In all likelihood, the report in the Sunday Observer a week ago of the experiment in a handful of primary schools of teaching children in Jamaican patois would have caused many people to twist some of their clothing in great knots to the great pain and discomfort of parts of their anatomy.

We expect, too, that they will have fulminated at the information that a recent study had found that nearly 80 per cent of Jamaicans felt that Jamaican patois is a separate language and that nearly 70 per cent agreed that it should be made official alongside English. Indeed, most Jamaicans feel there should be bilingual schools.

As we have made clear in these columns before, this newspaper is in absolutely no doubt that if Jamaica expects to grow and to prosper, it has to have an educated workforce, capable of managing and manipulating information and technology. And we have to be adept at working in the language of international commerce, science and technology, which happens to be English.

But we make an error, we believe, in assuming that English is the primary language of Jamaica and that the majority of the Jamaican people are competent in its use. It is hardly true that most people can cross naturally and easily between English and Jamaican patois, or that even if people do not speak English well, they certainly understand it.
We have long accepted the fallacy of that argument. What for us is relatively recent is a position of what to do about the problem of educating a work force that is internationally competitive in an education system that is based on English, when the majority of the people being catered to by that system are not proficient in English.

This newspaper has concluded that the crisis in education is so deep and the threats so wide that we can no longer pander to the arrogance of the minority who continue to insist on holding to a course that has delivered us to only where we are, rather than becoming creative in the effort to get to where we know we must be. In other words, we support the use of all available tools and processes in the effort to deliver decent education to all Jamaicans, not only those who are either bilingual or clearly proficient in English.

In this regard, we are willing to try everything. Including experiments like the one being conducted by the Department of Linguistics at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies and reported on by the Sunday Observer.

As we have argued before, it is our view that there has to be an acceptance that English is not the natural, primary language of Jamaica and that it should be taught as a separate language. Don't assume that the children who enter school already have a decent foundation in spoken or written English. So we have to get back to basics, teaching English as a foreign language, very much as a teacher may do with French or Spanish.

We also believe that where appropriate, teachers with the requisite skills may find it of benefit to supplement their pedagogy in English with Jamaican patois interventions. The point is, we should be about delivering education - by all means possible.

This is not about displacing English as the primary language of instruction and education in Jamaica, rather, it is about giving all the help it can get once that does not undermine the quality of the instruction being delivered.
It is about being pragmatic.

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