Language for the Global Economy: Some curriculum fundamentals and pedagogical practices in the colonial educational enterprise

Abstract

The paper provides an example of contrivances undertaken to establish English as the language of the global economy. Trinidad and Tobago is the location chosen, and the late colonial period is the time frame used to demonstrate how the 'project' worked. The paper focuses upon some curricular and pedagogic practices used to transmit and fortify English as the language of communication, and is classroom based. What took place at ground level, so to speak, and within the framework of a major formal institution, the colonial elementary school, is examined. Three theoretical frames are engaged: selected aspects of language learning theory as these relate to reading in particular, pedagogical content knowledge and hermeneutics. The analysis reveals that classroom practices were orchestrated to cement and fortify an English language base in Trinidad and Tobago during the period under study, and to guarantee the use of English for all time. The strategies used included appropriate packaging of content, exclusiveness in selection and use of textual (British) material, pre-occupation with the 'grammar syndrome', indoctrination into British culture, and transmission of the ideology that success in 'school English' was a touchstone for induction into 'the good life'. The paper concludes that the job of securing the already established English-language base in Trinidad and Tobago was a diligent masterpiece. The colonizer 'played a good number' upon the colonized in Trinidad and Tobago, so much so that the present exclusive use of English in that country is seen as irreversible, unlike the situation in some other post-colonial states.