The Demerit Lands on Every Bisaya Word in a Yard the Same Word Can't Afford

Walk into certain Catholic campuses in Cebu City or Iloilo City and you'll find the rulebook has a scoring system. Speak Bisaya at recess, lose a point. Slip into Hiligaynon in the corridor, there's a mark against your name. "English-only" sits in the handbook like policy, and "proper diction" gets a grade of its own.

The tongue being docked is the tongue the city actually speaks. In Central Visayas, Cebuano is the home language for the overwhelming majority of households. In Iloilo, kids grow up on Hiligaynon. These are not foreign imports anyone needs correcting out of. They're what Lola uses at the dinner table.

The grade column no exam covers

Deduction systems dress up as discipline, but they teach something blunter. They tell a nine-year-old that the language of her own house is a demerit. That the vowel she was born with needs flattening before it counts.

The national ground already shifted under this. Republic Act No. 12027 lapsed into law in October 2024, ending roughly 12 years of mandatory Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education. It dropped the mother tongue as the required medium of instruction from Kindergarten to Grade 3, switched classroom teaching back to Filipino and English, and left mother-tongue use optional in monolingual classes. The schoolyard fine runs even further than the law now requires, turning Bisaya and Hiligaynon into something to apologize for outside class too.

Call it a hangover from a mission-school model that treated English as proof of refinement and the local tongue as something lesser. The wiring held. English still reads as class, as future, as the passport out.

The tuition sorts before the diction does

Here's the part that stings. The schools enforcing the hardest on English charge tuition that climbs year over year. The households fluent in English at home, the ones with a parent who worked a BPO floor or studied abroad, clear the gate and clear the diction rule with room to spare.

The kid who speaks only Bisaya at home is the kid whose family struggles with the enrollment fee in the first place. So the policy does two jobs at once. It prices out the families who speak the penalized languages, then penalizes whoever sneaks through for speaking them. The sorting happens twice, and the second round is just confirmation.

None of this makes the graduates more employable. The call-center floors that reward a clean accent will train that accent anyway. The construction firm, the clinic, the sari-sari counter, they all run on Bisaya and Hiligaynon. A diction grade from Grade 4 does nothing except follow you around as a quiet belief that your first language was a problem.

You can keep the English. Learn it, use it, bill for it later. The fight is narrower than that. A child should be able to say something to a friend at recess in the words she thinks in without a teacher reaching for the demerit book. The handbook can keep its English-only rule in class. The yard belongs to whoever's playing in it, and the receipt for speaking there shouldn't be a mark against a name.