Letter of the Day | Time to rid ourselves of colonial mentality

THE EDITOR, Madam:

The letter by D. Michael Britton of Brooklyn, New York, on May 22 sums up very well the bilingual situation of Jameikans and the respective roles for them of English and Jameikan (Patois). 

The one thing omitted, the most crucial from another perspective, is the failure of Jameika’s educators and authorities to make Jameikan the channel of early childhood learning. I am not here advancing a novel idea. The Language Unit of the University of the West Indies and other observers have urged it for years. As recently as May 6, writing in The Gleaner, deploring the present inequality in education, Maziki Thame pointed to the essential place of Jameikan for learning English.

It is this simple but profound rejection – that is what it is – of our language that accounts for the failures in literacy and other fields at primary school and later levels. Jamaica Teachers’ Association President Mark Malabver was bewailing those consequences just a few days ago (May 21, The Gleaner). He made the additional point of the need and obligation to pay early childhood teachers what the enormous importance of their task deserves. They have to be trained as well.

This rejection of Jameikan originates from the very successful British imbedding of the superiority of English and all that went with it, from speech to hairstyle to dress length, in their Jameikan ‘subjects’. 

Our educators and income controllers, ridding themselves of this colonial mentality, which they alone can do, have an urgent obligation to correct an enduring and devastating injustice to our children and to their lives.

HORACE LEVY