Education: Elite vs. democratic approaches
By Raul Pangalangan, Philippine Daily Inquirer

If you marvel at athletic feats in the Olympics or Asian Games, you might instinctively think of the specialized training of elite athletes. It is easy to forget that great athletes first have to be spotted and identified, and for this you need to widen the pool from which you are recruiting, and that is what a fully functioning public school system can do. If you recruit from a narrow group of, say, the urban and the wealthy, you exclude the rural youth raised in farming and fishing villages whose muscles probably had the full benefit of fresh air, unprocessed food and manual labor.

The same thing with education in general. While I admire the geniuses produced by our science high schools, I also wonder if the future Filipino Einsteins might have never even thought of graduating from high school. We shoot ourselves in the foot by systematically excluding a huge part of our population from being contenders at all, and then confining our choices to a limited range.

We have already tried many solutions, and it’s about time we tried fresh approaches. For instance, we began by securing a larger budget for public schools in the 1987 Constitution: “The state shall assign the highest budgetary priority to education…” So how is it that today, the 2010 budget provides around P340 billion for debt servicing while allocating only some P185 billion for education? This is courtesy of a 1991 Supreme Court decision that validated the automatic appropriation of debt payments prior to its being budgeted by Congress (Guingona v. Carague).

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Public diplomacy: The world should be teaching us, Mr. Kristof
By John Brown, adjunct professor of Liberal Studies, Georgetown University

[Says] well-meaning Nicholas D. Kristof in The New York Times:

“Peace Corps and Teach for America represent the best ethic of public service. But at a time when those programs can’t meet the demand from young people seeking to give back, we need a new initiative: Teach for the World.

“In my mind, Teach for the World would be a one-year program placing young Americans in schools in developing countries. The Americans might teach English or computer skills, or coach basketball or debate teams. ...

“This would be a government-financed effort to supplement an American public diplomacy outreach that has been eviscerated over the last few decades.”

Mr. Kristof, who wants young Americans to teach English the world over, seems unaware that all too many of us here in the homeland (which is how we now identify our cry-the-beloved country in these sad post-9/11 times) are incapable of writing a coherent English sentence free of grammatical and spelling errors. And how many of us called-to-duty language missionaries currently living in said homeland, if volunteering to coach “debate teams” overseas, could actually be capable of crafting a logical argument, given our 24/7 we-can’t-stop-loving-it culture of instant mindless gratification a la Tee-Vee & Twitter & uptalk?

“I mean, like you know, whatever”—such is, increasingly, our American contribution to serious world-wide discourse.

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Language without barriers
By Sanjiv Kaura, IndiaTimes.com

“We must at present do our best to form...a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” With these words, spoken in 1835, Lord Macaulay crystallised an imperial approach to the English language that, unfortunately, continues to work to its detriment today. The old resentments about English being the language of the ruling classes, the old accusations about it being an imposition that dilutes our cultural ethos, continue to be political currency.

And so we have Mulayam Singh Yadav and the Samajwadi Party proposing a ban on English in Indian schools, or the Karnataka government banning 2,100 educational institutions in 2006 for using English as a medium of instruction. But there is a disconnect between the section of the political class that denigrates English, and the aspirations of India's burgeoning middle-class and its poor. They are playing to a constituency that is diminishing by the day. The English language is both an aspirational ideal and a practical tool that propels economic empowerment. The people have realised this even if the politicians who represent them have not.

Consider the evidence, both statistical and anecdotal. A study carried out in Mumbai a few years ago—based on a large sample and published in the American Economic Review—came up with interesting findings…

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Contending with foreign language in homes
By Yemi Adebisi, AllAfrica.com
    
LAGOS—A language is described as a particular kind of system for encoding and decoding information. The rate at which languages are disappearing globally has become a great issue because there are fewer people left who speak those languages.

Globally, no fewer than 7,000 languages exist in the world, though many of them have not been recorded, because they belong to tribes in rural areas of the world or rather are not easily accessible. However, it was gathered that since 1600 in North America alone, 52 Native American languages have disappeared. It is estimated that 6,809 “living” languages exist in the world today, but 90 per cent of them are spoken by fewer than 100,000 people.

The number of languages currently estimated and catalogued in Nigeria are 521. This number includes 510 living languages, two second languages without native speakers and nine extinct languages. In some areas of Nigeria, ethnic groups speak more than one language. To reach a balanced consensus, the official language of Nigeria, English, the former colonial language, was chosen to facilitate the cultural and linguistic unity of the country.

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Dalits look upon English as the language of emancipation
By Pallavi Singh, LiveMint.com

NEW DELHI—I dream of an English full of the words of my language, an English in small letters and English that shall tire a white man’s tongue, an English where small children practice with smooth round pebbles in their mouth to spell the right zha.

When Meena Kandasamy wrote these lines, almost like a petition, pleading that her roots be allowed to flourish in English, she was just 18 and fresh from the unusual loss of her poetic name: Ilavenil.

The Tamil name meant “spring” but often became the subject of ridicule for the young Dalit poet when many said sounded like the name of a train. “I winced in horror and wept on my pillows. Within my own state, this name was a clear giveaway of my Tamil origins: it was devoid of Hindu/Brahminic/Sanskrit roots. I wanted a name people could accept,” she recalls.

She later adopted her nickname Meena to escape the predicament, and in response to any question posed to her in Tamil, she spoke in English. “I want this new tongue to accept me. I expect it to appreciate my sensibilities, admire my culture and, above all, be accommodating,” she says.

Kandasamy is one of a growing band of Dalit intellectuals who are rooting for English, arguing what was once a language of imperial power is now a language of emancipation.

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English as a life skill

The Sri Lanka India Centre for English Language Training (SLICELT) was opened by Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao recently. It marked a new beginning in English language education in Sri Lanka.

The establishment of SLICELT also marks a radical departure from the past in the way of learning and teaching English. While all other nations were speaking and using English in their own ways, Sri Lanka continued to speak and use English just as the English did. In fact, we were proud to admit that we use English the Queen's way long after becoming independent.

English educated gentry used to mock at other countries that developed their own English. Little did these brown sahibs realise that most of them would have been mocking at Sri Lankans for their attempts at safeguarding a colonial heritage. It was the Americans who started using English in their own way. The influence of American English has been so great that even the orthodox Britishers were compelled to borrow words and phrases from the American diction.

In retrospect we could observe that this overt subservience to the former coloniser’s language practice was a method to keep the knowledge of English language to a select few, to perpetuate a stratum of brown sahibs.

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