Editorial: Producing ‘neo-illiterates’

The  Arroyo administration is reported to have blinked on the proposed tax on text messages, wary of a possible political backlash in the coming 2010 national elections just a matter of months away. Malacanang called on Congress to rethink the measure and spare cell phone users of this unnecessary tax burden.
The Palace’s latest move, clearly more aleatory than deliberately well-thought out, could only result from a correct assessment of the situation, that of the mountaing opposition to  the tax proposal, which can even be more hateful than the otherwise esoteric Revised Value-Added Tax. The RVAT was widely believed to have been behind the decimation of administration senatorial candidates in the 2007 elections, with Ralph Recto, the law’s author, on top of the casualty list.
The tax collectors may have stopped salivating at the projected income of from P20 billion to P36 billion to be generated by the aborted text tax. It is estimated that the some 70 million mobile phone subscribers send an average of at least 10 text messages a day.   However, this is not yet a happy ending for cell phone users. Appeasement is not one of the virtues of the current crop of lawmakers, as shown in the House’s “no retreat, no surrender” tact in the Cha-cha (Charter change). Who knows what else can some tax-happy legislators think of next? Mercifully though, there is the coming elections to force lawmakers to shelve their hubris and behave.
A graver issue on the use of cellular phones that should be targeted by Filipinos in righteous indignation is the “miseducation” that this twentieth century gadget seemingly promotes, albeit unintentionally.
No less than Rep. Eric Singson of Ilocos Sur has accused telecom companies of making
students (and out of school youths) “neo-illiterates” because they make them poor spellers, shortening words and disregarding rules of grammar in sending their messages. (Truth to tell, this difference in communication style, has caused so much acrimony between the young and the old, who find the text language offensive to their taste and disastrous to the youth’s learning how to communicate properly).
What an irony, therefore, that Sen. Richard Gordon favors the proposed text tax because the money collected could help solve the lack of funds for education in the country.