project would use these eight identified

languages as the language of instruction in their respective

geo-political areas in grades 1 and 2, before the students’

transition to grade 3. Despite the preparation, it was not fully

implemented due to the lack of resources not only for the

students, but most importantly the teachers who were ill-

equipped for the implementation of the program.

In the late 1990s, during the Estrada Administration, the

Vernacular Education Policy that has been in deep slumber was

resuscitated, as it was revised, and the languages of Tagalog,

Ilokano, and Cebuano were identified for pilot testing. It was,

however, shelved once again, as internal political issues

between the leaders of the Education department surfaced

(Gonzales, 2003).

At present, the country is now faced with another language

plan – the K-12 Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education or

MTB-MLE – the said banner project of the Department of

Education. It was first stipulated in a policy, Department of

Education order no. 31 s. 2012 in April of the said year, while

a law followed to legitimize it – R.A. 10533, or the Enhanced

Basic Education Act of 2013 almost a year after, ratified in May

2013. As the enhanced curriculum was enacted June of 2012,

wherein training was meager and the academe was caught

unprepared, curriculum guides were released to guide the

teachers who are to do the necessary changes and improvements as

the unmentioned but main implementers of the policies.

The said Curriculum Guide c. December 2013, and the

Department of Education Policy no. 31 s. 2012 are the main

documents set for interrogation in this paper. These were chosen

for these were the backbone of the project – one for the

creation of the K-12 MTB-MLE, and the other for its

implementation. These documents were also the ones supposed to

be directly in the hands of the implementers.

DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSES: Learning by doing

Going back to June 2012, curriculum guides for all subject areas

were given to school heads and administrators, supervisors and

middle managers, and the teachers. Because of the strict policy

by the Department of Education, teachers were forced to find a

way to have a curriculum guide for the respective subject areas

they teach, sometimes through certain connections to the

department, or via internet, as more curriculum guides are

downloadable. Some are through connections to the very authors

of some parts of curriculum guide – colleagues in the academe –

from flash drive to flash drive, from training to training that

made everyone believe that being and looking busy in such a

muddled time would mean that everyone is contributing in this

monumental and historic change in the education arena.

Schools in the provinces, especially the ones farther from

Metro Manila, and in public schools even around the metro, the

situation could not be worse. Public school teachers simply

waited for the curriculum guides for the different subject

areas, for lesson plans, and text books for weeks and months --

getting the said instructional materials even after the second

quarter. The situation in the schools in the provinces would not

need any further explanation. The country is unprepared and yet

these discombobulating events and scenarios were projected as

“birth pains” – necessary sacrifices for the creation of this

magnum opus.

Some people in the academe who have had active

participation conception and development of the K-12 program

have spilled some beans -- anecdotes -- like how the

instructional materials that were carefully constructed and

passed right before the deadline so it could be disseminated

immediately were put on hold by some members of the Education

department, causing too much delays. Another source said that

the content of the said curriculum guides were even changed or

tampered with. It was said that members of the said department

had created a textbook when opportunistic-cum-business minded

publishing companies raced to have the first K-12 aligned books

to sell by using the members of the government agency as the

very authors, using the earlier or old curriculum guides that

were not consulted with the academe. There is quite no harm done

here, except that the revised and enhanced curriculum guides

edited and proofread by the experts were tampered and reverted

to the original unedited version just so it could still be

aligned with the already printed textbooks.

Still, the K-12 program is not jeopardized for it

continuous to runs on its third year, right on course as it

should be, as no official formal evaluation has been made just

yet for it is seems too early to do so, or maybe too late when

one would soon be generated.

As of now, the only viable assessment of the K-12 program

would not be on the part of pedagogy, or on how things work, but

on how things are perceived to work – to check if the vision of

the state is the same vision everyone concerned in the project

has. This can only be done by interviews and anecdotes like the

ones above, and by looking deeply at the documents or text at

hand.

Context of the Documents

A. Department of Education Policy no. 31, series of 2012

The Produced in April 17, 2012 by the secretary of Education,

Armin Luistro, the document was made as a policy addressed to

all school heads -- both public and private. Attached to it was

an Implementing Guide but it was probably made by somebody else

in the Department of Education (DepEd) think-tank, or a result

of the public-private partnerships. The Implementing Guide

stipulates the mechanics of the changes in the education

curriculum, as the ten-year education cycle shifts to twelve.

The language used in all two parts of the document is English.

It is accessible via internet but it was believed to have been

e-mailed or post-mailed to the addressees.

