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Indigenous Children’s Education and Indigenous Languages

This report shows that educational models for indigenous and minority children which use mainly dominant languages as languages of instruction can and do have extremely negative consequences for the achievement of goals deduced from central human rights instruments and thus for the right to education. We use arguments and research results from international law, education, applied linguistics, psychology and sociology. In discussing the legal basis for education, we argue, using the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right the Education Katarina Tomaševski‘s interpretations, that this dominant-language medium education prevents access to education, because of the linguistic, pedagogical and psychological barriers it creates. We show that this education has a range of serious harmful consequences which violate various aspects of their right to education and perpetuates poverty. Without binding educational linguistic human rights, especially a right to mainly mother tonguemedium (MTM) education in state schools, with good teaching of a dominant language as a second language, given by competent bilingual teachers, most indigenous peoples and minorities have to accept subtractive education through the medium of a dominant/majority language. They learn a dominant language at the cost of the mother tongue which is displaced, and later often replaced by the dominant language. Subtractive teaching subtracts from the child's linguistic repertoire, instead of adding to it. In this enforced language regime, the children undergoing subtractive education, or at least their children, are effectively transferred to the dominant group linguistically and culturally. This also contributes to the disappearance of the world's linguistic diversity, when a whole group changes language. Optimistic estimates of what is happening suggest that at least 50% of today’s spoken languages may be extinct or very seriously endangered ("dead" or "moribund") around the year 2100. Pessimistic but still completely realistic estimates claim that as many as 90-95% of the spoken languages may be extinct or very seriously endangered during this century. Most of the disappearing languages will be indigenous languages, and most indigenous languages in the world would disappear according to these estimates.