Silvia Kouwenberg | English in Jamaican schools and the case for reparatory justice – Part II

In part one of this article, I argued that the failure to recognise Jamaican Creole as a language in its own right violates the rights of Jamaican Creole speakers, results in a denial of access to essential services, including quality education, and wastes Jamaican cultural capital.

Treating Creole as “broken” English is unhelpful to the extreme as is clearly evident in the consistently high levels of educational failure. In this two-part contribution, I place the discussion on language in education in the context of colonial legacies, the urgent need to redress historical injustices, and the imperative to unlock the cultural capital inherent in the Jamaican Creole language.

But … what about the success stories?

Powerful examples appear in the media from time to time of individuals who transcended humble beginnings in Creole-speaking inner-city or rural communities who became fluent English speakers and who went on to impressive careers. These examples appear to show that being a speaker of Jamaican Creole does not have to stand in the way of educational achievement. To this argument I say that these successes are disconcertingly exceptional. Why is it that despite faithful attendance at school and hard work, most children are unable to overcome their disadvantages as clearly evidenced every year by the grim reality of CSEC results for core subjects such as English language and mathematics? What we learn from the stories of achievement is that it takes truly exceptional grit, intellect, and motivation to succeed in a failing educational system. By implication then, most children are not going to have success stories to share and are told, to boot, that this is their personal failure for not taking to heart the usual message to “work hard, believe in yourself, and you, too, can achieve”.

JAMAICAN LANGUAGE AS LEGACY OF ENSLAVEMENT

Where the plantation constituted an environment for the imposition of colonial attitudes towards language, the modern postcolonial Caribbean perpetuates those attitudes. The myth that Creole languages are “broken” has been internalised over more than three centuries of colonial and postcolonial history. The privileged status of standardised languages, such as English in Jamaica, is only rarely questioned as is the message that vernacular languages, such as Jamaican Creole, are essentially unfit for all but the most informal contexts of use. But what is truly insidious is that the stigma of inferiority is applied not only to Creole languages, but to their speakers. So while the well-educated bilingual individual can feel comfortable using Creole in light-hearted moments, the monolingual or dominant Creole speaker is ridiculed for attempting English while at the same time being excluded from participation in environments that require it because Creole is not considered acceptable there.

Although Jamaican English has emerged as a distinct, indigenous variety over more than three hundred years, its modern sociopolitical status bears the hallmarks of its development out of the colonial language of a ruling elite. Socioeconomic divisions in Caribbean societies such as Jamaica are so strongly correlated with linguistic divisions that Creole speakers have little daily interaction with the country’s official language, have little opportunity to learn it in an educational system built on inequality, and have no faith that their attempts at using it will suffice to create a path towards socioeconomic advancement.

REDRESSING HISTORICAL INJUSTICES

Grace Baston, then principal of Campion College, spoke in a July 2022 forum on education of “the profoundly alienating and disenfranchising effect of not recognizing that most of our children from poorer homes have a first language which is not Standard English”, and referred to it as “an act of injustice”. Terms such as “injustice” and “disenfranchising effect” point to the political nature of this situation, implying that political decisions are needed to address it. Surely, the desire to address the “severe learning crisis”, which is what the Patterson report argues Jamaica has, should be a sufficient incentive for such decisions. That Jamaican Creole is a valuable language in its own right and that English must be taught with methodologies appropriate for the Creole classroom, ought to be recognised and translated into action. Our target must be the creation of real opportunities for every child to achieve proficiency in both Jamaica’s languages and leave the education system as functional bilinguals.

This target can only be reached by making significant reparatory investments in the development of new teacher training curricula, in the retraining of in-service teachers, and in the creation of new instructional materials. Investments are needed also in well-resourced literacy programmes for children who are behind in their reading, staffed with teachers conversant with second language methodologies. Investments are generally needed in the resourcing of schools in Creole-speaking communities at levels commensurate with a society that strives to achieve Sustainable Development Goal #4 “Quality education for all”. Besides these actions, a public education campaign is required on Jamaica’s de facto bilingual status, aimed at undoing the harm of attitudes to language that have their historical origins in the cultural erasure that accompanied enslavement. Finally, opportunities should be made available to the general public to acquire literacy in Jamaican Creole alongside English.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

UWI Mona Principal Professor Densil Williams has referred to Jamaica’s human capital as the country’s “oil”. He has drawn attention to the fact that with not more than two out of eight high school leavers progressing to tertiary-level education, this “oil” remains largely unexploited. With failure at the primary and secondary levels, a majority of Jamaica’s human capital are unable to progress to the tertiary level and remain at unskilled and low-skilled levels of training. Jamaica is wasting its human capital.

It is imperative that the investments outlined in the preceding are made to repair the injustices of a colonial history which imposed English as the official language, which created the conditions in which enslaved Africans shaped Jamaican Creole, and which branded its speakers as lesser beings. It is time to finally and formally recognise that Jamaican Creole represents significant cultural capital for the country as a whole to treat the language and its speakers with due respect and to create the conditions under which Jamaica’s human capital can truly thrive in a fully bilingual society.

Silvia Kouwenberg is professor of linguistics and dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Education, The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. Send feedback to reparation.research@uwimona.edu.jm.