Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

The global spread of English 115
had created a class of disaffected, alienated Indians, the Babus, who posed a
potential threat to the stability of the colonial regime.
6. Thereafter, colonial language policy sought to limit the teaching of English and
expand the role of the vernaculars, a tendency given formal expression in the
1927 Report of the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies (Evans
2002: 279). The aim, however, was not so much the promotion of vernacular
languages as the perpetuation of colonial rule over docile, submissive subjects.
This portrait of a reactive self-interested colonial language policy, conditioned by
economic considerations, which sought to limit English language education to a
narrow elite and to promote vernacular language education for the masses, often
against the desires of native subjects, is entirely consistent with other detailed studies
of colonial language polices; for example, that of Brutt-Griffler (2002: 78), who – in
a key passage of a prolonged discussion – observes that:
A close examination of the history of education policy in the British empire does
not show any concerted, consistent attempt to spread English on a wide basis. On
the contrary, it indicates a concern to limit the spread of English as much as was
consonant with the purposes of a colonial empire as part of the reactive policy of
containment, the effort to counteract the transformation of the colonizer’s
language into a ‘language of liberation’.
This interpretation is, of course, considerably removed from that proposed by the
linguistic imperialism hypothesis.
Post-colonial language promotion
Another event to which Phillipson (1992: 183) gives considerable attention in
support of his linguistic imperialism postulate is the Makerere Conference of 1961,
which, he argues, established a doctrine for ELT work in newly independent African
countries, privileging English over other languages:
There was an almost exclusive concentration on English at the Makerere itself.
The same was true of the teacher training and curriculum activities which sprang
from it. The conference did not look at the overall needs of periphery-English
children, or even their overall linguistic development, but at English and ways of
strengthening English. (Phillipson 1992: 216)
At first sight, the extracts from the Makerere report that Phillipson (1992) quotes
appear to support his case. However, as Davies (1996: 492) suggests, once the
broader context is considered, a more complex picture emerges. The conference was
not, as Phillipson (1992) suggests, about ‘strengthening English’ but rather finding
‘a means of increasing the efficiency of the teaching of English at all levels’ (Makerere
1961:20), something quite different. Also, it did not focus ‘almost exclusively on
English’, for, as Davies (1996: 492) again shows, the report does raise the matter of
the linguistic and cultural background of the learner, and calls – among other things
– for ‘research into the needs and demands of the learner and the community from