World English-chapter 5-part2

Chapter 5 Access Denied

Containing the Spread of English

Part 2

Estate Schools: The Education of Migrant Workers

In the case of Ceylon, a significant number of persons from the Tamil region of southern India migrated there to work on the large colonial plantations (K.M. De Silva, 1981), or what the British called estates.

Estate Schools: The Education of Migrant Workers

In 1901, Tamil workers employed on estates were 42% of the entire Tamil population in Ceylon concentrated on large farms as “indentured” workers providing cheap labor.

In addition to men and women, who worked in about equal numbers, children were extensively employed as “tea pluckers,” as soon as they were old enough “to reach over the top of a tea bush” (quoted in Ceylon, Commission on Elementary Education, p. 55).

Much of the education accessible to these children of indentured workers was organized and financed by the efforts of the indentured workers themselves.

The government of Ceylon was decidedly against “direct Government interference” in the matter (p. 57). Government policy more or less left education on estates to the discretion of the planters.

Colonial officials made no attempt to hide their reasons: “There is an undefined but very real feeling that education will prevent the children from following the vocation of their parents.”

The report on estate education asserted quite straightforwardly, “There is no question of the teaching of English” (p. 55).

The children of the estate worker were to learn, above all, the “habits of industry” (p. 19), and it was made clear that school should not be allowed to interfere with the day’s labor of children on estates.

Education was defined as that which encourages the estate worker to go on being an estate worker and did not interfere with production.

Instruction was therefore of the most basic nature. It was confined to two hours daily of basic mother tongue literacy and hygiene.

British language policy developed in piecemeal fashion in accordance with the dictates of the local conditions found in each colony.

The imperial authorities in London were almost wholly removed from the picture – so much so that the Secretary of State for the colonies was dispatched on a fact-finding mission in the late 1920s to discover just what constituted British colonial policy (Ormsby Gore, 1928).

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Language Policy in the International Political Arena:

The League of Nations Mandates Commission and the Phelps-Stokes Fund in Africa

The League of Nations Mandates Commission

After World War I, international politics would, for the first time, enter as a prominent factor in determining educational language policy in the British empire.

Within the League Mandates Commission, the body charged with distributing and overseeing former German territories, such as Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania) and Cameroon, British representatives wielded the power to ensure adequate representation of their views on colonial rule in Africa.

The existence of the League Mandates Commission, created a forum in which British language policy in various colonial settings would be considered jointly.

Since the League of Nations became a meeting ground for the chief imperial powers, the Mandates Commission provided a forum for each of the colonial powers to promote its own policy.

Great BritainPortugalSweden

FranceBelgium

The British, represented by Frederick Lugard, advocated a policy of “vernacular education at the base and English at the top,” as had become the popular means of expressing this idea.

The French made clear very early that they regarded the imparting of the French language in all educational institutions, including village elementary schools, to be “indispensable” (League of Nations, 1923: 29) – a view shared by the Belgians.

The French variously justified their policy, at one time complaining that too many different “dialects” (League of Nations, 1923: 245) existed in a particular country, other times that “the knowledge which [the government] wishes to impart can only be given in French” (League of Nations, 1923: 285).

Lugard made it clear that, from his standpoint, training for labor was the imperative that the “language of the country” must serve as the language of instruction in the schools. It was only a secondary question whether the European language were taught as a subject (League of Nations, 1923).

The Belgian representative found himself defending the right of each colonial power to “decide . . . on the spot whether it was in the native’s interest that he should be taught his own or a European language” (League of Nations, 1925b: 36). “The matter must be left to the local administration” (p. 36) and not the Mandates Commission.

The Phelps-Stokes CommissionThe British position on educational policy in

the League of Nations found support from an unexpected source, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, an American philanthropic society directing its resources towards African Americans and heavily interested in education.

American missionaries there feared that political developments in British Africa would lead to the loss of their influence over education.

So, they appointed a commission of enquiry to look into the current state of education in certain parts of Africa. The commission was set up under the leadership of Dr Thomas Jesse Jones, a sociologist from Columbia University and education director of the Phelps-Stokes Fund.

‘The goal of education in the colony was to “adapt education to the needs of the people . . . as the first requisite” and to “adapt school work to African conditions” (Jones, 1921: 11).

It also recommended the teaching of a lingua franca of African origin in the middle classes in the areas “occupied by large Native groups speaking diverse languages” (Jones, 1921: 26). Finally, in the upper standards, it suggested that the language of the European colonial power “should be taught” (Jones, 1921: 26).

“The aim of education in Tropical Africa should be to preserve and develop a vernacular as a medium of expression and of communication in adult life and as the vehicle of native thought and culture.

Therefore the mother tongue should be the basis and medium of all elementary education in Tropical Africa” (quoted in Schilling, 1972: 310).

When Great Britain finally developed an “imperial” policy it was not what advocates of imperial policy had understood by its term, nor what is today called the policy of linguistic imperialism, but rather precisely the opposite. It was a policy of limiting the spread of English to what was minimally necessary to running a colonial empire.

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