Uganda: Language Policy Will Promote Sectarianism

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Language Policy Will Promote Sectarianism

The Monitor (Kampala)
July 7, 2006

It is now official. Schools will be teaching in vernacular during the
first three years of primary education. This is an official policy and
little can be done about it. Educationists who pushed it did their studies
and concluded that it is the best way to teach the children of Uganda.
There are however a number of issues which need to be born in mind as the
new policy gets implemented in the next few months. Any efforts to create
a nation called Uganda are going to become harder because the new policy
in a way tends to lock people into their ethnic communities, rather than
opening them up.

To begin with, most children will only be able to attend school
effectively in their tribal districts. If an Acholi with a six-year old
child is posted or transferred to work in Mbarara, he may have to decline
the offer or resist the transfer because his child may not be able to
start school. If he goes, the child who does not know a word of Runyankore
will pick nothing in Primary One. He will obviously come last in all tests
except may be English which shall only be a subject and not a medium of
instruction.

If the family is then transferred to Teso, the child may go to P2 and
understand nothing the whole year, having missed understanding the first
year and again score zeros. A transfer to Masaka will make the child go
through P3 without picking a thing. The first time this child will
understand the teaching in arithmetic, science and everything else will be
at age nine as he starts P4, disoriented, frustrated and his esteem
shattered. In short, people with young families will prefer working only
in their tribal districts, further entrenching tribal thinking.

The new policy also condemns primary school teachers to working only in
their tribal districts. For how will a young Munyankore teacher who has
just graduated from a Teacher Training College work with kids in Moyo? She
would be the object of amusement for the kids; she would be absolutely
ineffective. So everyone in the teaching profession at that level will
remain a closed tribal teacher, teaching tribally oriented children and
look at the rest of Ugandans as aliens. Universal Primary Education would
not be able to contribute to national unity. So much for national
integration.

>>From Global Media (allAfrica.com).
http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/200607070396.html