Columnist's note: The mother tongue-based multilingual education policy and its discontinuance as an effect of Senate Bill 2457 have been an important point of discussion among linguists and educators in the Philippines. Many of them had a hand in crafting the original policy in 2012. The Linguistic Society of the Philippines (LSP) has been at the forefront of research and practice on multilingual diversity in the country, and is among those that pushed for the implementation of mother-tongue education in the country. They recently made a stand on the policy's discontinuance. As an LSP honorary member, and as a follow-up to my own opinion, which was published in the last two weeks, below is the group's stand on the issue.
THE Linguistic Society of the Philippines expresses its strong indignation against the proposed Senate Bill (SB) 2457 that seeks to discontinue using the various Philippine regional languages — our young students' mother tongues — as medium of instruction from Kindergarten to Grade 3. The bill not only undermines the progress the country has achieved in making education more inclusive but also denigrates the value of mother tongues in young learners' learning. It also disregards the crucial role of education and the state in upholding the civil right and human right of every child to be educated through his or her mother tongue that is foregrounded in various international human rights documents and conventions, including the United Nations.
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