Dakar, Feb 21 (APS) – A country’s education system cannot perform well by educating its children in a foreign language, argued on Monday the Inspector General of Education and Training in charge of national languages at the ministry. of National Education, Professor Mbacké Diagne
”We cannot have an effective education system by educating our children in a foreign language,” said Mr. Diagne in an interview with APS ahead of Tuesday’s celebration of International Mother Language Day.
According to him ”the introduction of national languages into the Senegalese education system more than 60 years ago has been a positive outcome”. ”A lot of benefits can be derived from using the mother tongue in the education system,” he added.
”The first result, he explained, is that the mother tongue facilitates learning for our children and allows them to be able to transfer their first acquisitions into the foreign language of French. Just as to facilitate teaching learning to our children, it must first be done in their mother tongue.
”Second observation, the use of children’s first language at school avoids the trauma they suffered when coming to school”, he continued, adding: ”A child grows up at the family, in his neighborhood, and discovers the world through his mother tongue, begins to acquire a lot of skills and knowledge in this immediate world. Once at school, he is told to throw it all in the trash and start learning the world again through another language.”
“This situation, deplored the teacher-researcher, means that he loses the six or even seven years he has lived, plus six years from the CEI to Cm2 where he will learn the French language to discover the world there. That makes us twelve or thirteen years of mental retardation for our children.”
These children have injuries, frustrations, because they do not understand French at the CEI, while the teacher speaks in French with enormous efforts to be understood and this will destroy the careers of thousands of Senegalese and African children. , insisted Mr. Diagne.
He believes that the mother tongue makes it possible to reconcile the environment of origin of the child and the school environment to avoid rupture and trauma. Today, this learning of mother tongues also settles the question of values, he noted.
”For the issue of values to be taken up by the education system, teaching must be done through the child’s first language.” insisted Mr. Diagne, stressing that the values of +jom , muñ+, etc., cannot be translated into any other foreign language”.
The Inspector also pointed out that there is a risk of losing the African creative genius because the know-how and know-how endogenous to the continent cannot be translated into any other language than those of the continent.
”Our knowledge can only be transmitted in our languages. If we want to prevent our children from being introverted in behavior, they must be educated in our own culture which begins with the language,” he pleaded.
”All these reasons explain, according to him, the option of the State to go definitively towards the harmonized model of bilingual education as of next October”.