[lg policy] Zambia: Introducing local language teaching needed study

[Harold Schiffman]

Introducing local language teaching needed study
January 13, 2014

Dear editor,


I ACKNOWLEDGE that it is important for our children to learn in a language
that makes it easy to grasp things particularly with regard to numeracy.
However, I really fear the consequences of the blanket introduction of this
policy in rural and urban schools.


We live in a dynamic world and for our policy-makers in the Ministry of
Education to re-introduce the teaching techniques that were applied in
colonial Northern Rhodesia in modern Zambia without first carrying out a
pilot study is worrying.
Parents of the 1970s and early 1980s in many urban homes used to teach
their mother tongue as the first language for their children. However, many
parents of the 1990s and 2000s teach and speak English to their babies.


Hence many children learn local ‘familiar’ languages later in life. For
this reason, it would have been important for the Ministry of Education to
carry out a study on the usage of the ‘familiar’ languages in Zambian homes
before the blanket rollout of the new policy.


In recent years our education system has been used for a lot of experiments
which have reduced the quality of education e.g. the introduction of basic
education in the 1990s. The blanket changes that were made to the syllabus
and the upgrading of primary schools to basic schools had some negative
impacts on the quality of education in our schools

.
Therefore our policy-makers should be cautious when making policy
pronouncements and enforcing policies that may reverse the progress that
our nation has made in education.


We should learn from Tanzania that uses Swahili in the education system.
MAPONGA CHIBUYE
Lusaka


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