Putting my ten centavos worth of ideas, I said that based on my personal experience and that of my classmates in the public schools of Cebu, I agreed that the school teacher was the primary ingredient that was the most important tool to teach young minds the basic three "Rs,’’ i.e. "riting,’’ "rithmetic,’’ reading, and other subjects. I then recounted that before WW II, my classmates and I in the public elementary schools had a good command, not only of the English language, but also of the three, "Rs.’’ Some US GIs asked where we learned to speak such good English. Of course, in our public schools! This training was proven when most of my classmates became successful professionals. After the Commonwealth was reestablished, our sixth grade class of 1941 was promoted to first year high school. We had overcrowded classrooms, hardly any blackboards, desks, books, but we certainly had very good teachers who had an excellent knowledge of the various subjects, who would lecture to us without opening their books. The only teaching aids that we had were our pencils and notebooks where we wrote the lessons taught to us.

Again it is said that the pupils that "graduate’’ from the elementary and the high schools have deficient reading skills and comprehension abilities. I don’t know whether children today are taught how to read by the constant repetition of words and phrases, or by teaching them the basic sounds of the alphabet as they are combined with the vowels as in "A,’’ "BA,’’ "KA,’’ and so on. I find the latter to be more effective, at least in so far as my children are concerned whom I successfully taught how to read to the point where they were reading newspapers and books at a very early age.

In summary, at a time like this, adding more years to the elementary and high school curriculum is not the best way to improve the system of education. The additional money that would be needed by the government would be better spent to really upgrade the state of knowledge and skills of the teachers. Salary increases should also be used to reward teachers who qualify in the upgraded standards. In the upgrading process of education, shall we use Tagalog or Filipino as the language of instruction, English or Taglish? I believe that it should be English simply because, whether we like it or not, the world is interconnected via cell phones, Internet, etc., and the basic dominant language used worldwide for science, technology, commerce, and industry is English. China with its 1.2 billion plus people is making a strong effort to teach English via the electronic media. India with about 1 billion people is very successful in the new communication and scientific technologies, because while they have hundreds of dialects, they communicate with each other in English.

Finally if we want to speak good English, we must eliminate Taglish so that we can learn to also speak good Tagalog. The government must persuade the KBP and the electronic media owners to introduce pure English or straight Filipino programs especially in talk shows. Many people, especially in the Metro Manila area, speak Taglish because of the strong habit-forming influence of TV and radio. I don’t believe that media should continue to be a tool for the destruction of English and T