B. MTB-MLE Curriculum Guide circa December 2013

The Curriculum Guide was probably made since May 2012, right

after the K-12 Program has been conceived, but the copy being

interrogated in this study is from the December 2013 revision.

It seems that the Curriculum Guide changes from time-to-time,

logically eliminating errors for every revision, or perhaps due

to the internal political and self-induced machinations as

mentioned in the anecdotes above. The language used to write

this document is also in English, and is largely circulated via

the internet. As per the interviews, more private school

teachers use the internet to look for resources like the

curriculum guide, while public school teachers wait for such to

be cascaded down to them.

There are four themes that surfaced from the text and

interviews, regarding the implementation of the K-12 MTB-MLE.

These themes show the multiple facets and latent meanings and

messages embedded in the seemingly embedded text of the two said

documents.

Confusion

There was utter confusion going on around the text, from

simple misunderstandings that seem to just require common sense,

up to the incomprehensible ones that not all implementers can

immediately grasp.

First, there are minor typographical errors found in the

Curriculum Guide, but these “minor” errors can lead to more

serious repercussions, just like the confusion regarding the

very act that legitimized the K-12 Program a year after its

inception. In the Curriculum Guide, the Enhanced Basic Education

Act of 2013, also known as R.A. 10533, was depicted as R.A.

10532. The latter refers to the National Health Research System

Act of 2013 (Official Gazette, n.d.), and a little detail

created so much of a difference. Implementers reading the guide

can just be confused or misled by these “minor errors” that

could have been eliminated if the guide was thoroughly revised

for probably two times already.

Another point of confusion is the use of “official” and

“second” language to describe English and Filipino. While it is

established that English and Filipino are the official languages

of the Philippines according to its 1987 Constitution, it was

referred to in the said documents as Second Language. It seems

like it assigns the official languages to a lower hierarchy of

languages, if there is such, and elevates the status of the

Mother Tongue languages to a more “official” one, so to speak.

There is also a muddled interpretation between Mother

Tongue as the language of instruction and the subject matter. A

common misconception about the MTB-MLE program is that the

Mother Tongue languages would only be used as the language of

instruction from Kindergarten, and not as a subject area. This

was further clarified and mentioned in the Implementation Guide,

as grades 1-3 will have a subject area called Mother Tongue –

similar with Filipino or English subject areas. This was not

really clarified in the documents except for the conceptual and

theoretical framework of the Curriculum Guide wherein a tiny

label shows the differentiation of the two. This jumps off to

another seeming anomaly – if the language of instruction is the

same mother tongue, or lingua franca used at the level of the

home, how can an implementer teach it to the children if there

are no standard ways on teaching such subjects for the number of

mother tongues in the country makes it impossible for every one

of it to have an existing lexicography, or similar studies and

developments, in the present? The answer to this question would

be related with the relations of power to be discussed later on.

Right now, it is safe to assume that having a separate mother

tongue subject without the necessary materials for studying it

except perhaps the major languages in the Philippines is nothing

but a moot exercise.

The incertitude continues as words such as “enjoined” or

“may” was used to ask the private schools to comply with DepEd

policy no. 31. It seems that Luistro, in his letter, is unsure

if the private schools must join the education system reform, or

he is not planning on requiring the private schools to abide by

the policy he has created. It was as if private schools has this

leeway; Luistro, coming from a private school before he was

chosen to be the DepEd secretary, seems like he was wearing a

hat of a private school accreditor when he made the letter. Why

was the leeway not given to all, and why was the program and its

implementation hurried? Why would the whole education system,

incapable of solving its old problems regarding classrooms,

teachers, commercialization, and its deteriorating standards,

create new ones through the inception of the new K-12 program?

It seems Luistro can be the only person to answer these, or the

president who asked him to do it; one can only be left to deduce

and speculate from the facts.

Assumptions

It is right to deduce that the main cause of the points of

confusion mentioned a while ago comes from the many assumptions

the documents have that the implementer failed to understand

fully.

First and foremost is that the K-12 program, as a whole, is

already understood by everyone by heart – its essence,

objectives, rationale, components, et cetera, as there was no

explanation of what the program is, especially in the first and

foremost document that orders its implementation and

ratification – Policy no. 31. It seems that the said contents

and explanations of the program was still in the making when the

policy was released in 2012 for the main law that truly

legitimizes and ratifies it, R.A. 10533, was released a year

after, so for the first school year of implementation of the K-

12 program, everyone based what the K-12 curriculum was from

mere undocumented hearsay, or incomplete and unperfected

curriculum guides, and whatever material anybody could have a

grasp on. And this was what exactly happened in school year 2012

to 2013, as any teacher can profess.

