What Can TESOL Do in Order Not to Participate in Crimes Against Humanity? TOVE SKUTNABB-KANGAS University of Roskilde (Emerita) Roskilde, Denmark Åbo Akademi University (Emerita) Vasa, Finland Ⅲ What can TESOL in order not to participate in crimes against humanity? The first Expert paper for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) that I cowrote (Magga, Nicolaisen, Trask, Dunbar, & Skutnabb-Kangas, 2005) contains sociological, educational, and legal argumentation where we show that to educate Indigenous and minority (IM) children, including immigrant minorities, through a dominant language in a submersion or even early-exit transitional program prevents access to education, because of the linguistic, pedagogical, and psychological barriers it creates Thus, it violates the human right to education This right is expressed in many international human rights documents, also in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (Art 29) The Convention has been ratified by all other UN member states except two: Somalia and the United States This education often curtails the development of the children’s capabilities and perpetuates poverty (see economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen) It is organized against solid research evidence about how best to reach high levels of bilingualism or multilingualism and how to enable IM children to achieve academically in school A recent Expert paper that I cowrote (Dunbar & SkutnabbKangas, 2008) shows that subtractive dominant-language medium education for IM children can have harmful consequences socially, psychologically, economically, and politically It can cause very serious mental harm: social dislocation, psychological, cognitive, linguistic, and educational harm, as well as economic, social, and political marginalization It can also often result in serious physical harm, such as occurred in residential schools and as a long-term result of marginalization (e.g., alcoholism, suicides and violence) When states persist in implementing these policies, in the full knowledge of their devastating effects, the state education system can thus sociologically and educationally be termed genocide, according to two of the definitions in United Nations’ (1948) Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention): Article II(e): “forcibly transferring children of 340 TESOL QUARTERLY the group to another group,” and Article II(b): “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” (emphasis added) Legally, this education can be labeled a crime against humanity Our conclusion states that subtractive education is now at odds with and in clear violation of a range of human rights standards, and in our view amount to ongoing violations of fundamental rights It is at odds with contemporary standards of minority protection In our view, the concept of “crime against humanity” is less restrictive [than genocide], and can also be applied to these forms of education In our view, the destructive consequences of subtractive education, not only for indigenous languages and cultures but also in terms of the lives of indigenous people/s, are now clear The concept of “crimes against humanity” provides a good basis for an evolution that will ultimately lead to the stigmatisation through law of subtractive educational practices and policies (Dunbar, & Skutnabb-Kangas 2008, p 30) Subtractive education through the medium of a dominant language often transfers IM children to the dominant group linguistically and culturally within one or two generations It may lead to the extinction of Indigenous languages, thus contributing to the disappearance of the world’s linguistic diversity A partial result of this extinction can be the disappearance of the knowledge about biodiversity and its maintenance and, through this, diminishing prerequisites for human life on earth Linguistic diversity and biodiversity are correlationally and causally related Most of the world’s megabiodiversity is in areas under the management or guardianship of Indigenous peoples Most of the world’s linguistic diversity resides in the small languages of Indigenous peoples Much of the detailed knowledge of how to maintain biodiversity is encoded in their languages Through killing them we kill the prerequisites for maintaining biodiversity If we continue as now, most of the world’s Indigenous languages will be gone by 2100 When states, including the United States, refuse to grant Indigenous peoples and (both “national” and immigrated) minorities an unconditional right to the most decisive linguistic human right in education, the right to be educated mainly in one’s own language in a non-fee state school, they are seriously harming both the children concerned and our planet What can TESOL in order not to participate in crimes against humanity? Both Indigenous and minority education could be organized so as to promote high levels of multilingualism This would give better results in terms of school achievement, learning of the dominant language, and issues around identity In addition, not even the initial short-term costs would be more than a few percent higher, and in the long term, mainly SYMPOSIUM: IMAGINING MULTILINGUAL TESOL 341 mother-tongue medium education would lead to considerable savings, including eliminating much of the “illiteracy” of tens of millions of children, and today’s educational wastage In my TESOL 2008 contribution (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2008), I provided positive examples of Indigenous language medium education in Nepal (Hough et al., 2009), Orissa, India (Mohanty & Panda, 2007; Mishra, 2008), the Saami country in Norway and Finland (Aikio-Puoskari, 2009), and from minority education in Ethiopia (Heugh, 2009; Heugh, Benson, Bogale, & Yohannes, 2007; Heugh & Skutnabb-Kangas, 2009) Deaf education was also mentioned (Skutnabb-Kangas 2008; Skutnabb-Kangas & Aikio-Puoskari, 2003) Peru (Pérez Jacobsen, 2009; Trapnell & Pérez Jacobsen, 2009), Bolivia, and Bangladesh also provide positive examples Likewise, there are many research studies showing the positive results of mainly mother-tonguemedium (MTM) education for both national and immigrated minorities Still, in today’s situation there is a lot of nice talk and far too little action Just three examples here: In July 2007, a project started in Orissa, India In 200 schools, Indigenous (“tribal”) children from 10 language groups are being taught through their mother tongues in the first grades, with materials collected from children, parents, and teachers The coordinator is Dr Mahendra Kumar Mishra Sixteen more languages were added in 2008 The research project “From Mother Tongue to Other Tongue: Facilitating Transition in