Cultural identity for toddlers (fwd)

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Education Today Newsletter
JULY - SEPTEMBER 2005

Cultural identity for toddlers

Until 1995, education in Papua New Guinea, an island nation in the South
Pacific, was in English.

As the world’s most linguistically diverse nation, with 823 living
languages spoken by a population of 5.2 million, there may have been
some logistic value in this, but it did little to foster a sense of
national and cultural identity. In 1979, parents in Bougainville
Island, in North Solomons Province put forward the idea of providing
their children with two years of pre-school education in their own
language, before the first grade of primary school, which would be in
English. The Viles Tok Ples Skul (village language school) was born,
later becoming the Tok Ples Pri Skul (vernacular language pre-school).

During the 1980s three other provincial governments and four other
language communities followed suit. Vernacular language pre-schools
sprung up elsewhere over the next decade, but remained informal, with
no national curriculum, and with teaching materials prepared by NGOs.
The education reforms of 1995 finally led to the development of a
national curriculum, encouraging vernacular language teaching in the
two years before primary school, with a gradual introduction of English
after that. By fifth grade, teaching is 30 per cent in the local
language, 70 per cent in English. At the end of 2000, vernacular
language pre-schools were teaching in 380 language groups.

A similar initiative is just beginning in Vanuatu, also in Melanesia,
which has some 106 local languages for a population of just 200,000.
And, in New Zealand, Te köhanga reo (‘language nest’) is a total
immersion programme for Maori children from birth to age 6, where they
speak Maori and learn within an indigenous cultural context. The
programme started in 1982.

>From UNESCO Policy Briefs on Early Childhood, October 2002