Viles Tok Ples Skul

is up and running in North Solomons

Ruth Saovana

SPRIGGS, co-ordinator of the Viles Tok Pies Skul (VTPS) project in Papua New Guinea’s North Solo mons Province, explains how the project works. She wants to make educators in other South Pacific coun tries “aware that there are ways of maintaining local languages and traditional customs and cultures.”

If modem civilisation, educa tion, money, training in English and such things cannot afford an average person in the North Solomons Province of Papua New Guinea equal opportunity for the benefits and privileges of modem life such as higher education and a secure place in the job-sector of the economy what is there to offer them?

Babies draw their strength from mothers. The Viles Tok Pies Skul (VTPS) is like the “Mother of Resources.” Viles (village) Tok (talk) Pies (place) Skul (school) the VTPS are Schools of the Mother Tongue.

In these schools the children are taught to read, write and count in their local languages together with traditional history, culture and customs, traditional children’s games, songs and dances, with the addition of some Western pre-school skills some elements of science for example. It is a program de signed for the two years before the child enters community school.

About five years ago the VTPS were established in the North Solomons Province. The project was born purely out of the constant demands for such schools by local people in the North Solomons Province. The high demand for education of this kind arose from the unmis takable fact of the rapid loss of local languages, customs and culture, traditional lore, and the like. It arose from loss of pride, but also from love of the local languages and traditional ways of living.

Earlier this year an ethnomu sicologist from Australia, Mr B.

Lobban, had an encounter with a lad who has had VTPS education, and is now in grade two in community (elementary) school. Mr Lobban wrote: “The old saying, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, came immediately to my mind when I was travelling recently in the Haku language area of Buka. This area is one of the first to have a Viles Tok Pies Skul, with the program now in its fourth year.

“A colleague and I were staying with a local family whose nine-year-old grandson, Albert, had had two years train ing at VTPS before moving to the local community school. Of an evening while I was writing up my journal he would share the lantern light, beg paper and a pen, and then write sent ences, only occasionally asking the spelling of a word.

“Often during our stay Albert said he wanted his photograph taken and finally I suggested that he and a small friend come down to the beach for a series of action pictures. They were both very pleased with this and were very vocal during the event.

“Walking back from the beach, and as we climbed the cliff, Albert talked non-stop in English. He chatted generally about the plants, wild life and village life. He was obviously thinking in English and his use of the language was much more sophisticated than what one normally hears in rural areas from nine-year-old boys. Com paring ALbert’s English lan guage use with boys of his age from other parts of both PNG and other countries in the southwest Pacific showed he had a much better grasp of the structure of the language. His only real difference from these other boys was in his VTPS education program. He had first learnt formal language and writ ing skills in his own language at VTPS schools before having to cope with the new language.”