Afterthoughts

The current system of primary/secondary education in Papua New Guinea provides for 12 years of schooling, starting at the age of seven and progressing through 12 grades, graduation from Grade 12 constituting matricu lation for .entry to university.

Grades/! to 6 are provided for in “community schools”; grades l,io 10 in “provincial high schools”, of which there are nearly 100 scattered across the country; while grades 11 and 12 are handled in “national high schools”, of which there are currently only four. Due to shortage of places at the higher levels, there is a process of weeding out the less promising students at grades six, eight and 10.

It will be noticed that the first weed-out takes place at the age of 13, and at that tender age thousands of PNG primary school pupils are tossed out of the system. The entry age for the vocational centres which are intended to provide for them is 15, and they can’t get a job, except with special permission from the Department of Labour, till they are 16. Not that that matters much, because most of them haven’t a hope of getting a job anyway.

It has been suggested that the primary range provided by community schools should be extended to cover grades 1 to 8 instead of grades I to 6. This proposal seems to me to make a lot of sense. It would mean that the first weed-out would be of 15 year-olds, and at this age those not eligible for high school would at least be able to enter vocational centres.

Incidentally this is not such a revolutionary proposal as might be supposed. In the early post-war years the primary course was an eight-year one, though this fact was masked by the nomenclature used two “preparatory classes” fol lowed by six “standard”. Regrettably, the course was later pruned down to six years by the elimination of the prepara tory classes. The comment made to me by one experienced primary school teacher at the time was: “We are now being asked to achieve in six years what we have so far been un able to achieve in eight.”

Education Minister Oscar Tammur, himself a teacher of proved ability and originality, has suggested that national high schools should be phased out and that provincial high schools should include grades 11 and 12 in their range. This seems to me to be sound in principle, but probably difficult to implement in practice for reasons both of finance and

staffing.

Even more difficult of implementation is another of the minister’s proposals, namely, that the performance of our mainstream schools should be upgraded to a level of inter national acceptance which would render the existence of the present “international schools”, to which I referred in a previous article, unnecessary.

This would be a very neat solution to one of our thorniest problems. Is it practicable? This brings us to the question of the teaching of English.

I do not think that there can be much doubt that the standard of high-school English in PNG has deteriorated during the last decade, or that this deterioration is related to the progressive localisation of the teaching service. To say this is not to criticise or denigrate our national teachers or those who have trained them. But it is unrealistic to sup pose that teachers who speak English as a second language, however well-trained and however dedicated, can do as well, as teachers of English, as others, equally well-trained and dedicated, who speak English as their first

language.

If international acceptability is our aim, the only way to

get it is to provide every high school with at least one specialist English language teacher who speaks English as his mother tongue. Such a teacher should teach English language as a subject throughout the school. Such teachers need not necessarily be palefaces. It might be possible to recruit West Indian teachers who speak English as their mother-tongue for this purpose. Although West Indian English may not be BBC English, it is at least as acceptable

internationally as Australian English and perhaps

pleasanter to the ear.

But is international acceptability what we want? Many people in the rural areas would probably say “no”, and go on to demand a less academic and more practical slant.

That’s fair enough too, so long as they understand that they can’t have it both ways.

How effective is our present teaching of English? To judge from the “Letters to the Editor” page of our national newspaper, “The Papua New Guinea Post-Courier”, it is not very effective. True, there are some excellent letters from nationals, clear, concise and to the point. But there are many, some of them signed by young people who claim to be, and no doubt are, high school or university students, which just don’t make any sense at all. With a sincere desire to know what these young people are thinking, I find myself at a complete loss to understand what they are trying to say.

Often this is because they use pretentious phrases and currently popular “in-words” the meaning of which they obviously don’t understand. Sometimes they trot out inter national conference style gobbledegook which doesn’t mean anything anyway. If our teachers at secondary and tertiary level could encourage their students to express themselves in plain, simple English and not to show off, much good would accrue.

But some of the difficulty one has in making sense of these letters is that their writers are muddled thinkers, and for this I blame the Department of Education’s “English

only” policy.

It is too often overlooked that language is not only a me dium of communication. It is also a medium of thought.

I myself speak two Papuan languages reasonably well. I have been speaking one for over 50 years and the second for nearly 40.1 can, and often do, think in them. But I would not like to have to do all my thinking in them. Like every body else, I can think best in my mother tongue.

The strongest argument in favour of including a ver nacular segment in Papua New Guinea’s education system is that it gives the students an opportunity to think, and to express their thoughts, in the medium in which they can most easily do so, their mother tongue.

This does not mean that English is not important in PNG education. It is, very important. But our system of edu cation, and particularly of primary education, has suffered too long and too deeply from making the parroting of English the be-all and end-all of schooling.

Let’s give the kids a chance to think.