Gwendolyn Garcia PHOTO BY LYN RILLON
CEBU CITY, Philippines — Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia said the provincial government would use English as a medium of instruction in the province’s 44 public schools next school year after students in the country rated poorly in a global ranking in reading comprehension and other subjects.
Garcia said she would want to go back to the time that English — not Tagalog, Filipino or the local language — was being used in schools, as she cited the “embarrassing” rating achieved by Filipino students in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa).
Pisa is a worldwide study intended to evaluate educational systems by measuring 15-year-old students’ scholastic performance on mathematics, science and reading.
Focus on academics
The Cebu provincial school board is implementing a policy to ensure that students will concentrate on academics, with less focus on school-related travels, regional sports meets and other extracurricular activities.
“It’s obvious that we have a very confused ‘studentry’ who are not learning anything. Why did we reinvent the wheel? There was nothing wrong with it. We were able to produce brilliant graduates when the medium of instruction was English. It did not make us any less Filipinos; it did not make us any less nationalistic,” Garcia said at a press conference on Tuesday.
Garcia said students could learn and use the native tongue, Cebuano, at home while schools could use English as its primary language.
Members of the provincial school board, in a meeting on Dec. 13, agreed that the new policy would be implemented at the start of the next school year.
Garcia said while other countries were trying to learn English, “we are trying to forget English” in the Philippines.
‘Confusing’
She described the country’s medium of instruction as “very confusing,” with students learning the mother tongue until Grade 3, shifting to Filipino at Grades 4 to 6 then English when they reach Grade 7 until they complete their secondary education.
Garcia said the use of English as a primary language of instruction had worked and should not have been changed in the first place.
The governor said she would ask the local school board to adopt the “English only” policy in Cebu until its implementation was stopped by a court.