THE SENATE on Tuesday approved on final reading a bill that seeks to discontinue the use of the mother tongue as the medium of instruction from kindergarten to Grade 3.
Senate Bill No. 2457 seeks to revert the medium of instruction to Filipino and English pursuant to the 1987 Constitution. Regional languages will only serve as a supplementary medium of instruction.
“Mother tongue as the medium of instruction is not a one-size-fits-all solution for every classroom,” Senator Sherwin T. Gatchalian, who authored the bill, said in a statement. “It is effective only in monolingual environments where learners are uniformly native speakers of the same mother tongue.”
He said key experiments cited by the Department of Education (DepEd) as bases for implementing the mother tongue education proved that the policy is only effective in school settings where everybody is using the same language, especially in rural areas.
Twenty-two senators unanimously approved the measure.
DepEd only implements mother tongue-based teaching programs for 19 of 245 languages in the Philippines, according to the bill’s explanatory note, citing 2020 government data. — John Victor D. Ordoñez
