#Dr. Florangel Rosario Braid

Mother tongue – key to authentic learning

The issue is whether to accept the proposal of the Department of Education which is to abandon the teaching of MTB-MLE or the Mother Tongue in Grades 1-3 and to merely adopt it as a medium of instruction. Or to continue with both as proposed by E-Net, a Civil Society Network for Education Reforms, which urged the Department of Education to identify its strengths and challenges to improve its overall implementation. It argues that “forcing our children to learn in an unfamiliar language creates an educational handicap. The suspension will further hold back progress and gains we have achieved in placing inclusive education at the center of the Education Agenda.”

Gilda Cordero Fernando, the artist

I first met Gilda in 1996 although I had been a fan of this multi-awarded icon for quite sometime. I have read many of her writings, including three that I had retrieved from my library collection which had shrank to 15 percent of the original size as I had donated most of them to my favorite school library and my son.