Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

190 Language Planning and Education
unsurprising, therefore, that the methods employed to teach the second/foreign
language often leave much to be desired. Finally, many primary school systems are
characterised by high drop-out rates and less than universal enrolment, particularly
among girls. Secondary schools, meanwhile, tend to cater to a small, relatively select
sector of the age-population.
This somewhat depressing catalogue of problems has not been assembled for its
own sake, however, but to make three main points. The first is that ministries of
education in sub-Saharan Africa have many problems to cope with and many
competing spending priorities. Given the conditions outlined above, and their
fundamental task of delivering basic education to the population, it would be
unsurprising, even justifiable, if they elected to commit their available financial
resources to the improvement of the basic educational infrastructure – books, desks,
teacher-training – rather than to a change of instructional medium, necessary though
that might also be.
Second, given the scale of spending required to ameliorate school conditions, and
given the fact that in many countries as much as 90 per cent of the primary education
budget is allocated to recurrent expenditure on teachers’ salaries – leaving little over
for books, equipment or maintenance, it is likely that a policy directed at changing
the medium of instruction, whether at primary or secondary level, would require
substantial multilateral or bilateral external donor support. Whether such support
will be forthcoming, however, is an uncertain and controversial matter. Mazrui
(2004: 45) for example, alleges that the World Bank speaks with a forked tongue on
this matter, espousing – on the one hand – a rhetoric supportive of the use of the
mother tongue in early primary education but refraining, on the other, from
committing resources to the ‘linguistic Africanisation of all primary education’
because it has, Mazrui (2004: 49) claims, a vested interest in the maintenance of
European languages of instruction.
Comparatively little empirical evidence is advanced, however, to support the
stronger of these claims. Certainly, there are good grounds for believing that past
structural adjustment policies 9 of the IMF-World Bank were not helpful to
educational development, and that the World Bank has taken little interest in
pushing forward an agenda of ‘linguistic Africanisation’ beyond the initial stages of
primary school. But there are indications that it is prepared to fund experimental
programmes using local languages as media in early primary education, the primary
bilingual education project in Mozambique (1993–97) being a case in point (Benson
2000: 50).
The third and perhaps most important point is that, given the circumstances
described above, we need to question the proposition that a change to an indigenous
language medium at upper primary or secondary level would of itself resolve the
problems of educational underachievement, whose causes are, in fact, more plausibly
conceived of as multiple, including: imperfect understanding of the language in
which instruction is delivered, a lack of books and learning materials, the ineffective
teaching of English as a subject, inappropriate syllabuses and teaching methodologies
and the variable quality of teachers. In view of this complex causality, it seems likely