Second, the policy makers, Luistro, et al, thought Policy

no. 31 would be disseminated to all implementers and members of

the education sector and academe concerned while it was simply

addressed to school heads. Yes, it is easy to say the school

heads would practically disseminate down the organizational

chart of their respective institutions, but since there was no

line or statement in the policy that stipulates it, the heads

can freely decide if the implementers need to see the policy or

not; making the implementation of the policy rely according to

interpretation of the heads instead of asking the faculty how to

read the policy as direct implementers of it. This made the

initial implementation of the K-12 program as an administrative

decision rather than an academic one – implementation was done

as to how the schools sees it fit and viable to their own

institution’s mold, especially for private schools who were

given such a leeway. For the public schools, rules were stricter

as the top-to-bottom managerial style perpetuated from the helm

of the Department of Education.

Third in the list is the usage of the metaphors to

illustrate the role of the Mother Tongue language in the

achievement of the students’ goals in the later life. In the

Curriculum Guide, the Mother Tongue language was directly

referred to as a bridge that would supposedly enable the

students to achieve success. More than this, in order to

construct the “bridge”, there should a strong “scaffolding” in

the form of the students’ prior knowledge rooted in the

experiences of the children, and can only be expressed, at

first, using the Mother Tongue. Also, there is the “passport”

metaphor which says language is the passport to a better life

through education.

Looking at the “bridge”, the “scaffolding”, and the

“passport”, it seems that these metaphors have deeper meanings

that are also implied but have been left unsaid. Among the

three, “passport” seems to be a giveaway – the current education

system, no matter how much it is enhanced – still supports and

promotes labor migration. The word passport is very appealing,

as there has always been a promise of a greener pastures abroad;

true for millions of OFWs who risked leaving the country, and

also for the aspiring ones who would sell properties just so one

can get out of the country. “Passport” here does not simply

imply a mere tool, but it also represents a promise of a better

life; it is as easy as saying to the student that: “a better

life awaits you, get this passport, but study first so you will

be prepared in life and in order for you to succeed” – which is

quite pathetic - as the symbol for school achievement has

devolved from a respectable diploma to a labor-migration magnet

represented in the passport. The scaffolding and bridge

continues the metaphor, as though saying that the life that

awaits abroad is a life where one succeeds by earning or saving

money from physical and arduous, manual labor. Now students will

aim for a blue-collared job abroad rather than a higher degree

in a university using a diploma. The education system is set-up

just so it can produce manual laborers that can be sent abroad,

to send remittances and keep the economy afloat.

Power

It was already mentioned that there is stark contrast

between the kind of leeway given to the private schools in

implementing the K-12 program, while there is strict, and utmost

compliance for the public schools. Logically, the public schools

would have been the benchmark or the standard that the private

schools should be able to at par with, for it is in the public

schools that the state can fully exercise its powers, so it

quite remarkable to notice the kind of K-12 implementation the

state does to its own agency.

According to public school teachers, themselves, the

implementation of having a Mother Tongue subject area is so

standardized it seems as though it is too strict to follow. The

level of standardization comes from the Division Head, meaning

the head of the agency for a whole city or province, as it

hands-down standardized lesson plans and instructional

materials. Even the quarterly examination is standardized as it

comes from the division office – one exam for all public schools

in the division – to check whether the teachers teach what they

are supposed to in the Mother Tongue subject area.

In the provinces, a bigger kind of repressive action has

risen. Use the case of the Bicol provinces in the southern part

of Luzon. Teachers complain about the kind of standardized

Mother Tongue subject area instructional materials they have for

the said standardized teaching tools – lesson plans, materials,

hand-outs, and quarterly examinations – are supposed to be

taught using the “mother tongue” of the province’s center – Naga

City. Thus, every public, or private school if they choose be,

would use such materials even though in reality, the mother

tongue languages across Bicol has several varieties. By mere

introspection, verified by Bicolanos, themselves, shows that

Naga Bicol is different from the Camarines Norte Bicol, for it

is near the Tagalog provinces and the kind of Bicol language

they use have the semblance of Tagalog words that have already

been used and diffused in their own societal context. Same is

the case of Albay Bicol, and that of Sorsogon or Masbate Bicol,

wherein people who are already near the Visayas, share the same

Bisaya words or Waray words they are more often in contact with,

due to trade or other reasons. Thus, imposing Naga Bicol to all

of these places kills the mother tongues of these places, and

defeats the purpose of the whole program – or, maybe it does not

for the objective of the K-12 machinery could not be to better

the education system but to standardize and homogenize the

provinces with the provinces of the center, for the case of

Bicol is not an isolated one, and surely, all provinces in the

country undergo the same horrid procedure.

