How chronic underfunding killed the once-celebrated mother tongue education

MANILA, Philippines — The government's axing of mother tongue instruction for kindergarten to grade 3 has drawn protests from education experts and advocates, who assailed officials for simply ditching the policy rather than fixing its funding and implementation issues.
 
Two faculty members of the University of the Philippines Diliman who specialize in language studies and education, as well as Filipino advocacy group Tanggol Wika, believe the recently passed law discontinuing the use of mother tongue in early education has stymied the program's potential benefits before they could be fully realized.

The bill, which downgrades mother tongue instruction as an option in class, lapsed into law last week without the president's signature.

For years, debates over the value of a nationwide policy compelling the use of mother tongue (language first learned at home) in classrooms have drawn a rare divide in the education sector.

Studies on the program show mixed results. Data the Department of Education (DepEd) presented in congressional hearings found no evidence that mother tongue education benefited multilingual classes with diverse home languages. In contrast, research on monolingual classes—where all students share a home language—painted the opposite picture.

But the very inclusion of the mother tongue in the K to 12 curriculum was not without basis. A briefer from DepEd itself in 2016 which cited experiments in Iloilo and Rizal from 1948 to 1966 show students taught in their native language mostly outperformed those taught in English.

What went wrong? The consensus among education experts, even before the passage of the law removing the mother tongue policy, was that DepEd was simply ill-prepared to implement it on a national scale: structure-wise, personnel-wise and budget-wise. 

"While using the child’s first language in instruction is consistent with theories in pedagogy, it has been difficult to implement due to the highly centralized structure of DepEd," said the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2) in its Year One report. EDCOM 2 led the filing of the bill that discontinued the use of mother tongue instruction from kindergarten to Grade