Multilingual Education of Tribal Children In India,” directed by Professors Ajit K Mohanty and Minati Panda (Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi), follows some of the children There are similar projects on a smaller scale in a couple of other states in India (e.g., Andra Pradesh), and plans to start them in several other states The project “Multilingual Education Program for All Non-Nepali Speaking Students of Primary Schools of Nepal” (Ministry of Education, Nepal, Dr Lava Deo Awasthi) is running six pilot projects where Indigenous and minority children are taught mainly in their mother tongues in primary school Materials and curriculum follow a bottom-up design, largely planned by villagers The plan is to extend this program to all non-Nepali mother tongue children in Nepal, a country that has more than 100 languages Ethiopia has an innovative and progressive national education policy that is based on years of MTM education Regions have the authority to make their own decentralized implementation plans Some regions transfer to English-medium education after or years A study across all the regions was commissioned by the Ethiopian Ministry of Education (Heugh, Benson, Bogale, & Yohannes, 2007) The study features an efficient collection of system-wide assessment data The data show very clear patterns of learner achievement at Grades/Years 8, 10, and 12 The Grade 342 TESOL QUARTERLY data show that those learners who have years of MTM education plus English as a subject perform better across the curriculum (including in English) than those with or even years of MTM instruction These were the words of the Minister of Education Abdul-Aziz Taib, when I interviewed him in Kurdistan, Iraq, 15 March 2006: “Every child in the world has the right to education through the medium of their mother tongue.” What can TESOL in order not to participate in crimes against humanity? What is TESOL doing? I conclude with Klein’s (2007) research on plurilingual competences on the labor market, based on data from 1998–2000 (random sample panel, 8,232 individuals, aged 20–64): “The advantages of commanding English will tend to diminish when these competencies become more and more abundant” (p 278) THE AUTHOR Tove Skutnabb-Kangas is Professor Emerita at the University of Roskilde in Roskilde, Denmark, and at Åbo Akademi University in Vasa, Finland She has written or edited around 50 books and 400 articles and book chapters, in 32 languages, about minority education, linguistic human rights, linguistic genocide, subtractive spread of English, the relationship between biodiversity and linguistic diversity, and other topics She has received the Linguapax Award (2003), and is presently involved in projects in Nepal and India where Indigenous children are being taught through the medium of their mother tongues Her home page is www.tove-skutnabb-kangas.org REFERENCES Aikio-Puoskari, U (2009) The ethnic revival, language and education of the Sami, an indigenous people, in three Nordic countries (Finland, Norway and Sweden) In A Mohanty, M Panda, R Phillipson, & T Skutnabb-Kangas (Eds.), Multilingual education for social justice: Globalising the local (pp 216–237) New Delhi, India: Orient BlackSwan (See also Skutnabb-Kangas, T., Phillipson, R., Mohany, A K., & Panda, M [in press] Social justice through multilingual education: Globalising the local Bristol, England: Channel View Publications/Multilingual Matters.) Dunbar, R., & Skutnabb-Kangas, T (2008) Forms of education of indigenous children as crimes against humanity? Expert paper written for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues New York: United Nations Heugh, K (2009) Literacy and bi/multilingual education in Africa: recovering collective memory and knowledge In A Mohanty, M Panda, R Phillipson, & T Skumabb-Kangas (Eds.), Multilingual education for social justice: Globalising the local (pp 95–113) New Delhi, India: Orient BlackSwan Heugh, K., Benson, C., Bogale, B., & Yohannes, M A G (2007) Final report: Study on medium of instruction in primary schools in Ethiopia Addis Ababa: Ministry of Education of Ethiopia Heugh, K., & Skutnabb-Kangas, T (Eds.) (in press) Successful multilingual education— from Ethiopia to the world New Delhi, India: Orient BlackSwan Hough, D., Bahadur Thapa Magar, R B., & Yonjan-Tamang, A (2009) Privileging indigenous knowledges: Empowering MLE in Nepal In A Mohanty, M Panda, SYMPOSIUM: IMAGINING MULTILINGUAL TESOL 343 R Phillipson, & T Skumabb-Kangas (Eds.), Multilingual education for social justice: Globalising the local (pp 146–161) New Delhi, India: Orient BlackSwan Klein, C (2007) The valuation of plurilingual competences in an open European labour market International Journal of Multilingualism, 4, 262–282 Magga, O H., Nicolaisen, I., Trask, M., Dunbar, R., & Skutnabb-Kangas, T (2005) Indigenous children’s education and indigenous languages Expert paper written for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues New York: United Nations Mishra, M K (2008, July) Mother tongue based multilingual education in Orissa: From theory to practice Paper presented at the Second International Conference on Language Development, Language Revitalization and Multilingual Education in Ethnolinguistic Communities, Bangkok, Thailand Mohanty, A K., & Panda, M (2007) From mother tongue to other tongue: Facilitating transition in multilingual education of tribal children in India Project proposal submitted to Bernard van Leer Foundation, Delhi, India Pérez Jacobsen, S (2009) The contribution of postcolonial theory to intercultural bilingual education in Peru: An Indigenous teacher training programme In A Mohanty, M Panda, R Phillipson, & T Skumabb-Kangas (Eds.), Multilingual education for social justice: Globalising the local (pp 183–189) New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan Sen, A (1985) Commodities and capabilities Amsterdam: North Holland Skutnabb-Kangas, T., & Aikio-Puoskari, U (2003) Exclusion or inclusion—linguistic human rights for a linguistic minority, the Deaf Sign language users, and an indigenous people, the Saami In P Lee (Ed.), Many voices, one vision: The right to communicate in practice (pp 59–88) Penang, Malaysia: Southbound, & London: WACC Skutnabb-Kangas, T (2008) Bilingual education and Sign language as the mother tongue of deaf children In C J Kellett Bidoli & E Ochse (Eds.), English in international deaf communication (pp 75–94) Bern: Lang Trapnell, L., & Pérez Jacobsen, S (in press) Language and culture in education: Comparing policies and practices in Peru and Ethiopia In K Heugh & T SkutnabbKangas (Eds.), Successful multilingual education—from Ethiopia to the world New Delhi, India: Orient BlackSwan 344 TESOL QUARTERLY