It is quite understandable that there is no propoer

lexicography or similar undertaking for all of the languages in

the Philippines, so the current K-12 MTB-MLE system could not be

that inclusive, but why implement it if it is that unprepared?

This shows that maybe, the state has more objectives to meet

that just bolstering up the current education system.

The complete opposite is what resembles in private schools.

As what was concluded from the reading of Luistro’s Policy no.

31, the private schools had the option whether to implement K-12

fully, or not, and have the Mother Tongue subject area, or not.

Some private schools abide fully, but perhaps these usually come

from small schools with little student population. Some schools

implement it but not fully, due to their own administrative

reasons, like lack of employees, or low enrollment rate. Big

schools, however, do not comply or just ring around the bush

with their Education lawyers – they proclaim that their

students, mostly children of the rich and affluent, uses English

as their Mother Tongue, so there in no need to create another

subject area.

In here one can see the following: first, the bigger the

school is, the more “leverage” it seems to gain from complying

with the policies of government agencies; second, language in

the realpolitik has been arranged in a hierarchy – English for

the rich and affluent, Filipino as the imposed language of the

center, and the respective mother tongues as the promoted

language of the masses. It is no question that the mother tongue

languages has been referred to the “other” languages in the

text.

Policy

It is also surprising to not that the effect of showing the

policy paper, or document, to the main implementer of the

program helped the psyche of the teachers who now teach Mother

Tongue as a subject area. In the table below, one can see the

binary opposing perception of the Mother Tongue teachers

regarding the implementation of the K-12 Program, as a whole.

Table: Perceptions of teachers regarding the K-12 Program, as

classified between the teachers’ chance to have read or not read

DepEd Policy no. 31, s. 2012 and the Curriculum Guide for Mother

Tongue – the main documents that created and ratified the

program.

Read one or both documents Have not read any of the two

documents

- based on a study

- “anthropology”

- “mabuti at epmhasised

ang pag-aaral ng Tagalog”

(as Mother Tongue)

- not studied well

- “napakagulo”

- “babalikan mo na naman”

- “mas maganda ang dati”

It can be seen that the two perceptions were completely

opposite the other, as one can say that obedience can be related

with the kind of “delegation” of task given to him or her. The

people from the left column, who responded that way, are private

school teachers, and they have seen the “shared-ness” of the

monumental K-12 task so their compliance level is also high. The

respondents from the right column, public school teachers, from

the top-down scheme of DepEd to its rank, shows that it is not

healthy for the system for it conspires resentment and un-

openness to change and compliance. Perhaps, public school

teachers were not able to see the documents for they are not

asked to comment or even “think” about the viability of the

project, as they are seen as mere implementers of the

standardized system – are they seen as a commodity to be used in

this factory-like, hyper modern education system? This seems

like a fatal flaw for the success of the K-12 program lies on

the hands of its very implementers.

It seems like this is the reason why, despite the weak

persuasion skills of Luistro as shown in his policy letter, the

Curriculum Guide seems to legitimize its validity by being not a

“guide”. The Guiding Principles of K-12 MTB-MLE is reminiscent

of legal writing, and has a bibliographic citation of a study

for every bullet in the principles, while no reference was given

to local studies undertaken before it starting from the UNESCO

project in 1953. It seems more of a scheme wherein readers are

obliged to follow it directly, and not divert from it. If these

whole-document Curriculum Guides were not meant to be shown to

public school teachers, does it mean that the state is subtly

enforcing strict compliance for the private schools? If so, why

is Luistro’s policy contains a mixed or different message? Could

it be that the latent agenda of the program has changed over the

course of a year? Gain, these questions leave the public, if one

is so keen, to speculate answers for his or her own liking.

Findings

Summarizing everything deduced from the text and

interviews, one can see that the policy is confusing. It

constantly showed mixed messages, intended or not. Second,

having to read the copy of the policy has an effect on the

compliance of the implementers as it showed the “shared-ness” of

the task and responsibility they have at hand. Again, this may

be intended or not by the policy makers themselves but it has

elicited the kind of mixed reaction and perception from the

implementers. Also, labor migration has been identified as one

latent message of the text. Third, the documents showed

unrealistic assumptions due to the lack of ample consultation

and evaluation on the ground.

