When you think of a modern private pre-primary and lower primary school, what comes to mind? A school whose main language of instruction is English or French? You are not far from the reality on the ground. In fact, most privately owned schools within city centres (Kigali being the biggest) use either English or French as a medium of instruction in class.

However, this could end as the Rwanda Education Board (REB), which is mandated to implement education policies, moves to ensure that schools comply with the ‘Mother Tongue’ policy. 

Dubbed the MT policy, it recommends that Kinyarwanda should be the language of instruction for pre-primary and lower primary levels, with English being taught as a subject until Primary Three. 

English then becomes the language of instruction from Primary Four onward. 

To justify the adoption of this policy, REB explains: "A child needs to work with other human beings, to socialise and to become a secure, confident, learning individual within her or his family and community, contained by and guided through the values, attitudes and behaviours of that family and community. Studying for the first years in the mother tongue can help create this conducive learning environment.”

Parents disagree

However, resistance to the policy is coming from an unlikely source — the parents. Their reasoning is straight-forward: English is the language of the market place. A child who masters it at an early age will have a distinct advantage over other children when it comes to finding employment in the future.

This is the thinking of Joselyne Kabanyana, a mother of four from Kicukiro, who sent her children to Kigali Parents in Gasabo district, a purely English school from nursery onward, with Kinyarwanda being taught as just another subject.

"We (parents) have to be wise,” she argues. "English has already taken over the job market. If we do not start early to send our children to English schools, their fluency in English will remain low and in the long run they will not be able to qualify for any job opportunity.”

Other parents, who also argue for instruction in a foreign language from an early age, insist that this is important because children are very quick learners at an early age and would grasp these languages much easier then than they would if they learnt them at a later age.

Betty Ntaganira, a veteran primary teacher and a mother of seven from Nyanza district, speaks from personal experience. She says that through the performance of her seven children, she was able to tell the difference between starting instruction early in a foreign language, as opposed to taking it up at a later age.

"Three of my children started English at upper primary,” she notes, "but today their English is poor although they are university graduates. Those who started English in nursery are brilliant.”

Schools defend early instruction in English

As the debate rages between policy makers and parents, some private school owners vigorously defend the practice of using English as the language of instruction right from nursery onwards. 

Brian Kasawuli, the headmaster of Alpha Community Academy, a nursery and primary school in Gasabo District compares English to money of great value.

"English is like American dollars; you can use them once in China, UK and Spain, but you can’t go there with shillings or Rwandan Francs. This is the same with English in comparison to other languages; it is a global language.”

For her part, Diane Muhimakazi, the Director of Shammah, a Kigali based nursery school with a French-instruction programme, says that they teach in foreign languages in order to keep up with competition from other schools which are motivated to do so because of the very high demand from the parents.

"We started this business because of the community demand. It would be selfish for us to stop it.”

Muhimakazi adds, however, that if the Ministry of Education wants to enforce the MT policy, they are ready to comply, as long as no school is an exception. Her worry is that, "if some children study in English from nursery up to Primary three, they will perform far better than those who would have studied it as just a subject. This would create an imbalance in education.”

Nevertheless, the Minister of State for Primary and Secondary education, Mathias Harebamungu is adamant that, "Competition should go in line with government policies.” 

Other critics of the programme say that efforts by schools to improve on instruction in English should not be discouraged. 

"After all many public schools teach exclusively in Kinyarwanda even after Primary Three, because we do not have enough qualified English teachers. Keep in mind that it is barely a decade since Rwanda started the shift from French to English. Schools that help children learn English should actually be encouraged.”

Harebamungu dispels the idea that there are not enough teachers of English available. 

"That is wrong,” he says. "We have enough English teachers graduating from College of education, beside a thousand mentors who are helping improve the level of English proficiency among our schools.” He added that the ministry has conducted a survey to rank 27,000 teachers around the country in English language proficiency.

A harmful "lifestyle”

According to Janvier Gasana, the REB’s Deputy Director General in charge of Quality and Standards, parents are sending their children to English/French-medium schools "because they think it is a lifestyle.”

He warned parents, that for a child who starts learning in a foreign language, critical thinking is problematic. 

"They struggle to understand an object that is right in front of them, and yet their parents could have easily helped them understand it in the mother tongue.”

He adds that at an early age, children largely depend on their parents, and a system of education that disconnects them from their culture will result in a crisis in the long run.

"Not only will their creativity capacity be quite low, their cultural values will be poor as well.” 

Vianney Habimana, a head teacher at Nyamata Primary School in Bugesera district, agrees. Although at one time a believer in the use of English as a medium of instruction at an early age, an experience with his own children would convince Habimana of the negative impact this practice has on the children’s appreciation of Rwandan culture.

"I sent my two children to an all-English school in Kigali,” he narrates, "but I got the shock of my life during holidays when I took them to pay a visit to their grandfather and they refused to greet him because he could not speak English!” 

Researchers speak

As parents, teachers and policy makers argue over this hotly-contested issue, what does research have to say? Studies seem to support the government position.

One such study was carried out by Casimir Rubagumya, an educationist from the University of Dodoma, who compared the early literacy in Rwanda, Tanzania and Ghana.

In Rwanda, and Ghana, instruction was carried out in the mother tongue for lower primary alone, while in Tanzania, the MT (Kiswahili) applies for the entire primary level education.

Overall, his findings indicated that in Tanzania, teachers explained concepts in Kiswahili better than in English; student involvement was higher when the mother-tongue was used; and that children expressed themselves better in their mother tongue than in a foreign language.

The study achieved the same result in Rwandan communities that used Kinyarwanda for instruction. The research further established that early learning of the MT actually aids the successful learning of the second language in the future and has a great impact on the general academic growth.

"Children learn better from the known to the unknown, and make faster progress when initial literacy is the MT,” reads part of the research.

A bonus of using the mother tongue is that parents participate in the teaching of this community language.

What next?

Schools that refuse to comply with the education policy regarding use of the Mother Tongue could find themselves in hot soup as officials in REB warn that punitive measures await.

"We have realised that in general, city private schools are not complying with the policy. Since 2011 when the policy was enforced, we asked schools not to start a new intake in the foreign language programme, but most of them have persisted in defying the directive” says Gasana. 

"We are soon starting to enforce punishment, which will include suspending defaulting schools,” he warns.

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STUDENTS ON MOTHER TONGUE POLICY

Ange Adukere

Kinywarwanda should also be emphasised in schools. Young people these days cannot speak their own language simply because they have been trained to speak only English in schools. It is good to speak English but we must also preserve our culture. 

Florence Sibomana

We need to use international languages in our communities. This is because our mother tongues have limited vocabulary which can affect our understanding of science subjects. Terms like density, mass and momentum cannot easily be put in Kinyarwanda.

Dennis Kalisa

It is not a good idea to use the mother tongue in schools. The English language can easily be twisted around to explain certain things which may not be so easy in Kinyarwanda.

Sarah Kamikazi

East Africans are working very hard to integrate. This means there must be a language to unite all the countries. Kinyarwanda is good at the local level but may not count much else where. 

Jackie Mutoni

Using an international language like English within schools helps to groom people with competitive skills. Much as we love our local language, we need to adjust to the Anglophone system such that we can also be agents of globalisation.

Emmanuel Turasinzi

We need to promote our local languages just like the whites do in their countries. If we don’t promote our own languages by introducing them in schools, no one will do that for us.