Fluency in English has become almost a staple in the country, as evidenced by the recent boom of Business Process Outsourcing – the contracting of a business task to a third party service provider – such as call centers.
English proficiency in the Philippines has become an intangible, intellectual resource, an end in itself. The lack of national industries in the Philippines, moreover, limits the Filipino professional’s chances of being employed and confines his/her options to either seeking a higher-paying job abroad or working cheap for some multinational company based in the country.
Code switching
Saki Arima, 19, is currently taking up International Relations. She intends to learn more about Southeast Asian development by staying in the Philippines for six months, believing her experience in dealing with the poor communities in the country to be an asset when she graduates and goes back to Japan. Yoshio Minami, a 22-year old Japanese student, also thinks that studying in the Philippines will help him when he graduates as community development major and finds work in a non-government organization or a travel agency, due to his interest in Philippine culture and ability to speak in Tagalog – a skill he acquired from taking Tagalog as an elective in Japan.
The characteristics that foreigners often enumerate when talking about Filipinos – the very concept of “Filipino values” integrated in their psyche – have become commodified due to the government’s effort to market the Philippines as the most ideal place for foreigners to improve their English-speaking skills. The so-called traits of Filipinos – hospitable and hardworking – are geared precisely to render the country as an ideal site for foreign investment.
One can see the parallelism between cheap labor investments in the country by multinational companies and the phenomenon of foreign students flocking to the Philippines to become well-versed in the language that arguably dominates the globe.
The Filipino’s proficiency in English attests to the Philippines’ subservience to the United States’ market. Evidently, the American mother tongue has set the standard for the rest of the world. The Philippines, thus, is more of a pawn than a player in international relations.
Mancer, Rika, and many others like them continue to dream. Eventually, they will graduate. Upon returning to their home countries, they will most likely succeed in their chosen fields, whether slowly or rapidly.
Chances are, they will rise to the top of the corporate ladder, thanks in part to the English-speaking skills they acquired in the Philippines from their Filipino friends and professors. The Filipinos – the students, tutors and professors who have mastered the English language – can only both dream and dread. They dream of a life abroad and dread the prospect of being constrained to a cubicle at work, and being underpaid while answering calls for a multinational company. Philippine Collegian/posted by Bulatlat
References:
Campoamor, Gonzalo III. “The Pedagogical Role of English in the Reproduction of Labor.” In Alamon , Guillermo, Lumbera, ed.
Mula Tore Patungong Palengke: Neoliberal Education in the Philippines. Philippines, Ibon Foundation Inc., 2007.
