THE COLONIAL ENGLISH

INHERITANCE
Name: Lacey Lisbeth Conde Carhuancho
Course: Culture and context in ELT
Teacher: Miguel Or de los Santos
Semester: 2014 - I

CONTENT
A masters language
Colonial educational language policy and
practice
In India
In Africa
Racism during the colony
English as a colonial inheritance

A masters language
Robinson Crusoe
By Daniel Defoe
I was greatly delighted with my new
companions, and made it my business to
teach him everything; but especially to
make him speak, and understand me
when I spake, and he was the aptest
scholar that ever was.
(Defoe, 1719).
It was one of the first times that it was talked about
English teaching.

It was suggested that Robinson Crusoe is the
unacknowledged founder of the British Council.

The people of the colonized territories had to learn
the language and the culture of their master, the
British.
Colonial educational policy and practice
In India:
When the British colonies were established, colonizers
needed a language and education policy to have people
under control.

A way to refer to this situation is to talk about the
modernizing of India.

So, the British Government had as their principal object to
promote European literature and science, in other words, to
impose a foreign culture.

The medium of instruction in school, universities and other
formal national institutions was the English language. Thus,
Indian languages were not valid anymore. That is the
reason why proficiency in English became the gateway to
all social and material benefits

A
N
G
L
I
C
I
S
M

Imposing
English
over other
languages.
O
R
I
E
N
T
A
L
I
S
M

Value
native
languages
over
English.
In India
Macaulays minute

Lord Macaulay had an important post
as a chairman of the Governor-
Generals committee on Public
Instruction and wrote a minute about
education in India.

t was necessary to teach them
English so that they can be
Indians in blood and color, but
English in taste, in opinin, in
morals and in intellect.

He explains that it is best worthing
knowing English than any other
native language because English is
the language of science and
literature.

NATIVE
LANUAGES
ENGLISH
In his opinion, it was a waste of money and time to teach
the local people their langauge because of their absurd
history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd
theology.
In Africa
Local traditions and culture were ignored in
education imparted in Africa.

To civilize primitive people it was neccessary to
shape their minds at schools so that they can be
useful for the colony.

The most important agent of civilization was
teaching local people grammatical knowledge of
English.

People needs and cultural background was never
taken into account in the colonized territories.

Racism during the colony
Many British were ethnocentrism, such as Reverend Metcalf Sunter thought that
Africans had no history of own and studying their languages was a waste of time.

Malinowski, anthropologist, suggested that education in Africa should not give
hope to local people to become the White mans brother and his economic and
political equal.

Colonial eduactional policy was fundamentally racist: there was separate
education for Europeans, Asians and Africans, in kenya in the 1950s, for example.


The white people
are to be leaders
English as a colonial inheritance
The dominant
language as well as
the content taught
was alien.
The learning of English
was the primary goal in
colonial educational
systems.
Education was simply
understood as the
ability to speak and
write English.
English became the
oficial language in
many ex colonies
even after their
independency.
Nowadays, speaking
native languages is
related to being
ignorant or inferior.
Bibliography
Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: OUP.

Pennycook, A. (1994). The Cultural Politics of English as
an International Language. New York: Longman.

Macaulay, T. (1835). Minute on Indian Education. In
Thomas Babington Macaulay. Selected writings, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.