Dr Egwaoje interrogates the challenges of a new federal policy on use of mother tongue for instruction in Nigerian schools.
The members of the Federal Executive Council meant well for Nigeria, no doubt, but need to be cautious not to add the dispute about a mandatory language of instruction in the school system to the current ethnic and religious flash points in our polarized union. For instance, an imposed lingua franca from one of the local languages might give the original native users of the chosen medium of instruction an undue linguistic, educational, and perhaps political advantage over others in the society.
Olajide Egwaoje
The Nigerian Federal Ministry of Education announced in November 2022 that the Federal Executive Council has determined that the country would henceforth adopt the mother tongue as the mandatory language of instruction in the first six years of learning in Nigerian schools. The school system would then combine English with the mother tongue as the medium of teaching at the junior secondary school level.
National fervor might argue against the propriety of picking a foreign language to stimulate learning and general knowledge acquisition in a setting other than its native culture. Such ardency might conclude that the Executive Council’s order was apt for Nigeria’s education. But the timing in our history for this directive and its possible impact on pedagogy in our public school system might not be so appropriate.
Historically, knowledge in the African context, especially in pre-colonial Nigeria, was socially constructed by the dynamics of the culture of the indigenous community. The family groups, age grades, artisan guilds, and elders’ councils provided the platforms for socialization and assimilation of societal values and norms. The local language was part of the underlying drives encrypted in the bond between epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and ontology (the perception of reality) among the natives.
Of a truth, the episteme of Western-type education may have ignored the social dynamics in the African system, thus creating dysfunction in the interplay between formal learning and culture. It offered the natives a new learning model of acculturation that showed little regard for existing social dynamics, jettisoning, as it were, the hitherto meaningful symbols of relevance in the people’s order of communal relationships. As I argued in 2022, this overlooked what the natives considered as emblems of self-evaluation, replacing their conceptual framework of learning with a Western epistemology
Since 1843, when the Christian missionaries established the first primary school in Nigeria, the school system in the country has had over 180 years of studying with English textbooks in all subjects, including art and the different sciences. While imposing the language of an imperial culture on a forced union of people of diverse tribes and tongues might be culpable, it was clear that English was the medium of instruction in Nigerian schools for several reasons.
Firstly, the British concept of knowledge remained embedded in their language, which they needed to pass on to the natives to engender learning. Secondly, none of the over 600 languages in the country would have been acceptable to all Nigerians, either as a lingua franca or as the singular medium of instruction. Besides, the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) concepts and terminologies currently expressed in English had no published parallels in the vocabularies of the local languages.
The members of the Federal Executive Council meant well for Nigeria, no doubt, but need to be cautious not to add the dispute about a mandatory language of instruction in the school system to the current ethnic and religious flash points in our polarized union. For instance, an imposed lingua franca from one of the local languages might give the original native users of the chosen medium of instruction an undue linguistic, educational, and perhaps political advantage over others in the society. Furthermore, as Chomsky argued in 1965, a child’s ability to acquire languages diminishes as they approach puberty. Thus, the appropriateness of introducing children to English as the medium of instruction at the age of 10, plus the uncertainty about when to develop equal competence in the chosen new language of learning, under the new policy, requires thoughtful assessment.
Current developments indicate that English is close to being a hegemony even among autochthonous cultures like China, Saudi Arabia, India, and several far Eastern countries, which have recently partially adopted the language as a medium of instruction or a language of international business. For instance, there are many studies now suggesting that English as the medium of instruction is gaining popularity among tertiary institutions in China. Its adoption as a lingua franca for international communication has enjoyed some degree of success across the country. The popularity of English as a medium of instruction has also spread to and beyond Vietnam, Japan, and South Korea. Therefore, considering the emerging global support for the use of the English language across borders, it might be erroneous to construe that Nigeria’s endorsement of English as the medium of instruction is synonymous with ditching the cultural values and identity of the country.
As mentioned earlier, English was a neutral alternative as lingua franca in the face of the multi-ethnic and multi-lingual nature of the Nigerian culture. Moreover, although several studies have indicated that children learn better in a language they are fluent in, the country needs to provide the correct textbooks and appropriate materials to learn in that language. Developing texts in diverse mother tongues that sufficiently describe theoretical concepts and scientific terminologies at today’s level of global intelligence would be a longitudinal project for Nigeria.
If Nigeria must change its medium of instruction from English to the mother tongue, the team responsible for managing the transition should first clarify the procedure and timeline of translating the various subject texts from English to the local languages. And as the transition program unfolds, an additional concern might be the engagement of professional instructors competent in English and the mother tongue of the environment who can code-switch without translation errors while teaching from English textbooks.
The current fascination with mother-tongue pedagogy is somewhat misplaced and likely to widen the achievement gap in science and technology between Nigeria and the advanced educational cultures of the West. Curriculum texts in the social sciences and STEM are unavailable in the local languages.
That said, a complication might arise if the new policy intends that a dominant local language should serve, in the long run, as the medium of instruction at the primary school level or that a language from each of the six geo-political zones would serve as the prevalent language of instruction in each zone. In the latter scenario, for instance, while a predominant language, such as Hausa, Yoruba, or Igbo, might work respectively in the Northwest, Southwest, and Southeast zones, the arrangement may not work in the Northeast, North-central, or South-south zones. After all, the various languages of these groups belong to historical cultures like the Nupes, the Tivs, the Junkus, the Kanuris, Edo, Urhobo, the Ijaws, the Efiks and Ibibios, which might not be willing to subjugate the primordial customs and traditions inherent in the use of their mother tongue to the dominance of a language from another ethnic group.
Nigeria has contributed much to knowledge, especially in the field of art. Its artifacts are world-famous, but the country needs to build on this achievement in other domains. It must upgrade its education facilities and strive to align with the current global push toward improvement in nuclear science, space technology, and artificial intelligence. The current fascination with mother-tongue pedagogy is somewhat misplaced and likely to widen the achievement gap in science and technology between Nigeria and the advanced educational cultures of the West. Curriculum texts in the social sciences and STEM are unavailable in the local languages.
As long as English remains the lingua franca and language of the classroom in the nation, Nigerian children should be exposed to instruction in English from the first day at school to enhance their competence in the language early enough for a better understanding of their curriculum texts. From records in the archives, the British colonial education policy delayed exposing rural school children to instruction in English, resulting in the achievement gap in English between rural and urban school children in Nigeria. The country does not want to repeat the mistake.
Public schools in Nigeria need professional English teachers to enhance the child’s competence in the language. The argument that Nigerian students are ignorant of their native culture because of the language of instruction in the school is somewhat erroneous. Students do not abandon their cultural heritage because they study English and gain competence in the language. People are more likely to discard their customs and traditions when they, for instance, pick foreign names outside those available in their culture for their children – not because the child understands and speaks a foreign language. People might lose their identity when they indulge in foreign cuisines and treasure foreign customs and traditions above theirs – when they value the cultures and living styles of other people more than theirs. The country needs to review the role of parents and leaders in society in the current drift from its ingrained cultural values. English, as the medium of instruction in the public school system, is not Nigeria’s problem.
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