BY GIZELLE AMOUR TAGABI
ILOILO City – Underlining the value of languages and their diversity in the Philippine education system, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, Fernand de Varennes, emphasized the teaching of children in their native tongue because this will guarantee their right to education without discrimination.
He emphasized that Mother-Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) should be in the long-term because quality education in mother languages takes time and investment and should be taught beyond the mandated grades 1 to 3 in the country.
De Varennes’s statement made on Feb. 22 at the West Visayas State University (WVSU) here came on the heels of the House of Representatives’ approval of the suspension of the MTB-MLE on Feb. 6.
Varennes, speaking in a conference with officials of WVSU and SILAK Media, the official college publication of the WVSU College of Education, explained that quality education in mother languages requires more time so as to give children the best results possible in exercising their language rights within the classroom.
“There should be at least a 10-year program or 20-year program to develop the materials to make sure that you start and you progressively build stronger and stronger programs,” he said, on top of stressing the importance of committing to the MTB-MLE.
He called upon education and government authorities to “take this program seriously” by investing in training, resources, and materials for teachers to effectively teach in mother languages.
“You have to look at this long-term as an investment, which will take time before you see really good results,” he said, adding that the lack of materials shouldn’t be a reason for suspending the MTB-MLE program.
Prior to the conference, Varennes spoke to about 1,500 students and faculty of the said university in a Symposium on Language Rights and Education in observance of the UNESCO International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032) along with multilingual education and MTB-MLE advocate, Firth McEachern, who raised awareness on human rights through language rights in education.
“You all have the right to learn and use your language in the classroom at any level. So don’t let other people tell you, ‘No, hindi pwedeng gumamit ng Hiligaynon kasi we have to be English-speaking’ — that is against your rights,” said McEachern, a Canadian national who can fluently speak Philippine languages including Filipino and Hiligaynon./PN
