The policy at the center of the study is Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education, known as MTB-MLE, which was embedded in the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013, Republic Act No. 10533. The reform required that the language children speak at home serve as the medium of instruction from kindergarten through the early grades, a design consistent with a large body of international research showing that first-language instruction facilitates meaningful and lifelong learning. Evidence cited in the study includes the well-known Lubuagan case study by Walter and Dekker, which documented measurable learning gains when Kankanaey children were taught in their own language. Yet by 2025, the Department of Education had issued a memorandum discontinuing the use of the mother tongue as the medium of instruction in kindergarten to grade 3, allowing only optional implementation in monolingual classes, and amending the very sections of the 2013 law that had mandated it. Republic Act No. 12027, recorded by the Supreme Court’s e-library in October 2024, formalized the rollback.

What makes the study distinctive is its insistence that this sequence of events cannot be understood through the language of implementation failure alone. Perez-Amurao and Nelmida argue that implementation gaps, the practical difficulties of training teachers, producing materials, and assessing learners in more than a hundred Philippine languages, were reframed by political actors as policy failure. That reframing, they contend, was the crucial move. Once a policy is publicly defined as having failed on its own terms, its rollback appears not as a political choice but as an administrative necessity. The researchers describe this process as lawfare, the use of legal instruments and legislative maneuvering to produce colossal effects on language communities, and they show how congressional records and education commission reports circulated data that reshaped the perceived value of the mother tongues themselves.

The theoretical core of the paper is a refined construct of linguistic depoliticization. In the authors’ account, depoliticization occurs when decisions about language are stripped of their visible political content and presented as technocratic matters, even as they remain deeply embedded in power dynamics. The Philippines’ national language acts, examined through critical discourse analysis in the tradition of Norman Fairclough, reveal recurring patterns of ambivalence: proclamations celebrating linguistic diversity coexisting with executive orders, such as Executive Order No. 335 of 1988, that directed government offices toward the exclusive use of Filipino in official transactions. This ambivalence, the study argues, is not accidental. It reflects the interests of actors whose political legacies favor a narrow, centralized linguistic order, and it echoes what other scholars have called the misuses of essentialism in language policy-making, where languages are reduced to symbols of unity rather than treated as living media of thought.

The stakes of this analysis are framed in unusually strong moral language. Drawing on the literature of cultural genocide, including work by Lawrence Kingston and Robert van Krieken on the destruction of identity among indigenous peoples, the authors argue that the absence of a coherent national language policy infringes on linguistic human rights and produces cultural genocide through linguistic genocide, the deliberate destruction of cultural identity achieved by attacking the languages in which that identity is carried. The Philippines is home to more than a hundred languages, most of them spoken by communities with no institutional protection, and the study situates the country’s obligations within an extensive framework of international instruments: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the 1996 Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights adopted in Barcelona.

The researchers’ methodological approach is worth examining because it demonstrates how policy histories can be reconstructed from official texts. Document analysis, as described in the methodological literature the authors cite, allows researchers to treat laws, memoranda, and commission reports as evidence of both stated intent and unstated assumption. Critical discourse analysis then interrogates how those texts frame problems, assign blame, and legitimize action. Applied to the Philippine record, the method surfaces a striking pattern: the same institutions that documented the challenges of implementing MTB-MLE also produced the evaluative data that justified abandoning it. Implementation-generated data circulating within policy institutions, the study finds, progressively reshaped the value of the mother tongues, recasting them as obstacles to learning rather than as resources for it. The rollback of 2024 and 2025 thus appears in the record not as a sudden reversal but as the endpoint of a long discursive campaign.

The study also situates the rollback within a broader pattern of democratic retrogression in the Philippines. The authors connect the language policy trajectory to the country’s recent political history, including the radical populism associated with Rodrigo Duterte and the Marcosian revisionism documented by historians such as Francisco Jayme Guiang, in which myth-making reshapes collective memory. In such an environment, they suggest, language policy becomes another arena in which historical narratives and national identity are contested and rewritten. The ambivalence of the state toward its own linguistic diversity mirrors a wider ambivalence toward pluralism itself. Democratic retrogression, on this reading, is not only a matter of institutions and elections; it is inscribed in the languages children are permitted to learn in, and therefore in whose knowledge counts as legitimate.

