Some Stuff About Things

The Mediums of Instruction at SU It would be naive to think I could talk about the injustices of linguistic  privilege without touching on the language crisis at the University of Stellenbosch. I'm not going to elaborate on what, where, when cause that could take me 3 days to explain. If you have not been following the news lately or if you don't follow South African news, a simple Google search will provide you with everything you need to know about this saga. It might be smart to do so now as this blog will be tackling issues directly related to it. What are the Issues? As you are now aware of, the university has shifted between a policy accrediting Afrikaans and English as equal languages of tuition, to primarily English and back to Afrikaans and English at the start of this term. The new (old) language policy of Afrikaans and English gives rise to a number of problems. None of these problems stem from profound philosophical insights, but are genuine pr...

The Mother Tongue Mind Many children in South-Africa and across the globe  are unable to speak or to even understand their mother tongue. This is because of all the hype that exists around English. A lot of parents believe it would be wiser to send their child to an only English school, hoping that it would help them further in life. Many schools also do not offer schooling in the child's mother tongue, either because they do not have the resources or the child's home language is not widely spoken in that area and is being oppressed by another, bigger language. But few know the great loss children suffer if not taught in their mother tongue as long as possible.  Wait, what? The hard fact is that these kids are losing their chance of performing well at school. They are thrown into a system of language turmoil without as much as a straw to grasp on. In the most cases, their entire school career is a fight to keep their head above water. A study was cond...