Imagine, it is your first day at school. You are nervous and self-conscious, you hold your mother’s skirt and try to hide behind it. Everything around you is new and unknown: the building, the trees, the desks, the boards. But most frightening of all - new people. Remember that feeling? The shyness that paralyzed you as you were asked to say your name?
Well now imagine that everyone speaks in the language you don’t understand. The teacher tells you how to add 2 and 2, but you don’t understand. The teacher asks you to solve a simple equation, but you don’t know, because you don’t understand. You try to find the answer in your book, but you can’t, because it is all written in a foreign language. How does it make you feel? Embarrassed, confused, angry?
While as early as 1950s it was recognised by the UN that education should be organised in one’s mother-tongue (or “native language”) there are still numerous of children around the globe studying in an unfamiliar language. Being not able to understand their teachers children tend to drop out of school and never go back. The results of this are lost opportunities, talents sent to garbage bin, marginalisation, exploitation, not to mention growing inequality. We are losing leaders, innovators, progress catalysts over the language of instruction. In the time like this such brain waste seems to be too expensive and unaffordable.
What does mother-tongue education bring? Different researches show that children, who study in their mother-tongue, are more likely to achieve good results and successfully finish school. At the same time, mother-tongue is especially important on the early stages of education as it promotes the interest to learning and exploring new things, as well as it lays the important cognitive foundation for the child to learn a second language. Moreover, mother-tongue based education supports tighter communication between parents and schools, thus making the educational process more effective.
There are approximately 100 languages in Myanmar, six bigger language groups and only one official language - Burmese. All instruction in schools is conducted in Burmese, which results in children suffering. Shan state seems to be the worst of all: its literacy rates are the lowest among all Myanmar states. Recently local NGO CRED started an initiative of opening boarding schools for children from rural areas, where they could get a chance to study school curriculum in their mother-tongue. Estonian NGO Mondo has been supporting CRED with financial assistance in order to ensure educational opportunities for a bigger number of children. This year students and professors of Tallinn university decided to help the project, raise awareness among Estonian and international society and fund the studies of 10 children from Shan state.
We ask you to help us! Join us at our fundraising events, get to know more about Myanmar, its political and social situation and familiarize yourself with delicious Myanmar traditional dishes!
