Thanks to students majoring in Education at the University
of Malawi’s Chancellor College, the Ministry of Education’s decision for
English to be the language of instruction starting from Standard One has become
a national debate. I would like to congratulate the students for their active
participation in a matter of national significance.
The significance of this issue goes beyond the classroom. It
is about national development, national identity, and national aspirations. And
as the students have emphatically argued, it is also about class and social
inequality. This is why the matter of language of instruction in schools
awakens latent passions that lie deep down our hearts.
Thus far the debate has been restricted to the merits and
demerits of English as the language of instruction from Standard One. What has
not been discussed yet is the process the Ministry of Education has used to
come up with the declaration, in the first place. While the main justification
for the declaration, as quoted in the media, has centred around the importance
of spoken English and grammar, that is not the whole story.
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As the Minister of Education, Dr. Lucius Kanyumba explained,
the declaration is based on the New Education Act, 2012, which replaced the old
Education Act of 1962. The process to come up with the New Education Act goes
back to 2002, when the Ministry of Education requested the Law Commission to
review the 1962 Education Act and come up with a new one. In August 2003 the
government instituted the Special Law Commission, which undertook the task of
reviewing the country’s laws.
The Special Law Commission embarked on wide consultations,
including inviting submissions from various stakeholders on various aspects of
the country’s laws. The issue of language of instruction in public schools came
up during these consultations. A larger debate was going on amongst Malawians
on the place of Chichewa as the national language, and the effects of having a
national language on minority languages. There were those who argued that
rather than having a Malawian language as a national language, giving it
superiority over other languages, English would be an ideal alternative as a
neutral foreign language.
By the time the Law Commission finished its work in 2010, it
had drafted the New Education Act. The Commission issued a report titled
“Report of the Law Commission on the Review of Education Act”, which was
released in March of that year. One of its recommendations was the use of
English as the language of instruction in schools. The report was silent on the
rationale for this recommendation.
The issue of language of instruction is found in Section 78
of the New Education Act, which has two subsections 1 and 2. Subsection (1) is
unequivocal in mandating English as the language of instruction. However it
does not mention that this should be from Standard One. Subsection (2) is less
unequivocal. It says “Without prejudice to the generality of subsection (1),
the Minister may, by notice published in the Gazette
prescribe the language of instruction in schools.” The use
of the word “may” is somewhat circumspect, but the Minister has obviously used
powers vested in his office to make the prescription, including the declaration
that this should start in Standard One.
In making the declaration, the Ministry of Education has
pleased sections of Malawian society who use proficiency in spoken English as a
proxy for quality education. But this prescription goes against global trends
and volumes of research findings that argue for the importance of mother tongue
in the development of cognitive skills. That said, it is understandable why
many parents view good spoken English as representative of quality education.
There is a lot of prestige attached to English, and it gives one a global
passport. It is an important language that bestows glamour on those who speak
What gets buried inside the debate is the recommendation for
bilingual instruction, the practice of teaching in the mother tongue while introducing
one other or more languages. The Chancellor College students are very right in
arguing that children who develop a deeper functionality in their first
language find it easier to learn a second language.
Teachers and lecturers in our secondary schools and
universities are observing a trend in which students from private schools speak
perfect English, but their reasoning, writing and problem-solving skills are
not well developed. This is even as the Independent Schools Association of
Malawi (ISAMA) is reporting reporting that 80 percent of students selected to Malawian
universities are coming from private schools.
Language researchers have also found that children who speak
more than one language exhibit better academic performance than children who
know only one language, regardless of what that language is. This is why our
language of instruction policy needs to promote multilingualism, and not monolingualism.
Just a generation ago most Malawians were multi-lingual, speaking two or more
languages on average. Today’s generation knows two languages, English and
Chichewa, on average. If we do not enact policies to develop our local
languages, the coming generations of Malawians will be reduced to only one
Monolingualism encourages insularity, a restricted worldview
in which the only knowledge available to one is from one linguistic source. The
danger with the new policy, as it stands, is the damage it can potentially
cause to Malawian languages. The new policy will mean that as a country we will
allocate more resources to English at the expense of nurturing and developing
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As the students have eloquently argued, this will benefit
the children of the elites while disadvantaging children from poor families.
But it must also be pointed out that this inequality is already prevalent with
children of wealthy Malawians able to attend better schools than children of
poor Malawians. Those of us who went to school in the 1970s and 1980s had
Chichewa as the language of instruction in the early standards. We learned
English as a subject. And our English proficiency has turned out to be alright.
Contrary to popular opinion, all languages have an inherent
capacity to evolve and grow. Human knowledge has developed from the thousands
of languages spoken across histories and geographies rather than from one
language alone. Languages grow based on how much knowledge is generated in that
language, and how much resources are being allocated to it.
Language is more than communication. It is about identity
and cultural pride. It is also about national development. One key reason why
our country registers slow growth and development is because new research and
knowledge are predominantly in a language only few Malawians use. Our local
languages are deprived of new knowledges which remain beyond the acquisition of
the majority of our people.
The majority of our people remain poor and disempowered
because they are denied an opportunity to participate in knowledge-making processes
due to language policies that denigrate a core aspect of our identity. It is
for these reasons that we must come up with language policies that promote
greater knowledge-making, national confidence and civic participation amongst
our people, without depriving them of knowledge available through foreign
languages. This is why we must promote multilingualism, and not English only.
Note: A version of this article appeared in the Sunday Times edition of Sunday 23rd March, 2014