Metaglossia: The Translation World

For centuries the language has defined what knowledge and truth are and by embracing it Africa will always be in a unequal position.

OUR COVERAGE

Common sense fails our students

How transformative is our practice of "academic development" in South Africa? I pose the question in the light of several recent articles in the Mail & Guardian on the subject, most recently by Chrissie Boughey and Penny Niven ("Common sense fails our students", August 10 to 17).

I was briefly involved in academic development in the early 1990s after returning from Spain, where I had been teaching English as a foreign language during the 1980s.

In a post-fascist society that had been politically isolated from Western Europe, Spain was trying to make up for lost time and insert itself into a global system in which computer and English language skills were seen as the basic prerequisites for development and progress.

Of course, that was only one ­element of the subjugation of Spain to various requirements for ­integration into the European Economic Community. Having followed the recipe for economic success, the Spanish economy today lies in ruins as large sectors of national industry have been closed because of their inability to compete with powerful German and French competitors.

However, this slow deterioration occurred after my return to South Africa in 1991. At the time I experienced a sense of déjà vu on discovering that, when I started teaching at post-school level, the prevailing concerns and priorities in education were much the same as they had been in Spain. Without proficiency in English and computer skills, no education was complete as South Africa prepared for its debut in the theatre of neoliberalism.

A pedagogical base
After 18 months of working on a pilot project in which nearly all the students were isiXhosa speakers and the teachers non-isiXhosa speakers, it occurred to me that it would probably have been more worthwhile to spend the same amount of time and money developing good study materials and glossaries in isiXhosa to establish a sound pedagogical base.

Despite the intentions of "enhancing the effectiveness of teaching and learning", which seems to be an ubiquitous tag line in academic development, what we practitioners were doing was perpetuating a relationship of power and a ­division between those with and without proficiency in English while contributing to the growth of a vast and lucrative global industry that is premised on the assumption that Western forms of knowledge constitute the "truth".