2019年经济学人 全球英语教学对于非洲和南亚意味着什么?(1)（在线收听）

International

《国际》版块

Teaching in English around the world

在世界各地用英语教学

Language without instruction 

没有指导的语言

LAHORE AND LUCKNOW

拉合尔和勒克瑙

More children in Africa and South Asia are being taught in English. That’s often a bad thing 

在非洲和南亚，越来越多的儿童正在接受英语教育。这通常是件坏事。

“Roly poly right, right, right. Roly poly left, left, left,” sings a class of five-year- olds at a government primary school on the outskirts of Lucknow, a city in India’s Hindi-speaking heartland. This English- medium school, one of seven that opened last year among the 215 government schools in the Sarojini Nagar administrative block, is part of an effort by the government of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, to counter the rise of private schools. Private schools have been mushrooming in India—private-sector enrolment rose from around a quarter of pupils in 2010-11 to over a third in 2016-17— and in Sarojini Nagar there are 200 registered private schools and many more unregistered ones. One of their main attractions is that the great majority of them use (or claim to use) English as the language of instruction. 

“右，右，右。左，左，左，”印度讲印地语的中心城市勒克瑙郊区的一所公立小学里，一群五岁的孩子正在唱歌。这所英语学校是去年萨罗吉尼纳加尔行政街区215所公立学校中开办的7所学校之一，北方邦是印度人口最多的州，为抗衡私立学校的的发展，北方邦政府建了这所学校。私立学校在印度如雨后春笋般涌现——私立学校的入学率从2010-11年的四分之一上升到2016-17年的三分之一以上——在萨罗吉尼纳加尔有200所注册私立学校和更多的未注册学校。其主要吸引力之一是，绝大多数使用（或声称使用）英语作为教学语言。

As a recruitment drive, the policy seems to be working. A school nearby saw its enrolment rise over 50% in six months when it switched the medium of instruction from Hindi to English last April. As an education policy, however, it is not ideal.

随着一股招聘浪潮，这项政策似乎有效。去年4月，附近一所学校将教学语言从印度语改为英语后，入学率在六个月内上升了50%。然而，这并非一项理想的教育政策。

The language in which children are taught can be hugely contentious. Colonial history determines its political salience. Where colonial powers wiped out the indigenous population, such as in America and Australia, it is hardly an issue: the colonial language has crushed indigenous ones, though a few of these are making a comeback. In places that were colonised unsuccessfully or not at all—such as Europe, Japan and China—indigenous languages rule. But controversy erupts in countries with a century or two of effective government by a colonial power—in South Asia and Africa, for instance—where the colonial language retains considerable sway.

孩子们使用的教学语言可能引起很大争议。殖民历史决定了其政治重要性。列强灭绝原住民的地方如美国和澳大利亚，几乎没有这类问题：尽管某些土著语言有卷土重来的趋势，但早已被殖民语言摧毁。在殖民失败或是从未被殖民过的地方——如欧洲、日本和中国——则一直使用本土语言。但经过一两个世纪殖民统治的地方，如南亚、非洲，却爆发了很多争议，在这些地方殖民语言仍有很大影响力。

In sub-Saharan Africa, only Tanzania, Ethiopia and Eritrea do not use a colonial language at all during primary education. Others use either English or French. That is partly because of inertia. Developing curricula and printing books in local languages is expensive, and doing so in scientific subjects in which the terminology is in English is difficult. Keeping English or French is also, in some places, politically convenient. Where tribes compete for power, the colonial language can be less controversial than the local ones. And then there is the self-interest of the elites, usually the only people who can speak the colonial language properly. “They have a huge return to their linguistic capital” when it is the official language, says Rajesh Ramachandran, of the Alfred Weber Institute for Economics in Heidelberg, Germany. The bias in favour of English is sometimes ferociously enforced: Rose Goodhart, a teacher in Ghana, has seen children beaten for speaking in their mother tongue.

在撒哈拉以南的非洲，只有坦桑尼亚、埃塞俄比亚和厄立特里亚小学教育期间根本不使用殖民语言。而其他国家要么使用英语，要么使用法语。部分原因是由于习惯，编写本土语言课程、印本土语言书籍成本很高，而在使用英语术语的科学学科中更难做到如此。而在某些地方，保留英语和法语也会提供政治便利。在部落争权夺利之地，本土语言所引起的争议比殖民地语言更多。而且关系到精英们的私利，而精英们是唯一准确掌握殖民语言的群体。当殖民语言成为官方语言时，“他们的语言资本得到了巨大回报。”德国海德堡阿尔弗雷德韦伯经济研究所的教授拉杰什·拉马钱德兰表示。有时会强行培养对英语的偏爱：加纳教师罗斯·古德哈特看到过一些孩子因为说母语而挨打。