Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

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.