House Minority Leader and 4Ps Party-list Rep. Marcelino Libanan (left), and Dr. Jose Rizal (Facebook, Wikipedia)

House Minority Leader and 4Ps Party-list Rep. Marcelino Libanan wants Filipino students to emulate national hero Dr. Jose Rizal in terms of the latter's mastery of foreign languages.

For this purpose, Libanan penned and filed House Resolution (HR) No. 910, which urges the Department of Education (DepEd) to integrate foreign language studies into the K-12 Program.

“Our school system by tradition has been teaching Filipino children to emulate and aspire to be like Rizal. We might as well encourage them to study foreign languages, just like Rizal,” Libanan said.

Doing so would "acquaint learners with foreign languages other than English" and "encourage them to learn foreign language that will vastly improve their employability in the global labor markets of the 21st century", the veteran solon said.

Owing to his fascination with foreign languages, Rizal--often described as a polymath--became conversant in Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, and Swedish.

Vice President and DepEd Secretary Sara Duterte, in her 2023 Basic Education Report, had declared that the department intends to revise and improve the K-12 program, with the aim of developing lifelong learners who are competent and job-ready.

In his resolution, Libanan said that “The whole world has become a global village with multilingual labor markets, thus creating a strong demand for workers with foreign language skills.”

Global corporations based in the United States, China and Japan – the world’s three largest economies – have been known to prefer hiring staff who can speak a second foreign language besides English, Libanan pointed out.

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Philippines deployed a total of 2,150,000 workers to overseas labor markets in 2019, or an average of 5,890 every day, according to Department of Migrant Workers (DMW).

The number of Filipino workers deployed abroad has since dropped to less than one million yearly.

Despite the deployment slump, the World Bank estimates that the Philippines received up to $38 billion in cash remittances from all channels in 2022, making the country the world’s fourth-largest recipient of money from overseas workers, after India, Mexico and China.