Filipino as required course?

There are three kinds of courses or subjects in the General Education Curriculum (GEC), as mentioned in CMO 20, s. 2013: Core Courses (24 units), Elective Courses (9 units), and Mandated Courses (3 units).

The Core Courses are: Pag-unawa sa Sarili (Understanding the Self), Mga Babasahin hinggil sa Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas (Readings in Philippine History), Ang Kasalukuyang Daigdig (The Contemporary World), Matematika sa Makabagong Daigdig (Mathematics in the Modern World), Malayuning Komunikasyon (Purposive Communication), Pagpapahalaga sa Sining (Art Appreciation), Agham, Teknolohiya, at Lipunan (Science, Technology, and Society), and Etika (Ethics).

All incoming college students, no matter what major they are pursuing, will be required to take the Core Courses starting 2018. (Students already in college in 2018 will continue to follow the current or old GEC.)

Each Higher Education Institution (HEI) is required to offer a number of Elective Courses. Every Elective Course must “conform to the philosophy and goals of GE, apply an inter- or cross-disciplinary perspective, and draw materials, cases, or examples from Philippine realities and experiences and not just from those of other countries.” Every student, depending on his or her preference, has to take 9 units of Elective Courses.

The Mandated Courses are those required by various laws. The CMO mentions only the course on Rizal’s life and writings. Whether other subjects required by other laws will be retained on the collegiate level has not yet been decided by CHED. The Repealing Clause (Section 18) of RA 10533 (Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013) provides that “all other laws, decrees, executive orders and rules and regulations contrary to or inconsistent with the provisions of this Act are hereby repealed or modified accordingly.” Since Section 5 of the law disallows “remedial and duplication of basic education subjects” in college, it is not yet clear if the laws mandating the study of physical education, NSTP, taxation, agrarian reform, the Constitution, family planning, and population education (topics now in the K to 12 curriculum) have also been repealed. (Lawyers, help!)

It is important to remember that CHED does not limit the number of courses that a student may be required to take. That is not within the authority of CHED, because that will impinge on the academic freedom that the Constitution guarantees to all HEIs. What CHED does is to impose a minimum number of units. An HEI, therefore, may require as many courses as it likes; this is routinely done in religious schools, where students have to take theology or similar courses.

The issue in the current debate is this: Should Filipino be added as a Core Course in the new GEC?

The issue is not whether an HEI is prohibited from requiring Filipino for all its students. Any HEI can do that, if it wants to. That is part of academic freedom.

The issue is not whether Filipino should be studied in college. Of course, Filipino should be studied by those majoring in fields that will require specialized knowledge of the language. Education majors, for example, have to study Filipino linguistics, because they will be teaching the language on every level from Kindergarten to Grade 12.

The issue is not whether Filipino may be offered as an Elective Course. Of course, it can be. An HEI can offer an Elective Course that focuses on Filipino, though not as a language and only on this condition (spelled out in the CMO): the course must “cover at least any two domains of knowledge (arts and humanities; social sciences and philosophy; and science, technology, and mathematics).”

In fact, there already exist several syllabuses for courses on Filipino that satisfy that condition. We have to credit some universities, associations of Filipino teachers, the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, and the National Commission for Culture and Arts, for these proposed courses.

I myself can think of an Elective Course that I would love to teach – “Filipino Mathematics.” In such a course, the students could explore, for example, the way mathematics would be differently conceived if the language used were not English but a Philippine language.

A simple example of the way language shapes thinking is measuring distance. When a Filipino answers, “diyan lang,” to the question of how far a place is, the distance referred to has no exact equivalence in the metric system, but it does measure a distance between “ayan na” and “malayo pa.” Studying the way Filipinos view distance will uncover many interesting ways in which we see the world differently from the way speakers of other languages do. We can see immediately the interdisciplinarity of the discussions that will occur in a class on this subject. Students will have to go into, at the very least, psychology, history, linguistics, philosophy, physics, and mathematics. If we take examples not just from Tagalog, but from other Philippine languages, we can see how intellectually stimulating such a course would be.

I am not against Filipino being studied in college by students majoring in linguistics, the philosophy of language, literary criticism, education, and similar fields.

I am not against interdisciplinary courses with emphasis on Filipino being offered by HEIs as Elective Courses.

I am against requiring all college students to study the Filipino language as a Core Course in the GEC. That is all I am against.