BAGUIO CITY — The Supreme Court (SC) has stopped the move to delete the Filipino subject in the college curriculum.
During Tuesday’s en banc deliberations of the SC, it issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the Commission on Higher Education (ChEd) memorandum which effectively removed the said subject from the General Education Curriculum (GEC).
The TRO of the SC will be indefinite and without any duration.
The TRO was issued without giving due course to the petition filed by a group of college professors nationwide.
The SC also rdered ChEd to file its comment within a period 10 days from receipt of notice.
The petition was filed by the group of Filipino subject professors headed by Bienvenido Lumbera.
The petitioners argued that it will cause over 10,000 full-time and 20,000 part-time Filipino professors to lose their jobs or get less income.
The subject of the questioned petition is ChEd Memorandum (CMO) No. 20, series of 2013.
Under the directive, Filipino will no longer be part of the GEC by 2016 and directed that the teaching of Filipino at the college level will be limited to Filipino majors and Education in Filipino majors.
The justification made by ChEd for its removal is that the subject would be covered in Grades 11 and 12 under the new K-12 curriculum.
The National Commission for Culture and the Arts’ National Committee on Language and Translation (NCCA-NCLT) contested the same.
The Pambansang Samahan sa Linggwistika at Literaturang Filipino, Ink. (PSLLF), an organization that promotes the use of Filipino, has also thrown its support behind the NCCA-NCLT resolution by promoting a change.org petition which asks the ChEd and Congress to include the nine Filipino units in the GEC.
The online and written petition letters were initiated by De La Salle University (DLSU) Filipino professor David Michael San Juan.
They argued that the ChEd memorandum violates Article XIV, Section 6 of the 1987 Constitution in the promotion of the Filipino language.