When the late playwright and teacher Rolando Tinio established the Filipino Department 34 years ago, the main thrust was to instill nationalism in every Atenean. Award-winning critics, playwrights, and writers were assembled to educate students on the basics and intricacies of the Filipino language and culture.

For Liz*, however, studying the Filipino courses has become more bane than boon. She says that, no matter how much effort she has exerted in raising her grade for her Filipino 12 class, she never got past D. “Most of my classmates also have D as their grade,” she says in Filipino. This, Liz adds, happened when she took Fil12 under one of the department’s tough professors. “Isn’t that disturbing? Everyone in the class exerts effort, only to find that they [barely passed in it].”

“The Filipino dialect is not utilized to its full potential,” says Jon Marante (IV BS LM). He also says that this might stem from a lack of discipline where students view the language as inferior to English.

While the Ateneo prides itself for being a liberal arts university, students might not share the same enthusiasm in studying their own language and culture.

Regional divide

Filipino Associate Professor Joseph Salazar says that Filipino usage in the Ateneo is in a dire state. Salazar believes that one reason for the students’ difficulty in using Filipino is their varying academic and personal backgrounds.

“[The students] carry with them different ideas on what Filipino should be,” he says. “Not that we don’t welcome all these ideas, but maybe my main problem is that they are not aware, that language itself…could carry different cultural baggages with it.”

Cebuano-speaking Marante had difficulty adjusting when he started his Filipino classes in the Ateneo. He grew up unaccustomed to Tagalog as the primary dialect.

Salazar further illustrates this fact. Batangueños and Bulakeños he says, would have a more rigid notion of Tagalog as Filipino. Meanwhile, people from the Visayas region, especially those from Western Visayas, would tend to have a more liberal and distant concept of the Filipino language.

“Their concept of Filipino would tend to embrace words from other languages, English especially,” he says.

Not intellectual

Matanglawin Web Editor Hansley Juliano (II AB PoS) believes that this decline may be caused by the belief that Filipino is not an intellectual language compared to that of English.

“Maybe it’s because of our colonial experience, that if it’s English, it’s more intellectual than the vernacular,” says Juliano in Filipino. Juliano says that his passion for the Filipino culture comes from the uniqueness of being a Filipino. “The Filipino community is something that can’t be defined by a language or a lifestyle,” he says.

“I think we have this long tradition of being conscious about using language, that I think now we have the impression that English is the language of modernity, [of progress, and of science],” says Salazar.

He also says that, based on what he has observed in the classes he handles, most students think that the only information worth taking from Filipino readings are of the moral kind. Students then end up discussing works in Filipino with “very emotional and very moralistic codes of conduct that otherwise the text doesn’t push for.”

As for the difficulty that students find in their Filipino classes, Salazar believes that the department would like to maintain that difficulty. “It expresses to the students that a lot needs to be done in resuscitating the appreciation and the critical practice in understanding culture.”

“Whether a student is really interested in really exploring Filipino culture as it is, or not, a little work, a little effort will help out.”

Search for the Filipino

Besides these factors, Salazar says that it could also be about the Ateneans’ natural tendency to socialize and pretend to belong to a particular social stratum. This results in a resentment of Filipino as a language and as a culture.

“They’d like to belong to a…particular social class,” he says. “They’d like to belong to a particular social grouping, to a particular social culture. But what they really have, they are not familiar with.”

Meanwhile, Juliano believes that the cultures of developing countries such as the Philippines “get buried in favour of global culture” through globalization.

“We’re not anymore as isolated, as distinct as before,” says Sociology and Anthropology Lecturer Jerry Apolonio. He also says that, by mingling with people of different cultures, one gets exposed to their language and absorbs it into their daily lives.

Such perceived changes or decline in language usage, he believes, must be faced with an appreciative criticism to know why these shifts are happening.

Though language may reflect one’s social background, its ever-changing nature may also reflect the need to search for what Filipino truly is.

“The changing conditions in the use of language may be pointing us to the fact that there is an inherent search among us Filipinos to really be able to express pure Filipino thoughts.”

Medium of instruction

“Masasabi na may mga estudyante at mga titser… na naninindigan na ang edukasyon sa Ateneo ay may pagkahiwalay sa kultura ng Pilipinas (It can be said that there are students and teachers who believe that the Ateneo education is distant from Philippine culture),” says Philosophy Professor Emeritus Fr. Roque Ferriols, SJ.

According to him, this could be remedied by using the Filipino language as a medium of instruction. And in 1969, he taught Philosophy classes in Filipino.

When Ferriols taught about five Philosophy classes, he observed that his students were more enthusiastic and eager in using the Filipino language. “It’s because they create their Filipino language,” he says in Filipino. “It’s similar to Shakespeare, who enriched Middle English by borrowing French and Latin terms.”

“We have to have creative stealing from other languages.”

Leading double lives

“This is easy to do in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. You see it in Philosophy, in History, and in Political Science, but in Management or in the [School of Science and Engineering] incorporating Filipino is a very difficult task,” Juliano says.

“We’re leading double lives,” says Apolonio. “The way they talk in the classroom is not anymore the same as how we talk outside.” He believes that this inconsistency is reflective of the culture, which he describes as “very faddish.”

“It’s sad to say that we’re Filipinos and yet, we can’t speak in straight Filipino,” says Liz in Filipino.

“What you have are basically hybrid Ateneans who are neither in New York or in the realities of a Third World Manila,” says Salazar. Apolonio adds that Filipino traditions must first be established before going forward.

“Filipino subjects are basically postcolonial in framework, Salazar says. “It’s very difficult to be postcolonial in a school where a lot of the students use education for capitalist gain.” This, he says, is one of the challenges that the Filipino Department currently faces.

“Whatever intentions or objects you have with the curriculum would have to be reinforced in other ways. And it’s hard to see a sense of Filipinoness that is responding to the times.”

*Name has been changed to protect the individual.