The case for English proficiency

In the previous post, I have raised concerns why others---especially Filipinos---are scrambling to be proficient in English when other countries like China are making progress, economically, and yet their English is far from passable.

Over at Jose Carillo's English Forum, Jose Carillo, the English usage columnist in Manila Times, made the case for English proficiency:

Let me sketch the big picture. Nearly 50 years of American colonization had deeply Anglicized the way we Filipinos think and run our lives—the way we name ourselves and our institutions, the way we consume, the way we educate ourselves, the way we inform and entertain ourselves, the way we do business, and the way we muddle through with our politics. English is in our soul, in our tongue, in our stomachs, in our scent, in our clothes, in our shoes, in our printed word, in our airwaves and bandwidths, in the very air we inhale and exhale. We can argue to death that this may not be exactly a good thing, but that is precisely what we have become—Asian by geography, skin, and temperament but decidedly American by taste, inclination, and aspiration.

If it were possible right now to successfully strip our Filipino-ness of its American veneer and its English trappings so we can build a new nation anchored on Tagalog, I would be among the first to enlist for the effort. But you and I know that this will be madness. We have gone too far in the day to entertain that simplistic notion. It will require reprogramming our minds or lobotomizing our brains, and disowning our very own culture—the moral and physical equivalent of national suicide.

To me, language is just a tool, and I really couldn’t care less if we replaced English with Tagalog, so long as we could express ourselves clearly and conduct our day-to-day business effectively. But of what good would that be? In the global order of things, we are fortunate to be already 100 years ahead in the quest for the one attribute that many other nations are now breaking their necks to have: English proficiency. English has become today’s global language, one that over 7,000,000 of our countrymen are already using to earn a living abroad. Why sacrifice this one competitive advantage in the name of romance and nationalism?

And now for the small picture. Our business sector demands good English from those who want to join the white-collar workforce. But you and I know that thousands upon thousands of our college graduates can’t even write a good English sentence, much less a credible job application letter. Because of that, they will never get the jobs they had trained for; they will not even make it to the shortlist of qualified applicants. That’s a lot of money down the drain educating them, and a terrible and monumental waste of our country’s human resources. Yet all we have to do to correct the situation is to think wiser and equip Filipinos with the basic tool that our own society and the world demand of them.

That tool is the English language—something we already have and need only polish to a good shine.