Projecting the long-term effects of the program, using

today’s assessment, shows eminent eradication of the town-local

mother tongues due to the standardization and homogenization of

province-local mother tongues – a common indicator that the

state wanted to “modernize” its system, or just to “flatten” the

culture among all parts of the Philippines and resurrect the

stark regionalization the country has – a consuelo de bobo to

the many peoples who question the legitimacy of the national

language – Filipino. English, however, can still prevail as the

official and enduring language that would bind the country – the

said mother tongue of the elite and affluent. Transmuting this

to the political economy of the Philippines gives one the idea

that the few are favored and are to win over the oppressed many,

as the masses would be sent abroad as a commodity from an un-

industrialized country to keep the economy afloat while the few

-- rich and affluent -- remains in power due to the un-education

of the masses that could and would topple them off their ivory

towers.

This machination will, however, be resisted through the

partial and wrong implementation of the program due, as power is

distributed in these micro-sites (Foucault, 1991), and in these

schools, the plan of the state can be reverted and exposed –

intended or not, consciously or subconsciously -- as this would

mark the failure of the said project.

All in all, this most recent language plan the state is

vying for, will fail once again.

Or perhaps they would win, if the latent agenda of the

state is not education actually; the decentralization and

distribution of power to the local governments that will soon be

used for the strict standardization of the K-12 program. In

return, the newly garnered power will be used to support the

political party of the current administration in the upcoming

elections. Again, all is sacrificed for the political ambitions

of those in the highest bunk of society.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION: Paradigm shift

In totality, the MTB-MLE has rational, and research-sound

objectives that can be very instrumental in bolstering up the

present education system but the vision of the policy maker is

far-away from the interpretation of the implementers –

preparation is seen inadequate, the government and public was

caught unprepared. The K-12 MTB-MLE will not succeed as a

language plan to help revolutionize the education system for the

policy is unclear and the implementation is varied, as it is

dependent on the interpretation of the different school heads

and the teachers in the way it is convenient to them and to

their students.

The public was left to speculate about the project for it

was unclear for all what its real or latent objectives are, the

principles it stands for in behalf. And so the public would

abide, yet again, another law that can change as soon as the

current administration exits. The Philippines has failed, once

again, to make a long-term plan that would be viable for its

people, Now, many are in clamor over the suspension of the law

for it seems to bring more harm than good, rather than its good

intentions, as seen in the recently concluded international

conference entitled Language, Culture, Multiculturalism,

Multilingual Education and the K-12 Curriculum: Trends, Issues,

Challenges, Practices held at UP Diliman Theater from November

20 to 22, 2014. It has sounded more like a political rally than

an academic exercise, and the battle cry was to repeal the K-12

program – the only marking reform made by the Aquino

administration to date, if it is to be considered as one. Now,

the public continues to speculate.

Paradigm shift? Is the country even shifting from the old ideals

and system to a new phase that would revolutionize and eradicate

the way people in the Philippines would think, or live?

I guess not. As of now, we are not even moving.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agoncillo, T. (2003). History and Culture, Language and

Literature: Selected Essays of Teodoro Agoncillo, ed.

Benedicto Reyes Churchill. Manila: University of Santo

Tomas.

Canete, R. R. (2009). Pulilan: The Blessed Land. Pulilan,

Bulacan: Jefarca Arts and Historical Society Inc.

Espiritu, C. (n.d.). National Commisson For Culture and the

Arts. Retrieved from Language Policies in the Philippines:

www.ncca.gov.ph

Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish: the birth of a

prison. London: Penguin.

Frei, E. J. (1959). The Historical Development of Philippine

National Language. Manila: Bureau of Printing.

Gonzales, A. (2003). Language Planning in Multilingual

Countries: The Case of the Philippines. Manila: De La Salle

University.

MCFarland, C. D. (1997). A linguistic atlas of the Philippines.

Quezon CIty: University of The Philippines Library.

Official Gazette. (n.d.). Retrieved from Republic Act No. 10532:

www. gov.ph/2013/05/07republic-act-10532/

The K-12 Basic Education Program. (2014, November 5). Retrieved

from www.gov.ph/k-12/

Sona Tech Report 2012. Office of the President website, p. 32.

Retrieved from www.gove.ph

Language, Culture, Multiculturalism, Multilingual Education and

the K-12 Curriculum: Trends, Issues, Challenges, Practices.

November 20-22, 2014, held at the University of the Philippines

Diliman, Quezon City

Main Documents Reviewed for this Study:

- Department of Education Policy no. 31, series of 2012

- Mother Tongue Curriculum Guide, circa December 2013