UP professors, students protest scrapping of Filipino

MANILA, Philippines—Professors and students of Filipino courses in the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, on Friday opposed a Commission on Higher Education order removing Filipino subjects from the college general education curriculum (GEC).

“We believe that nine units of Filipino subjects should remain in the tertiary GEC because what is needed is to improve the quality and not the length of education,” said a statement of unity read in Filipino during a forum at the UP College of Mass Communication.

The Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) has issued a memorandum order revising the general education curriculum by removing remedial courses that will be taught in the K-12 program, taking out disciplinal courses and adding new liberal education courses.

“We moved to K-12 because we crammed in 10 years what should be taught in 12 years. (If) you transfer tertiary subjects to senior high school, you’re just congesting it,” linguistics professor Ricardo Ma. Nolasco said.

“Language courses are an important part of general education,” Nolasco said, adding that language permeates other disciplines.

Issue of nationalism

Raniela Barboza said: “It’s not merely an issue of Filipino subjects. It’s an issue of nationalism. [The removal of Filipino subjects] goes against the aim of making students rooted in the Filipino identity.”

The CHEd said in June it was wrong to claim that Filipino, as a medium of instruction, had no place in the new curriculum because the memorandum states that the entire curriculum or parts of it may be taught in Filipino or English.

“Most universities would opt for English,” Barboza said.

“Courses should be taught in a language that the learners understand,” said Nolasco, a proponent of the mother tongue-based multilingual education.

“You’re decongesting the tertiary curriculum but you’re not ensuring the quality of education,” Nolasco said.

“Even if you put all those courses there, where are your teachers? The teachers should be retrained.”

Teachers may be displaced

With the K-12 program, the  government is lining up ways to cushion the impact of the change on teachers likely to lose their jobs if Filipino was stricken out of the curriculum.

“The dropping of Filipino subjects in the general education curriculum will likely displace more teachers,” increasing the number of teachers displaced with the full implementation of the K-12 program, education and labor officials in Davao City said.

However, the government is doing what it can to cushion the impact, they said.

Dr. Raul Alvarez, director of CHEd in southern Mindanao, said that of the existing 63 units of general education subjects, only 36 would be retained.