PJ Garcia to file bill to support Gwen’s ‘English only’ policy in public schools
CEBU CITY — Deputy Speaker and Cebu 3rd District Representative Pablo John Garcia said he may file a bill seeking for the amendment of Republic Act 10533, or the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013.
RA 10533 is the law that sets the policy on the Department of Education’s K-12 (Kindergarten to Grade 12) program and the implementation of mother tongue-based teaching in the first stages of education.
RA 10533 says that: “The curriculum shall adhere to the principles and framework of Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE), which starts from where the learners are and from what they already knew proceeding from the known to the unknown; instructional materials and capable teachers to implement the MTB-MLE curriculum shall be available.”
“It does say in the law that in the first stage of education, it should be the mother tongue. But that same law also says education should be globally competitive. I don’t know how to balance those two,” Garcia said.
Last December 2019, Garcia’s older sister, Cebu Governor Gwendolyn Garcia, ordered that all public schools under the Division of Cebu Province should revert to using English as the main language of instruction beginning June 2020.
The younger Garcia backs the governor’s position that the present set up in the medium of instruction has caused the academic performance of Filipino students to deteriorate.
Governor Garcia blamed the MTB-MLE why 15 year olds from the Philippines rank 79th—the lowest—in the recent Program for International Student Assessment (Pisa).
But Department of Education Central Visayas (DepEd-7) Acting Director Dr. Salustiano Jimenez earlier said that it is not up to the governor to decide whether the schools should teach in English or in vernacular but the Congress and DepEd.
“I believe that a lot [of students’ skills] declined especially in reading comprehension. It has to something to do with these frequent changes in our educational system,” Rep. Garcia said.
“It [RA 10533] should be revisited, reviewed and if necessary, a bill should be filed to [amend it],” he said. /bmjo
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