Neville Alexander
a SECOND LOOK
The report (The Star, January 14) that Sandringham High School decided because of financial constraints not to renew the school governing body post of its teacher for Zulu and that, instead, a government-financed Afrikaans post may be created, has again brought to the fore the language-education policy as one of the central issues of school education in South Africa. This refers to languages taught as subjects (part of the learning area Language, Literacy and Communication in the jargon of Outcomes Based Education) as well as to languages of learning and teaching (previously, ”media of instruction”).
I believe, like an increasing number of educationists, that unless the language issue is tackled expeditiously, we are going to be squandering many more billions of rands to produce something like a 50% failure rate in matric yearly and a drop-out and repeater rate which is one of the worst in the world. Anyone who is interested in statistical details should read a recent publication by my colleague at the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (Praesa) Kathleen Heugh. In this preliminary, but nonetheless comprehensive, demolition of some of the fallacies perpetuated by academics and ”experts” about language education in South African schools, she deals with what she calls ”the case against bilingual and multilingual education in South Africa” (Praesa Occasional Paper No. 6).
Since July 14 1997 we have a language policy in education which promotes mother-tongue and bilingual education in terms of an approach which we call additive bilingualism. That is one which assumes that the learner’s first language (loosely, ”mother tongue”) will be sustained preferably as a language of learning but minimally as a subject throughout his or her educational career. The justification for this approach is fundamental to learning theory.
While there are many practical reasons why this policy cannot be implemented fully at once, it seems, unfortunately, that there is not enough of a sense of urgency as far as implementation in the medium to longer term is concerned. My criticism of the national and provincial education department’s dithering in this regard is directed at the fact that there are no clear signals which indicate where we are heading. By default, we are implementing what can only be called a neo-apartheid language policy in education.
Under the present policy, the choice of language medium vests in the individual student or in the parent/guardian in the primary school. There is no compulsion to choose any specific language as the language of learning and teaching, as long as the language of learning and teaching is one of the official languages of South Africa, or sign language. School governing bodies have to determine the language policy of their schools but in most cases this has not been done.
The vast majority of parents want their children to become proficient in English as a matter of course. However, up to 88% of South African parents want the home language to be maintained next to English throughout the education of their children. Heugh has calculated that about 4% of people who have an African language as a home language want their children to be taught through the medium of English only from day one.
What should we do? In a few sentences: we have to popularise the policy as it exists on paper, launch campaigns to change the language attitudes of the school community so that the universal principle of mother-tongue education can be revalidated (only English- and some Afrikaans-speaking children enjoy mother-tongue education in South Africa and this is borne out by the matric results, among other things). Bilingual education should be implemented for those, the majority, who want this.
We have to train, and retrain, systematically over the next five to 10 years all educators so that they can use the mother tongue as a language of learning and teaching, handle multilingual classrooms effectively and become proficient second-language English speakers and teachers if English is not their home language. Large-scale translation projects of the essential literature have to be undertaken.
The initial investment will cost us something but we will save billions in reduced failure and repeater rates and in enhanced capacities of students, who will become eminently trainable. Above all, we have to stop being held in thrall by Anglocentric delusions and realise that we live in Africa and that our children, like children throughout the world, can be taught in their own languages and at the same time become proficient in the global language, English, as and when they need to do so.
All our children should, as a general rule, be able to speak three South African languages, one of which will invariably be English.
There are many other considerations that play a role in determining the best language education policy to be implemented in given circumstances, but these are the essential first steps. The dilemmas of schools such as Sandringham can be obvia-ted if we take a clear stand on the direction we want to go. Do we want to perpetuate a badly implemented English second-language system of education or do we want to have a bilingual education system in which all have equal opportunities? Do we want to programme failure and mediocrity into the system or do we want to unleash the potential of all our children in the spirit of an African revival in the new millennium?
We are fiddling while the schools are burning. We cannot, obviously, ignore the language attitudes and preferences of parents but it is incumbent on leadership to be decisive in a matter which is the very basis of all learning. We have to understand that people, including South African people, cannot be totally spontaneous, creative and self-confident if they are forced to communicate always in a second, for most of them actually a foreign, language but in any case one of which they do not have an adequate command.
Let us remember that only a small minority of the population of any African country is sufficiently competent in the former colonial languages, English in our case, so as to empower themselves by means of enhanced social status, economic benefits and political power. The overwhelming majority remain outside this charmed circle and cannot effectively exercise their democratic rights. We should also note that many West, Central and East African countries are returning to mother-tongue medium and bilingual educational systems because the previous policies based on English-only or English-mainly approaches have failed so dismally. It is time that we address the issue seriously in our country so that we can stop wasting the meagre resources we have.
Neville Alexander is the director of the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa at the University of Cape Town