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Language education policy in post-colonial Africa 185 secondary education. There must, therefore, be some alternative socio-political or economic explanation for the retention of English. 7.2.1.1 The attractiveness of English The most important of these, exceeding the national unity factor in explanatory power by far, is the economic power and attractiveness of English. It is a language that is perceived to be, and manifestly functions as, a gatekeeper to educational and employment opportunities, to social advancement. No wonder then that competence in English and English medium education is highly valued by parents, students and the wider public, all of whom see it as a form of ‘linguistic capital’. From a range of countries comes ample evidence of the strong demand for English. In Mozambique, for example, urban employees are willing to spend considerable portions of their small salaries to fund attendance at private English classes, and in many parts of Africa, such as Tanzania, private English-medium schools, principally for children of the political and business elites, are booming (Vavrus 2002: 37; Mafu 2003: 276; see Chapter 5 also). Wright (2004: 81), citing a study by Mafu (2001), notes a strong middle-class antipathy in Tanzania to further Swahilisation of education, this corroborating Criper and Dodd (1984: 22), who – years earlier – had found that proposals to remove English from the curriculum or restrict its teaching were ‘universally rejected by all Tanzanians we spoke to, both professionals and others, because it would appear to downgrade education at the primary level’. From South Africa, meanwhile, Broom (2004: 523) reports not just strong parental demand for English but sustained pressure for schools to effect a transition to English medium as early as possible. Where schools do not comply, parents are quite ready to transfer their children to schools where English has been adopted as the medium of instruction. The attractiveness of English is also partly fuelled by the corresponding unattractiveness –for parents – of education in indigenous language media. In South Africa, these bear historical connotations of oppression and disempowerment, but there is also a feeling, harboured by many parents here and elsewhere in Africa, that education through indigenous languages is dead-end education, there being relatively little reading material in these languages beyond school books and few wellpaid employment opportunities accessed by knowledge of them. Changing such attitudes is clearly an important matter, but also a large-scale language planning undertaking, involving no less than a complete rehabilitation of the status of African languages. This, in turn, would require changes in the economic status of these languages – to incentivise their study; their use in prestigious public domains – to increase their prestige; and an increase in the variety of reading, educational and entertainment material available in the language(s) to enhance their attractiveness, not to mention, as Broom (2004: 524) suggests, ‘the development of a culture of literacy and reading in these languages’. It would seem on the face of it, then, that there is no immediate prospect of rapid attitudinal change Meanwhile, many of those looking to English to deliver socio-economic advance-
186 Language Planning and Education ment will end up disappointed. Many will fail in English, and in countries where only 10 to 20 per cent of children continue to secondary school, many will be excluded from participation in public life and from the modern sector labour market by lack of proficiency in English. But this does not mean that demand for English is irrational at the individual level (see Chapter 5), even though these preferences in aggregate help maintain a system of education disadvantageous for most, the reason being that, while there is no guarantee of individual mobility with English, without it there is the virtual certainty of exclusion from higher education, salaried positions in the modernised sector of the economy, travel abroad and so on. And it is for these reasons, in King’s words (1986: 452), that ‘parents and pupils prefer to fail in English rather than be denied it altogether’. The same factors also explain the general reluctance of politicians to embark on a course of action that would restrict access to English or displace it as a secondary school medium, for to do so would be to court considerable public displeasure, or worse. The wider point here is the familiar one that school reflects society and has limited power of itself to change it. An analogous point was made by Foster (1965) in his seminal study that produced the phrase ‘the vocational school fallacy’. In his critique of vocational training as a means of enhancing the relevance of schooling in Ghana, Foster pointed out that unless conditions in the wider labour market changed, an academic curriculum was in fact perceived as vocational because it led to the more desirable modern sector jobs. Vocationally oriented curricula, on the other hand, were regarded as inferior because, no matter how worthy in principle, in practice they led to second-best jobs. In a similar way, given the present economic order, English in Africa still leads to the more attractive, better paying modern sector jobs, and as long as this situation persists, which is probable given globalisation and the weakness of many African economies, politicians are unlikely to swim against the tide of public opinion by switching the medium away from English. 7.2.1.2 Vested interests We come finally to another factor sometimes adduced as a reason for the retention of English medium education: the vested interests of ruling elites (see Myers-Scotton 1990). English, it is argued, helps elites maintain their privileged position by excluding the mass of the population, who have less easy access to the language and to the resources needed to develop a high level of proficiency. It is a mechanism, in short, by which elites are able to reproduce their privilege in the succeeding generation, and one, therefore, they are unlikely to dismantle voluntarily. The argument has some plausibility, in some countries more than others, but it would probably be a mistake to give it too much prominence, for there are other constraints, in all likelihood more powerful, that are also responsible for the ongoing policy inertia. We turn now to a brief consideration of the more salient of these.
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