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In 1977
my mentor, the National Artist for Literature and
Theater Rolando S. Tinio, said: “It is too simple-minded
to suppose that enthusiasm for Filipino as lingua franca
and national language of the country necessarily
involves the elimination of English usage or training
for it in schools. Proficiency in English provides us
with all the advantages that champions of English say it
does—access to the vast fund of culture expressed in it,
mobility in various spheres of the international scene,
especially those dominated by the English-speaking
Americans, participation in a quality of modern life of
which some features may be assimilated by us with great
advantage. Linguistic nationalism does not imply
cultural chauvinism. Nobody wants to go back to the
mountains. The essential Filipino is not the center of
an onion one gets at by peeling off layer after layer of
vegetable skin. One’s experience with onions is quite
telling: peel off everything and you end up with a pinch
of air.”
Written
31 years ago, these words still echo especially now,
when some misguided congressmen are pushing for English
as the sole medium of instruction in schools. Afraid
that we might lose our competitive edge in English, they
themselves are proof positive that we might have lost
it. Their bills, and their illogical defense of these
bills, show that the problem is not lack of language
skills, but of brain cells.
Decades
of teaching English to students (together with four
years of teaching Filipino) have shown me that the best
students in English are also the best students in
Filipino. And how did they master the two languages?
One,
they had very good teachers in both languages. Two, they
inhabited the worlds of both languages. Three, they have
gone beyond the false either-or mentality that hobbled
their parents.
Let me
explain.
My best
students in English and Filipino were tutored by crème
de la crème, many of them teaching in private schools.
At the Ateneo de Manila University, we have classes in
Remedial English, since renamed Basic English or English
1. These are six units of noncredit subjects. The
enrollees are mostly intelligent students from the
public schools and the provinces. Lack of books and
untrained teachers prevent them from having a level
playing field with the other freshmen. A year of
catching up is necessary for them to have the skills to
have a mano-a-mano with the other students.
Moreover, I introduce them to the worlds of the language
they are studying—be it in the formal realm of the
textbook or the popular ones of film, graphic novel or
animé. I encourage them to keep a journal, as well,
which is not a diary where you write what time you woke
up and why. A journal, or its postmodern cousin, the web
log or blog, aims to capture impressions or moods on the
wing. If, at the same time, it sharpens the students’
knowledge of English, then that is already hallelujah
for the English teacher.
And the
third is that today’s generation of students is no
longer burdened by the guilt of learning English—and
mastering it. I still remember those writing workshops I
took in the 1980s, when I was asked why I wrote
bourgeois stories in the colonizer’s language. The
panelists said I should write about workers and
peasants—and that I should write in Filipino. Without
batting a false eyelash, I answered that I don’t know
anything about workers and peasants, and to write about
something I don’t know would be to misrepresent them. To
the charge that I write only in English, I showed them
my poems in Filipino, because the modern Filipino writer
is not only a writer in either English or Filipino, but
a writer in both languages, like colorful balls that he
juggles with the dexterity of a seasoned circus
performer.
So it’s
not a choice between English or Filipino, but rather,
English and Filipino, plus the language of one’s
grandmother, be it Bikolano, Waray or Tausug. And in
college, another language of one’s choice, be it Bahasa
Indonesia, German or French—the better to view the world
from many windows, since to learn a new language is to
see the world from another angle of vision. In short,
one no longer has to live between two languages, but to
live in a mansion of many languages.
To end
in a full circle, we must return to Rolando S. Tinio,
who said: “Only the mastery of a first language enables
one to master a second and a third. For one can think
and feel only in one’s first language, then encode those
thoughts and feelings into a second and a third.”
In
short, as a friend and fellow professor has put it, “The
Philippines is a multilingual paradise.” The earlier we
know we live in a paradise of many languages, the better
we can savor its fruits ripened by the sun. |