The human consequences are concrete. Millions of Filipino learners, the study notes, continue to be denied inclusive and culturally responsive education. The evidence base for the pedagogical value of mother tongue instruction in the Philippine context is substantial, ranging from the Lubuagan experiment to studies of classroom implementation by public elementary teachers in Masbate and analyses of how language ideologies shape policy implementation published in Asia-Pacific Education Researcher in 2025. Against this backdrop, the discontinuation of mandatory mother tongue instruction in the earliest grades represents, in the authors’ framing, a policy choice that prioritizes political convenience over documented learning outcomes. Recent economic research, including a 2025 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on the long shadow of early education in the Philippines, underscores how consequential early-grade learning conditions are for lifetime outcomes, adding an economic dimension to what the authors frame primarily as a rights question.

The paper does not stop at diagnosis. It calls for greater accountability among policymakers and advocates for institutional safeguards that would insulate linguistic inclusivity and cultural revitalization from the oscillations of electoral politics. Such safeguards, the study implies, would need to address the structural conditions that allowed the rollback to proceed: the concentration of policy authority, the vulnerability of implementation data to political reframing, and the absence of enforceable rights for linguistic minorities. The Second Congressional Commission on Education, whose reports the authors analyzed, represents one of the few institutional mechanisms capable of sustained scrutiny, but the study suggests that commissions alone cannot substitute for binding legal protection of learners’ linguistic rights.

Ultimately, the study’s contribution lies in naming a phenomenon that is easy to miss: the quiet depoliticization of decisions that are, in substance, profoundly political. When a multilingual democracy rolls back the right of children to learn in their own languages, the move is typically narrated as pragmatism, as a response to logistics or test scores. Perez-Amurao and Nelmida’s analysis of the Philippine record argues that this narration is itself the mechanism, a discursive shield behind which political legacies and actors’ interests operate. By reconstructing the full chain from national language acts through implementation data to the 2024 and 2025 policy reversal, the study offers a template for examining similar rollbacks elsewhere, and it issues a warning that resonates beyond the Philippines: languages do not die only through prohibition and punishment. They can also be killed by memoranda, reframed statistics, and the slow administrative erosion of the right to be taught in the words one first learned to think in.

Subject of Research: The politics of language-in-education policy and the rollback of mother tongue-based multilingual education in the Philippines

Article Title: Philippine linguistic genocide, depoliticization, and policy rollback

Article References: Philippine linguistic genocide, depoliticization, and policy rollback. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01680-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01680-6

Keywords: language policy, MTB-MLE, Philippines, linguistic genocide, cultural genocide, linguistic depoliticization, mother tongue education, policy rollback, critical discourse analysis, linguistic human rights, multilingual education, educational equity

The authors ground their analysis in three theoretical traditions that have gained considerable traction in decolonial scholarship. Decolonial thought interrogates the coloniality of knowledge, the idea that political independence did not dismantle the underlying hierarchies of what counts as legitimate expertise. Postcolonial theory examines how those hierarchies persist in institutions, languages, and credentialing systems long after formal rule ends. Ubuntu philosophy, rooted in southern African thought and often summarized as the principle that a person is a person through other persons, offers a relational ethic in which knowledge is communal, contextual, and bound to collective wellbeing rather than individual accumulation. Together, these frameworks provide the analytical lens through which the researchers read decades of literature on African education, asking not only what is taught but whose knowledge is authorized to appear in the curriculum at all.

Methodologically, the study is a systematic analysis of literature rather than a new empirical survey, a design choice that carries both strengths and constraints. By aggregating peer-reviewed findings across five national contexts, the authors can identify patterns that no single-country study could reveal, such as the recurring gap between policy rhetoric and classroom practice. The trade-off is that the review inherits the limitations of its source material: uneven documentation, variable definitions of what constitutes indigenous knowledge, and the persistent underreporting of oral traditions that resist easy codification. The authors are candid about this gap, noting that existing literature frequently celebrates the value of IKS in the abstract while failing to investigate its practical integration within the varied contexts across the continent. Their review is explicitly an attempt to move the conversation from principle to implementation.

What the analysis found is a consistent architecture of obstruction. Five barriers recur across the case countries with striking regularity. The first is the persistence of Eurocentric curricula, in which African history, science, and ecology appear, if at all, as footnotes to a European narrative. The second is language: instruction delivered in English, French, or Arabic often severs children from the languages in which their communities encode agricultural, medicinal, and ecological knowledge. The third is institutional resistance, as universities and ministries built on colonial templates treat indigenous epistemologies as folklore rather than scholarship. The fourth is inadequate policy support, with governments issuing symbolic endorsements of local knowledge without budget lines, teacher training, or assessment reform to back them. The fifth is the challenge of meeting global academic standards, a structural bind in which internationally benchmarked examinations and accreditation regimes penalize curricula that deviate from metropolitan norms.

