DENIZENS OF ALIEN WORLDS

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believed—that the best ideas were English ideas, the best government was
English government, and the best men were Englishmen (Mandela 1994: 32).
This was the condition in the author‘s own school in the nineteen sixties and is
still the condition in elitist English-medium schools today. What has changed, however,
is that whereas English culture was the model in the sixties, the present model comes
from the United States. One‘s own countrymen and women are looked down upon just as
they wre by the Western colonisers. The English schools, then, produce snobs with only
one redeeming feature---some of these snobs, because of their liberal-humanist values,
support human rights, democracy and freedom. However, even this support is very often
confined only to the young and the idealistic. After all, those products of these schools
who become functionaries of the state are the ones who create both the policies and their
rationalization which diempower and furthe pauperize the poor. And whatever they may
believer in private, or profess to believe in fashionable company, they do not do anything
to change laws which discriminate against religious minorities and women. So, on the
whole, the English-medium schools do not redeem themselves by any but the most
superficial and snobbish criteria of judgment.