Here's Bernard Moses, Secretary of Public Instruction in the Philippines during the American colonial period, writing in 1904:
The boy who in his school days has learned the language of a civilized nation, even if he has learned nothing else, has put himself en rapport with civilization. Aside from the practical circumstances of his life, it makes little difference whether he learns English, French, German, or Spanish, but it makes a great deal of difference whether he learns French or Tagalog, English or Bicol. The one makes him a citizen of the world, the other makes him a citizen of a province in the Philippine Islands. If the government were to make the local dialects the media of school instruction, a limited number of the more or less wealthy and influential persons would use the facilities which they can command to learn English for the sake of the additional power or other advantages it would give them in the communities to which they belong, and these advantages or this additional power would tend to perpetuate the prestige and domination of the present oligarchic element in Filipino society.When I was much younger I got into an argument with a friend, where I defended the use of English as public instruction in schools, claiming that translating textbooks into Tagalog, or any other Filipino language, was simply time-consuming and expensive. I said English, after all -- and here it comes -- enabled Filipinos to be employed overseas, which was the main reason for their being hired.
Moses wrote the above quotation only a little after American schoolteachers were let loose on the islands, and we have the good fortune to knows what happens next; as Renato Constantino famously put it in 1966, "Philippine education was shaped by the overriding objective of preserving and expanding American control."
Moses, however, is also essentially correct. English did pull the rug off underneath many a member of the Spanish-speaking elite, though it clearly did not contribute towards dismantling the oligarchy in any real fashion. He is correct in that the glamour / grammar (I think their etymologies are the same) of English also provides social and, in this case, ultimately, economic capital. But surely this is no excuse to let native languages languish in schools in favor of English; the point here is to provide job opportunities locally (a tall order) rather than use English as a tool to make Filipinos more employable abroad.
One can call Moses prescient, but one can also argue that the present defenders of English -- and usually only for purely capitalist reasons -- are using the same colonialist reasons to fight for this alien tongue.