Multilingualism and globalized education
Credit to Author: FR. RANHILIO CALLANGAN AQUINO| Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 16:12:55 +0000
THE Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF) must now be abolished. It is obsolescent and has hardly done anything to nurture the richness of linguistic diversity in the Philippines.
True, it has attempted to standardize the orthography of different Philippine languages but clearly, as is evident in the prescribed arrangement of phonemes and lexemes in Ibanag, the undergirding persuasion was that Tagalog was the model language along the lines of which the spelling, phrasing and enunciation of other languages had to correspond. The KWF is the custodian of the myth that all other languages are marginal in relation to the language of the Tagalogs. It is also the purveyor of the fallacy that our nationhood depends on the propagation and national imposition of Tagalog.
Following years of ambivalence in respect to the policy on the language of instruction, we have in our hands the bitter harvest of this vacillation, irresoluteness and lamentable paucity of perspective: We have senior high school students who are non-readers. We have freshmen college students whose level of comprehension does not go any farther than the barely coherent, utterly illogical and outstandingly foolish posts on Facebook. When the Philippine Bible Society and its laudable project of making Scriptures accessible to simple folk adopted the principle that the translation had to be as simple as a newspaper article (which it considered the most available form of literature), it did not foresee the depths into which we would fall — because most college students today do not read newspapers!
The Commission on Higher Education is right in taking the teaching of foreign languages as an indicator of globalized education. Cousins and relatives who attend European universities easily read, speak and write in two or three languages besides their first language. With our flair for the dramatic and our laughable inclination to exaggerate, we have extirpated Spanish from our curricula, stigmatizing it as the language of our colonization and our enslavement — the telltale sign of a pathetic nation that has been foolishly unable to reconcile itself with its history and to appropriate it in ways productive and enriching.
One attempt at “simplifying” contemporary language theory puts the matter thus: “The extent of thought is the length of your tongue.” Language, thought Heidegger, is “the house of Being.” Whatever can be affirmed, said or meaningfully realized can be done so only within language. It is not only the means of communicating — as if thoughts were possible without language, and only subsequently had to be “encoded” to be transmissible. No thought is beyond language, and when one pretends that one “knows” but cannot “say,” then the straightforward fact is that one does not know. For Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logica Philosophicus, the world is a totality of facts, and facts are what atomic and molecular propositions picture. A proposition makes sense because it pictures, but not every proposition that makes sense is true, because propositions can picture states of affairs that are not facts. Elephants fly higher than geese. So, when you have terms like “sanse,” “ditse” or “manong, “manang,” “ate” and “kuya,” then you think according to a sense of order, familiar relations and social hierarchization that is unknown (and unthought) in the West, generally. It is philosophical investigation that makes the very strong point that learning a language is immersing oneself in a way of life — because expressions mean what their functions are in the language games that the different life situations of the language-speakers are. To learn a language then is to learn a way of looking at things, of doing things, of relating to each other, of going about with the business of life.
Aside from the obvious benefits of access to literature and studies written in other languages and the more consumerist end of facility of business with entrepreneurs who speak other languages, the advantage of multilingual education in higher education is the perspective that is opened to the student, the parallel words that are offered to him with each language earned, the standpoints and vantage positions that other languages are that allow us to be more accommodating, not only tolerant, of others, that allow us to recognize otherness and still relate in friendship, goodwill and peace.
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@outlook.com