CONFUSING RACIAL PREJUDICE WITH LANGUAGE RIGHTS
Remarks made by Prof Jonathan Jansen - Rector of the University of the Free State - in the Percy Baneshik Memorial Lecture to the English Academy of South Africa on 18 September, have caused a furore in Afrikaans cultural and educational circles. They have been widely interpreted as a call for English-only education and as a claim that "Afrikaans‐exclusive or even Afrikaans‐dominant white schools and universities represent a serious threat to race relations in South Africa".
Jansen said that "one major solution to the long-term resolution of the crisis in education" would be to "instruct every teacher and every child in English from the first day of school rather than add to the burden of poor instruction in the mother‐tongue in the foundation years to the trauma of transition to English later on".
Jansen has since then insisted that "his careful argument on language in education has been distorted to create a media hype". Nevertheless, it may be helpful to remind participants in the debate about what the Constitution actually says regarding language and education.
Section 6(1) of the Founding Provisions of the Constitution enshrine English - along with 10 other languages - as one of the official languages of the Republic. No one disputes that it would be unconstitutional for any school (or other academic institution) to implement exclusivity on the basis of race, and, similarly, if it was unfair, on the basis of language. Neither does anyone really dispute the idea that English is the lingua franca and thus, as Jansen proposes, should be the language of reconciliation.
However, Prof Jansen's apparent proposal that a long-term solution to the education crisis would be exclusive English education - from the foundation phase - cannot be reconciled with the Constitution's provision for multilingualism and for the space that it clearly provides for education in any of our official languages - also in single-medium education institutions.