The magic of ignorance - English a false prophet

[Trond Trosterud]

The problem for educational systems conducted in English or French
rather than in the language(s) native to the country is the premise
underlying their solution:

The premise is that your head is a bucket with space only for one
language. This was the story they told Sámi kids in Norway in order to
have them switch to Norwegian, and this is the story these education
planners tell their governments today (in Malaysia, e.g., according to
Saran's quote).

But the road to prosperity does not go via rejecting your own language
and build a school system on a language used by only a minority elite.
Walking this road has solid traditions, e.g. in the whole Sub-Saharan
Africa, and there is no evidence that it has positive consequences.

I have told this story before, so bear over with me, but since the
topic returns, so does the cure: The most competitive country in the
world (OECD survey) and the country on the top of PISA's list of
education results (twice, the 2004 result focused on math) is Finland.
The educational policy of Finland can be described as follows:

* Basic education (reading, writing, math, science, history, etc.) is
conducted in the mother tongue, for all pupils. English, Swedish and a
third foreign language are taught as foreign languages.
* Higher education, up to and including PhD level, is also conducted in
the mother tongue. English is used as  language of instruction only at
international PhD research courses, otherwise they use the mother
tongue.
* Textbooks are in the mother tongue in primary and secondary education.
* Textbooks at university level are in the mother tongue if available
(much resources are used on translating central textbooks). At more
advanced or specialised levels, textbooks and research literature of
course in English.

The consequence of this policy is that the whole intellectual potential
of the population is accessible, not only the tiny elite. Time is used
to learning the school subjects, and for researchers, the complex
reasoning behind their results may be conducted in the mother tongue.

This, then, is the road, if not to prosperity, so at least to a well
educated people, capable of understanding and conducting research and
technological innovation.

It is utterly sad to see "experts" from the British Council etc.
advising development countries to "do as we, use English", when the
real advice should be "do as we, use your mother tongue" (cf. Robert
Philipsons book on Linguistic Imperialism). Also, since Britain and the
US are the countries with really lousy results in foreign language
teaching (and yes, the bad results are due to poor motivation, and not
their fault, but then they should not act as "experts" when advocating
their English-only policy either).

Trond.

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Trond Trosterud                                        t +47 7764 4763
Institutt for språkvitskap, Det humanistiske fakultet  m +47 950 70140
N-9037 Universitetet i Tromsø, Noreg                   f +47 7764 4239
Trond.Trosterud (a) hum.uit.no          http://www.hum.uit.no/a/trond/
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