Bilingual Education in Niger - ADEA

Where external effectiveness is concerned, the educational system
continues to be an ineffective instrument for combating underdevelopment.
This is so because instead of the imaginative reflection that it
should be developing, “it cultivates a negative attitude in young
people in school where productive and manual work is concerned,
and reinforces social prejudices against occupations in the key sectors
of the national economy: agriculture, livestock farming and
craft work” ( Niger, 1975). And lastly, and this is the aspect that
seems most important here, such education, taught in a foreign
language, confirms the break with the student’s personal environment
of which it denies the psychological parameters for development.
How could it be otherwise given that we know that language and
culture are intimately linked and consequently inseparable?
How can children attach value to their culture when they receive
their education in a language that is not their own?
How can children enrich their technical and scientific knowledge
through a language that they have not fully mastered?
Surely the above questions go to the heart of the issues surrounding
bilingual education?
Teaching materials
The unsuitability of syllabus content and teaching methods and
their failure to match the level of training of the teachers have
been aggravated by the absence of any national policy on teaching
materials. This lack of policy has had the following consequences:
• It has restricted any initiatives for the design and production
of teaching materials.
• It has encouraged the distribution and massive use of teaching
aids produced elsewhere.
• It has thus fostered a feeling that national organisations lack
the capacity to take charge of curriculum development and
4. The context and justification of the experiment 27