Decolonization without a disconnection? Teaching the vernaculars in New Caledonia today

Abstract

The use of the notion of ‘decolonization’, applied to indigenous people's schooling, is somehow misleading. It refers to a certain period, namely the colonial period, which officially ended in New Caledonia in 1946, then a French colony and now a French overseas territory. It also refers to contemporary efforts to address the colonial legacy. It thus minimizes the fact that post-coloniality shaped a radically different education from its colonial counterparts. The paper aims to question this ‘problematic temporality’: though the recognition of indigenous languages and culture is an important aspect of ‘decolonization’, it might not encompass it. The paper addresses some ongoing reforms, which witness the implementation of Kanak languages in formal education and ipso facto recognize linguistic diversity as a key element for the decolonization of the New Caledonian school system: do they actually lead to a recovery of sovereignty, and what kind of sovereignty are we then talking about? The announced purposes of what constitutes a radical shift in the former French monolingual dogma are threefold: it is intended to facilitate, together with the efforts made by families, the transmission of the linguistic and cultural heritage; it is expected to improve the academic performance of those whose mother tongue is the vernacular language, by promoting their emotional and intellectual development and strengthening their linguistic skills; it is expected to favor the emergence of a renewed social bond between communities. In the light of the persistent local resistances to the recognition of Kanak languages as languages of education, the paper demonstrates that instead of being congruent, these official goals assigned to the reforms are contradictory, revealing what is really at stake when the notion of ‘decolonization’ is taken seriously.

Keywords:

• vernacular education
• decolonization
• Kanak languages
• New Caledonia
• Pacific
• language planning

Notes

Originally a penal colony in the nineteenth century, New Caledonia became a European settler colony at the beginning of the twentieth century. Within the French Colonial Empire, it is the only colony whose original populations were put into reservations and massive numbers of workers were imported from Asia to palliate the absence of indigenous labor in economic development. This first wave of colonial migration were followed by a second wave in the 1960s and 1970s with the arrival of Oceanic populations from the French Republic's other territories (Tahiti, Wallis, Futuna, etc.). Today, even though the indigenous groups are still the most important group in terms of number of inhabitants (they represent 44% of the 240,000 inhabitants of the archipelago), they are only one of the many communities present: European, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Tahitian, Wallisian, etc.

Noumea Accord (1998), informal translation by the Pacific Community translation services, French Embassy Press and Information Section, Sydney. http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AILR/2002/17.html

Eight of them are considered ‘vulnerable’, five ‘definitely endangered’, three ‘severely endangered’ and two ‘critically endangered’ (Moseley, 2010).

In 1984 began a series of violent events commonly called les Evénements (‘the Events’) in which Kanak fighting for independence opposed ‘loyalists’ of European, Asian or Oceanian origin. It ended in 1988 with the signing of the Matignon Accords.

[Dans l'enseignement primaire]

L'on s'accorde à penser que deux raisons essentielles de la relativement faible promotion mélanésienne sur le plan scolaire et universitaire sont d'une part l'insuffisante maîtrise de la langue française par de nombreux autochtones, d'autre part et corrélativement une certaine maladresse dans l'utilisation des concepts de la pensée européenne.[…] L'école primaire a pour rôle de donner aux enfants les moyens de communication, par la parole et par l'écrit, qui leur sont indispensables pour s'insérer dans une société en mutation. A la lumière de cette remarque, l'on ne peut que souligner la nécessité d'être un lieu où la pratique de la langue française soit constante.

[Dans l'enseignement secondaire]

Il ne paraît pas que soit justifiée la comparaison avec quelques grandes langues régionales de Métropole, véhicules d'une littérature et ayant dans plusieurs cas servi de moyens d'expression à des centaines de milliers de personnes. La présence de langues vernaculaires mélanésiennes parmi les épreuves de baccalauréat ne saurait, à brève ou moyenne échéance, être valablement envisage.

Four languages among the most spoken … and for which adequate teaching materials and qualified teachers were available.

Sources: New Caledonian Department of Education.

From 2002 to 2004, an external assessment system comprising a socio-linguistic constituent and a psycholinguistic constituent was used to assess the impact of experimental Kanak language teaching. The experimental group (having been ‘exposed’ to a Kanak language 7 h a week) performed statistically better than the control group (taught in French only) in the vernacular, based on results for all language production tests (vocabulary in terms of both reception and production, and morphosyntactic production). Moreover, there was no measurable negative impact on French language skills, since the overall linguistic performance of children in the experimental groups was equivalent to that of children in the control groups. Finally, the results indicate that the children from the experimental group achieved better results than the control group in recognizing written letters and words in French. After three years, the experimental group performed significantly better than the control group in terms of three of the chosen indicators (transversal skills, reading and writing) and in oral language tendencies. On this count, the supposition that LCK teaching would have a medium term impact on French language skills was confirmed. These results corroborate Cummins' hypothesis (Cummins, 1979) concerning the impact of bilingualism on high level cognitive skills such as reading (Bialystok, 2001). I conducted the socio-linguistic enquiry and showed that Kanak parents were enthusiastic about the LCK class, seeing it as a means of preventing a break with their children's ‘roots’ and fostering their children's development by turning their personal experiences to advantage. Whereas family linguistic habits are characterized by a mingling of languages, LCK teaching at school acts as a balance by simultaneously emphasizing the legitimacy of both the French language and the native language, thereby breaking with the former practice of imposing the first by forbidding the second.