Linguistic Rights for Appropriate Development in Education

Abstract

Education in many African and Asian countries today has a range of serious harmful consequences, which violate various aspects of African and Asian linguistic rights in education and perpetuate poverty. Binding educational linguistic rights, including a right to MT-medium education in schools, is essential at primary level, and should be supplemented at the secondary and tertiary levels with good teaching of a local language as a second language. English should be taught as a foreign language. As it is, most children in Africa and Asia have to accept “subtractive” education through the medium of a foreign language. Children learn a dominant language at the cost of the MT, which is displaced, and later often replaced, by a foreign language. Teaching through a foreign language subtracts from the child’s linguistic repertoire, instead of adding to it. Educational models for indigenous language in schools for children which use foreign languages as a LoI can and do have extremely negative consequences for the achievement of an effective learning process. In this chapter I provide the background on human rights conventions and argue that the use of local languages and local curricula in education should be regarded as a human right — a right in education.