Language policy is a sure recipe for failure

By Ken Opalo

Several months ago, I wrote in this page about how hard it is to develop and successfully implement public policy. One of the arguments I advanced then was for the government to develop the habit of data-driven policy development and analysis. Those calls fell on deaf ears. Day in day out the government continues to engage in jua kali policymaking. The latest instance of this is the education ministry’s directive that Kenyan pupils under the age of eight be taught in mother tongue.

Now, there is nothing wrong in giving value to our languages and the cultures they embody by teaching them in schools. Indeed, one can argue that we will only be truly decolonised the day we start learning about our history, culture and the natural world we occupy in our own local languages as opposed to what President Jomo Kenyatta called “colonial languages.”

That said there is also a lot of evidence against teaching young Kenyans in their mother tongues. First is the question of standards and equal access to quality education. Income inequality and access to education in Kenya overlaps to a significant degree with ethnicity. What this means for the new policy is that historically wealthier groups with more access to education will have better vernacular teachers than the rest of the country.

Smaller, poorer ethnic groups will be at a great disadvantage in this regard. More broadly, the proposed system is guaranteed to confine poorer children without access to English instruction at the bottom of the academic ladder after Standard Three. Is this what we want for our children? Second, a lot of research shows that the first few years of schooling are critical for pupils’ academic development and achievement. In other words, students with a firm pre-primary education tend to do very well in school. Here in Kenya we seem to be actively fighting against this reality. By laying the groundwork for a shaky academic beginning for our children, we are dooming them to failure after they stop being taught in their mother tongues.

If this boneheaded policy gets implemented, Kenya will find itself saddled with thousands of Standard Three pupils who cannot read or write. And given the challenges that our education system faces, majority of these pupils will not catch up. In other words, the Ministry of Education is condemning hundreds of thousands of Kenyan children to a future of academic underachievement. How otherwise sane people are letting this happen is absolutely mind-boggling.

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Third, there is the question of national cohesion.

Negative ethnicity is one of the millstones that continue to weight us down as a nation. How will the new educational directive affect the way we see ourselves? Aren’t we priming future Kenyans to think of themselves firstly as members of their ethnic groups and only secondly as Kenyans?

To see the potential impact of the ministry of education’s directive, we need not go far. Our neighbor to the south, Tanzania, has had a policy of mixed language instruction. There, students in lower classes are taught almost exclusively in Kiswahili and only later on does English get introduced as a language of instruction. The result? Massive failure rates in high school national exams. A lot of reasons may explain Tanzania’s high failure rates, but language policy is certainly up there as a cause. This is what Kenya is trying to do to its students, albeit on a more circumscribed scale. Is this what we want for our children?

If we want to compete with the best in the world we have to pull up our socks. Our public officials must take public policy development and implementation seriously. The culture of jua kali policy development must stop. Before we implement policies that will have a material impact on the lives of millions of Kenyans we ought to think them through. Otherwise we shall keep moving in circles, and will continue to confine millions of our people to lives marked by underachievement and material want.

Public policy development is hard. Those who go about it without serious thought are charlatans that do not belong in the public service. Their continued employment at the expense of the taxpayer is a gross failure of our political leadership. We should definitely think of ways of preserving our diverse languages and the cultural riches they embody. We should also strive to ensure that our kids get the best education possible.

The sad truth, however, is that neither objective can be achieved by implementing a policy as boneheaded as the proposed language policy from the Ministry of Education.