Beyond Good Intentions: Combating Linguistic Genocide in Education

Abstract

Scientific imperialism involves outsiders creating knowledge about dominated groups. This applies to the relationship between indigenous or minority children, parents, teachers and communities on the one hand, and dominant groups (schools, teachers/administrators, us as researchers) on the other hand. How can we as outsiders work together with other oppressed groups to overcome the legacy and consequences of linguistic and cultural genocide and, in the process, create new and liberating histories for us all? The article examines how scientific imperialism has contributed, and continues to contribute, to linguistic genocide in the education of indigenous and minority children and outlines some of the challenges and opportunities that people are faced with when trying to change the genocidal situation. New forms of linguistic genocide based on subtractive bilingualism, ‘free market’ economics, parental ‘consent’ and ‘good intentions’ can be more harmful to indigenous and minority children than overt attempts at extinguishing the language and culture, because they are more difficult to analyse.

In subtractive language learning, a dominant or majority language is learned at the cost of the mother tongue. Subtractive teaching subtracts from the children's linguistic repertoire (instead of adding to it). The children undergoing this type of education, or at least their children, are forcibly transferred to the dominant group linguistically and culturally, and the education can cause them mental and physical harm; both are defined as genocide in the United Nations Genocide Convention. The most decisive educational factor in causing negative statistics of indigenous ‘performance’ is the use of the wrong teaching language (together with lack of indigenous content, methods and ethos in schools). An additive approach to bilingualism based on long-term, mainly mother-tongue medium (MTM) education, can be employed to preserve and enrich indigenous and minority languages and cultures. In large-scale studies of educational models for minorities, the amount of education through the medium of the mother tongue is the strongest predictor of both children's competence and gains in English, and of their school achievement. The final part of the article focuses on the struggle to combat linguistic genocide in education and its consequences on the island of Kosrae in Micronesia.

What is needed today is a coherent strategy to put an end to extroversion in all forms, whether economic, scientific or technological. Thus far, we have been involved in the mass production of export crops for the consumption of people overseas, and/or exploiting mines for their industrial plants. We have been producing scholarly articles, conference papers and books for them first, and only secondarily for our own people. We have been collecting data in all fields primarily for their use, and only secondarily for the use of our own people. We have been serving as informants, though sometimes as learned informants, for a theory-building activity located overseas and entirely controlled by people there, giving as many details as we could about our history, our cultures, proverbs, myths, intellectual production and so forth, to allow them to write impressive books on our societies. And when we happened to write such books ourselves, we did everything to have them read and appreciated by them first, and only secondarily by our own people. As a result, we could at best be co-opted in our individual capacity in a world-wide scientific discussion which remained centred in and managed by the North, while our people remained largely excluded from such a discussion. These trends should be reversed or at least corrected. (Paulin Hountondji, Benin, 2002, pp. 36–37)

Well, where does our technical expertise come from? For more years than any of us have been on this Earth, foreign experts have been coming to our islands. They have looked at our languages and cultures through magnifying glasses of their own making. They have invented innumerable anthropological, linguistic and other scientific terms, definitions, categories and descriptions of our people and cultures. They have then carried these data back to their own countries in order to interpret who and what we are to the rest of the world. And finally, they have given these interpretations and world views back to us so that we now understand our own histories, languages, cultures and places in the world largely through their eyes, research methods, written accounts and other forms of Western scientific documentation. For those of us lucky enough to have received professional education and training, the question must be asked: Is our expertise really ours? I ask this not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We should be proud of our professional accomplishments. But I also believe that we should look critically at our received knowledge. We should be constantly asking ourselves how much this received knowledge is helpful to us. Can it really help us to preserve and enrich our languages and cultures? (Alister Tolenoa & David Hough, Micronesia, 2004, p. 78)

After the collapse of communism, it has become increasingly clear that western social scientists don't know enough about east/central Europe and vice versa. In this age of globalisation and Europeanisation, those of us in the east who have taught and conducted research for many years in the western countries are subject to growing dissatisfaction with the lack of intercultural knowledge and understanding of the burning social and linguistic issues. All too often western ‘experts’ offer their help to us and fail because they don't know the social issues in the east.

They don't know the languages we speak, let alone the cultures we have. Oftentimes they are even ignorant of the distinction between the theory of cultural nation (defined on the basis of language and culture) and political nation (defined on the basis of citizenship). Some even believe that the latter is somehow more right or advanced than the former, as if nations constituted culturally were lesser developed. Few are the western scholars who have learned our languages and earned our respect by their research conducted in our countries. (Miklōs Kontra, Hungary, 2000, p. 1)

Finally, we got to where we had no language, no history, no name. The white man named us after himself — Jones, Smith, Johnson … (Malcolm X, USA, 1972, p. 37)