Is compulsory government policy of learning from known to unknown justifiable?
The mother tongue policy was propounded by the colonial regime to make children assimilate lessons properly.
Based on this, local languages were used as a medium of instruction in our basic schools.
This philosophy is objectionable, as any child born anywhere and introduced to learning in any language will do well once the approach is apposite.
Children who went through that system became confused and were frightened any time there was any subject called language, be it local or foreign.
For instance, we normally pronounce Tomato- tomanto and pear- peya in the mother tongue.
Switching on to spell or pronounce these words and other similar ones accurately in the medium of instruction was a very daunting task and nearly ended our quest for education because our essays were marked ‘vernacular English’ with copious red ink that discouraged us.
We must be curious about policies left behind by the colonialists to determine whether they are appropriate for us or not. Language is a means of communication, and it does not matter what language one is introduced to, to begin with.
If the policy of learning from known to unknown by using accustomed parlance is credible, then our cultural practices, including our religions, must be taught first in our schools before any foreign ideology is imposed on our children.
Swahili was adopted by all Eastern African states as lingua franca, but did not survive, and thus was reversed.
Africana was imposed on the Southern African states, but with fiasco.
Language does not matter in knowledge acquisition as many Ghanaians went to unfamiliar terrains to acquire education and performed better than those born within those races.
Private schools with hardly trained teachers perform better than public schools that have adopted this language policy.
This policy can probably work if we are able to translate all our textbooks into our mother tongues.
This policy will also be a disincentive to teachers who will otherwise want to teach in other communities.
Again, it will block pupils from transferring to communities they are unaccustomed to, limiting acculturation, which is critical for development.
It is impracticable for a cosmopolitan/heterogeneous city like Accra for pupils to be taught in other Ghanaian languages other than Ga, imposing a local foreign language on Ga communities.
We cannot repeat the same policy from the colonial regime and expect divergent results.
Weak performances in schools generally pivot on the lack of adequate infrastructure, teacher motivation and supervision/inspection platforms.
During our time in basic schools in the colonial era, pupils’ ratio population to a teacher was 25/35. Presently, teachers are saddled with between 120 to 130 pupils in a class.
Work without play makes Jack a dull boy.
We are producing pupils who can neither write nor read local or foreign languages correctly.
Our educational system needs to be fixed adequately.
The writer, Dr Albert O. A. Tsolu, is an Ethnomusicologist
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