By Anna Mghwira
That we must urgently reform our education system to match our current and future needs is now obvious. But we will be deceiving ourselves if we think we can plan, strategise and come up with flowery development programmes that can help us without looking at the past and determining how it will affect the future.
We erred when, at independence, we decided to carry on with the education system our colonisers handed down to us. The right thing to have done was for leaders to begin a new journey at independence—to reclaim our lost culture, traditions, practices, customs and the ideals we held dear. That was to be done through our local languages.
From the very moment we adopted an alien language to teach our children, the whole education system began the slow and painful journey to nowhere. Today we are witnessing the consequences of the political decisions we made in the past. More thorough research would be needed to give us an idea of how we could have established our educational system based on local languages or Kiswahili as a unifying language.
The question here is one of the relevance of education and its effectiveness and efficiency that would have become the determining factor in a sustainable system of education that would represent our development process.
There is also the question of which language to use when running an education system. In our case and the rest of Africa, education experts advise that children learn best in the language of the mother, the language they first hear and speak. It is the best for learning, irrespective of its origin, geographical location and user group.
If education is the transmission of knowledge and understanding that shapes our personality and develops society, its organisation should reflect the outcome of struggles between various competing outcomes, for instance between the state and employers, the market, religion, culture, parent and child interests.
In our case, competing interests varied between our internal need for development and meeting demands of the market master, the investor master and the financial provider master. We had to buy into an invention of the dominant culture.
Tanganyika then was a very outward looking nation, meeting the demands of Africans against those of colonial western masters. Now that we have accomplished our mission to liberate our neighbours, it is time we came back home and looked after our children, our elders and even our dead ones.
The outward-looking perspective impacted negatively on education when we bought in and adapted the same educational ideals that we fought against at independence.
Schools taught in English while at home pupils spoke their vernacular or Kiswahili. Basically, Kiswahili is still spoken on play grounds, the mother tongue at home and English in school.
This has been a case of triple denial in education, a missing in action kind of thing—an alien language in an alien culture. It has come down to a clash of civilisations and the result is a denial of basic rights to education and learning.
The UN special rapporteur on the right to education, Ms Katarina Tomaskveski, argues that the use of dominant language medium prevents access to education (perpetuates poverty) because of its linguistics, pedagogical and psychological barriers.
She argues further that this kind of education is subtractive because children learn the dominant language at the cost of the mother tongue, which is displaced and later replaced by the dominant language.
A study by educational experts on the use of language in education suggests that children undergoing subtractive education are effectively transferred to the dominant group linguistically and culturally.
This also contributes to the disappearance of the world’s linguistic diversity, when a whole group changes languages. Pessimistic but still completely realistic estimates claim that as many as 90 to 95 percent of spoken languages may be extinct or very seriously endangered during this century. Most of the disappearing languages will be indigenous languages.
Tanzania is home to more than 122 languages. If we are to go with expert opinion, what would we have to do to meet their demands? It is time we began to think seriously and strategically on the best ways to redeem our values and ethos in education.
The writer is a teacher and political analyst based in Arusha
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