Last week's gift of $1.75 million by the Carreras Group to the Department of Linguistics at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) to help finance its research in Jamaican patois, is, to us, of more than passing significance.

As it should be to all persons who have an interest in Jamaica's development and believe - rather than just mouthing the notion as a slogan - that its people are the most important resource in this process.
By so openly associating with such a project, Carreras has edged away from most of what is conventional wisdom in corporate Jamaica and among our country's intellectual elite: that there is little value to be gained by engaging in the language of the majority of the people, except as a source of theatre and comedy. And comedy as grotesque caricature.

The action by Carreras is, to say the least, courageous and the company's CEO, Mr Michael Bernard, is to be commended.
In the specific case, the money will help in the development of a glossary of basic Jamaican language so as to help in facilitating its use in official settings abroad.

The bottom line is to improve the ability of Jamaicans in the diaspora to access services, which they might otherwise have been denied, because of inability to communicate in English, and are embarrassed to reveal this weakness.

We have an interest in this issue at the domestic level for another related and very important reason - our need to deliver education to Jamaicans. Indeed, we have in these columns argued that so seriously do we take the crisis in education that its delivery must be by every, and any, means possible.

Moreover, no longer can we deal with education as another policy matter to be worked through by the experts and delivered by the pedagogues in classrooms. Instead, if we are to have any hope of surviving in today's competitive environment, education has to be a crusade for which there is mass mobilisation.

In this process, we feel, there has to be full engagement, involving communities, mass media and the use of popular culture and its purveyors in the delivery of the message.
It can't be left only to the supercilious set, peering over half-cut glasses down onto the ignorant crowd.

It is in this context that we have come to appreciate and back the use of Jamaican patois in classrooms, in support of an education in English.
There has been a disingenuous attempt by an anti-patois lobby to suggest that the issue rests on removing English as a means of instruction in schools, thus robbing students of an education in a universal language - one in which Jamaicans have to be versed if we to have any hope of coping in the global economy. The idea, as we understand it, is to allow instruction in English and patois, allowing the two languages to coexist, side by side.

It is increasingly clear that it is a false premise that most Jamaicans understand and speak English with any mastery. The bald truth is that the vast majority do not, even though they have some English. We perpetuate a fallacy, therefore, by limiting instruction to English on the basis that the pedagogy is being delivered in the native tongue. Part of the proof of the fallacy is the poor performance at all grades of our education system.

If we accept that the majority of Jamaicans do not naturally master English, then we have to begin to teach English in the way any foreign language is taught in school, starting at the earlier segments of the system. It also seems to make sense to us that the process of learning can be enhanced and knowledge reinforced if there is also instruction in the language children understand, rather than being made to feel worthless or inferior because of the language in which they have initial competence.

Perhaps if we begin to take an enlightened position on this issue we can begin to entice into our proposed crusade for education those who now hold sway with the mass of Jamaica's young people, but many of whom do not have English as a first language and now feel themselves social outsiders.

Executive Class

Gardens with Gravel

Death to the Mullet!