Against this bleak backdrop, the case findings offer concrete evidence that integration can work. Ghana’s mother-tongue education initiatives, which deliver early literacy instruction in local languages rather than English, have yielded measurable improvements in reading outcomes while strengthening children’s connection to community knowledge. The mechanism is well understood in literacy research: phonological awareness and comprehension develop fastest in a language a child already speaks, so mother-tongue instruction is not a sentimental concession but a cognitive advantage. South Africa’s formal IKS policy frameworks, among the most developed on the continent, have created institutional channels through which indigenous knowledge can be documented, protected, and incorporated into research and teaching, with reported gains in cultural identity alongside academic outcomes. These are not peripheral experiments; they are national-scale demonstrations that decolonized curricula can be both culturally grounded and pedagogically effective.

The Kenyan and Tanzanian cases illustrate a different dynamic, one in which policy ambition collides with implementation reality. Both countries have experimented with incorporating local content and languages into schooling, yet the review documents how examination pressure, teacher shortages, and centralized curriculum control repeatedly pull practice back toward the colonial-era default. In the North African comparative sub-case of Morocco and Algeria, the picture is complicated by the region’s layered linguistic history, where Amazigh indigenous knowledge and language have had to negotiate space within education systems dominated by Arabic and French legacies. The comparison underscores a key analytical point of the study: there is no single African template for decolonizing education. The colonial encounter differed profoundly across the continent, and so must the pathways out of it.

From these findings the authors derive a three-part prescription. First, localized curriculum reform: national curricula should be redesigned so that indigenous ecological knowledge, oral histories, and local problem-solving traditions are treated as core content rather than enrichment material. Second, community-driven teacher training: because most teachers were themselves educated within colonial epistemologies, professional development must be co-designed with elders, knowledge holders, and local communities rather than imposed from ministry headquarters. Third, national legislation to institutionalize IKS, giving indigenous knowledge the same legal and structural protection that formal disciplines enjoy. The argument here is essentially institutional: without statutory anchoring, IKS integration remains hostage to political cycles and administrative discretion, vulnerable to reversal with each change of government.

The implications extend well beyond the five countries studied. Education for sustainable development has become a global policy orthodoxy, enshrined in United Nations frameworks and national strategies alike, yet the review suggests that sustainability education imported wholesale from external models risks reproducing the very epistemic dependencies it claims to overcome. Indigenous knowledge systems, by contrast, often encode precisely the relational, place-based understanding of ecosystems that sustainability science now champions, from rotational farming practices to community water governance. The study’s contribution is to show that recognizing this is not enough; the mechanisms of schooling, including language policy, teacher certification, assessment design, and legislative frameworks, must be restructured to carry that knowledge. Sustainability, in this reading, is as much an epistemological project as an environmental one.

For policymakers and development practitioners, the review functions as both a diagnosis and a roadmap. Its evidence base, drawn from published literature rather than new fieldwork, means that the reported outcomes, such as improved literacy in Ghana and strengthened cultural identity in South Africa, should be read as promising signals warranting rigorous longitudinal evaluation rather than settled proof. The authors themselves frame the findings as significant implications for those seeking to build culturally grounded and socially relevant education systems across post-colonial Africa, a formulation that invites further empirical testing. What the study establishes firmly is the shape of the problem: five interlocking barriers, documented across multiple national contexts, that will not dissolve through goodwill or symbolic policy alone.

The deeper stakes of the research are captured in its attention to post-colonial identity. Education does not merely transmit skills; it tells young people who they are and whose knowledge matters. When a Kenyan student learns ecology only through European case studies, or a Ghanaian child is punished for speaking her mother tongue at school, the curriculum performs a quiet erasure that no amount of technical training can offset. The review’s most consequential argument may be that sustainable education and epistemic justice are inseparable: a system that devalues the knowledge of the communities it serves will struggle to secure their trust, participation, or long-term engagement. Reimagining African education through decolonial pathways, the authors suggest, is therefore not a retreat from global standards but a demand that those standards make room for the intellectual traditions of the continent’s own people, and a demonstration, through cases from Accra to Cape Town, that when they do, learning improves.

Subject of Research: Integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems into sustainable education reform in post-colonial Africa

Article Title: Reimagining sustainable education in Africa through decolonial pathways and indigenous knowledge systems

Article References: Shah, N., Akram, H., & Abdelrady, A. H. (2026). Reimagining sustainable education in Africa through decolonial pathways and indigenous knowledge systems. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04596-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04596-6

Keywords: Indigenous Knowledge Systems, decolonisation, African education, sustainable education, education for sustainable development, postcolonial theory, Ubuntu philosophy, curriculum reform, mother-tongue education, Ghana, South Africa, language policy