Editorial | Patois, education, Miss Lou

The declared intention of the People’s National Party (PNP) to formally recognise Jamaican Creole/Patois as a national language is a natural follow-on of its promise to name Louise Bennett-Coverley, Miss Lou, a national hero.

For it would seem incomplete, if not a tad hypocritical, to celebrate Miss Lou with the country’s most sacred honour, yet not fully embrace the most critical element of her body of work. Miss Lou was a poet, humourist comedienne and actress who worked mostly in Jamaican Patois, to which she began to give legitimacy as early as the 1940s.

But formally recognising Patois must be more than a symbolic gesture. It must be part of a genuine move towards education and social inclusiveness, which the PNP’s chairman, Angela Brown-Burke, suggests is the party’s aim. Achieving this requires a broad national/political consensus, including winning over the education establishment, which Jamaica has failed to achieve over several decades.

Part of the problem, of course, is an absence of broad acceptance that Jamaican Patois is a “real” language, which linguists, globally, recognise that it is. Many in the society consider Patois to be “broken English” that confers on its speakers lesser social status.

Moreover, there are concerns that promotion of Patois means or implies an intention to overthrow English, thereby threatening Jamaica’s capacity to participate in the global economy.

NO SUCH ASPIRATIONS

This newspaper has discerned no such aspirations from serious people who promote Patois or Jamaican. Rather, there is a case for co-existence and extracting value from both in the process of national development.

The fact is, Jamaican Patois is the mother tongue of the vast majority of Jamaicans - the language they use in their homes and social engagement. While almost all Jamaicans have some facility with English, the majority are not in full command of it.

It’s hardly surprising that, in an environment that assumes great facility, which is solely used as the language of instruction, each year, a third of the students, at the end of their primary education, don’t meet the proficiency requirements in language arts. Nearly six in 10 can’t extract information from single English sentences. At high school, more than a quarter of students fail English at the Caribbean Examinations Council’s (CXC) Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams.

This failure at reading and comprehension in English translates to weak performances in other subjects, including mathematics.

Yet, English is taught as if it were the mother tongue and there is no, or little, or no place in classrooms for Patois in the teaching-and-learning process.

As Grace Baston, the former principal of Jamaica’s premier high school, Campion College , recently said: “I am appalled that, after decades of this university’s (University of the West Indies) advocacy for taking seriously our children’s first language as we attempt to teach English, that no such course on dual language teaching exists in teachers’ colleges.”

PROFOUND OBSERVATION

In 2022, Ms Baston, who now oversees a remedial reading project in Roman Catholic high schools, had a similarly profound observation on the language question: “We continue to ignore that profoundly alienating and disenfranchising effort of not recognising that most of our children from poorer homes have a first language which is not Standard English…

“[T]he failure to take this reality seriously (and) to draw on the research done by our linguistic scholars at the UWI, and to have teachers trained in the ability to engage students in their first language and then, through that language, to introduce Standard English, is an injustice.”

Speaking at a political rally in western Jamaica last week, Dr Brown-Burke said her party’s plan was for an education system where young students can be spoken to and taught in Patios in “laying the foundation to learn”.

The PNP, judging by Dr Brown-Burke’s remarks, has the embryo of an idea for the use of Patois in schools, which needs building out. What is more important, though, is the commitment it has made.

Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness has talked of creating a new category of national honour, just below national hero, to which Miss Lou would be elevated. So, there is consensus on the essence of Miss Lou and the value of her work.

It is now for the country to take the next step by formally recognising, and liberating, the language because of whose use she is much loved by Jamaica.