The Miseducation: Colonial Languages and the Learning Crisis

The Miseducation

Imagine you're six years old.

You've grown up speaking Yoruba with your parents, your grandparents, your neighbors, everyone you know. You've learned songs in Yoruba. You've heard stories in Yoruba. Your entire understanding of the world — every concept, every relationship, every emotion — has been built in Yoruba.

Now imagine you walk into a classroom and the teacher speaks only English.

The textbooks are in English. The tests are in English. When you don't understand — when you can't understand — you're told you're failing. You're slow. You're not smart enough.

But you're not failing at learning. You're failing at an impossible task: learning in a language you don't know, about concepts you've never encountered, from teachers who themselves often struggle with the colonial tongue.

This is the reality for hundreds of millions of African children.

The Colonial Inheritance

When European powers carved up Africa, they didn't just draw borders and extract resources. They restructured minds.

Colonial education was never designed to develop Africans. It was designed to produce clerks, translators, and administrators — a thin layer of Africans fluent enough in European languages to help run the colonial machinery, but educated just enough to be useful, not enough to be threatening.

The Belgians under Leopold II prohibited higher education in Congo entirely. The French taught a curriculum focused almost exclusively on France — its history, its geography, its literature — while African languages were banned from classrooms. The British were marginally more tolerant of vernacular instruction in early grades, but the ultimate goal was always the same: English fluency for the select few who would serve the empire.

At independence, the new nations inherited these systems intact. And they kept them.

The reasons seemed practical. Most African countries had dozens or hundreds of languages. Choosing one indigenous language as the national medium would privilege some ethnic groups over others. The colonial language — English, French, Portuguese — appeared neutral, belonging to no single group.

Besides, the argument went, English and French were the languages of international commerce, science, and diplomacy. Mastering them was the path to modernity.

So children continued learning in languages they didn't speak at home.

The Numbers

The results have been catastrophic.

Out-of-school children: More than half of the world's 272 million out-of-school children live in Sub-Saharan Africa. One in five children aged 6-11 are not in school. Almost three in five youth aged 15-17 are not in school.

Learning poverty: In Sub-Saharan Africa, 89% of children cannot read and understand a simple text by age 10. Before the pandemic, it was 86%. This is the highest rate in the world. Seven in ten children across all low- and middle-income countries are in "learning poverty" — but Africa carries the worst burden.

Literacy rates: While global adult literacy has reached 87%, Sub-Saharan Africa lags at 64%. The number of illiterate adults in the region has actually increased — from 196 million in 2015 to 225 million — even as the literacy rate slowly rises, because the population is growing faster than education can keep up.

Completion rates: Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest primary school completion rate in the world — around 67%. For upper secondary, only about half complete.

Teacher shortage: Sub-Saharan Africa needs 15 million additional teachers, the largest shortage of any region, driven by rapidly expanding school-age populations and declining resources.

Children are in school but not learning. They sit in classrooms for years and emerge unable to read a paragraph or do basic arithmetic. The system processes them without educating them.

The Language Problem

The evidence is overwhelming: children learn better in their mother tongue.

A study of South African sixth-graders found that those educated in their first language scored an average of 69% on national assessments. Those educated in a second language — typically English — scored just 32%.

UNESCO research found that African students taught in a familiar language were 30% more likely to read with comprehension by the end of primary school than those taught in a foreign language.

This isn't surprising. Learning requires connecting new information to existing knowledge. When instruction is in a language children don't understand, they can't make those connections. They resort to rote memorization without comprehension — copying symbols they don't understand, repeating sounds that don't connect to meaning.

Yet most African countries continue using colonial languages as the primary medium of instruction.

Francophone Africa was particularly affected. French colonial policy insisted on French-only instruction from the very first day of school. There was no transition period, no acknowledgment that children needed to learn French before they could learn in French. One French official, worried that Haiti might teach Creole in schools, said: "If that is done, it will be a threat to French." Another believed French would "eventually eliminate African languages to become a 'mother tongue.'"

The results were predictable. A UNESCO report identified the five countries with the world's lowest adult literacy rates — all five were former French colonies that had kept French as the official language.

Anglophone Africa fared somewhat better. British colonial policy allowed vernacular instruction in early grades before switching to English. But the transition often comes too early — Grade 3 or 4, when children have barely grasped their first language in written form, let alone acquired English.

In Tanzania, children receive seven years of primary education in Kiswahili, then face an abrupt switch to English-only instruction in secondary school. Most students struggle. The foundation wasn't built for the structure being placed on top.

The Classroom Reality

The language problem cascades through every aspect of education.

Teachers struggle too. In many African countries, teachers themselves aren't fluent in the colonial language they're required to use. They learned it the same way their students are learning — badly, through a system designed for failure. A survey in Ghana found that many teachers lacked the confidence to teach in English, because their own training was inadequate.

Materials are scarce or inappropriate. Textbooks in African languages barely exist. What materials do exist are often imported, written for European children, featuring European contexts. A child in rural Mali learns to read from books about snow and apples and London buses — things they've never seen and may never see.

Time is wasted on language, not content. Teachers spend so much time trying to teach the language of instruction that they can't teach actual subjects. As one observer noted from West Africa, instruction in French "left little room for instruction in arts and sciences: because the students' poor performance in those subjects was the result of an inadequate command of the language in which they were taught, instruction in that language had to come first."

The child ends up learning neither the language nor the content.

The Hidden Curriculum

There's something deeper happening too.

When you tell a child that their language is not suitable for learning, you tell them something about themselves. When the language of success is foreign and the language of home is ignored, children absorb a message: your culture is inferior. Your knowledge doesn't count. Your way of understanding the world is backwards.

Scholars call this "epistemic violence" — the systematic devaluation of indigenous knowledge systems. Colonial education didn't just fail to teach; it actively taught Africans to distrust their own minds.

The curriculum itself reinforces this. In Francophone countries, children learn French history — the Revolution, Napoleon, the great kings — while their own histories are ignored or minimized. They learn French geography while barely studying the land beneath their feet. They read Molière and Victor Hugo while oral traditions that have sustained communities for centuries go untaught.

The African child is educated out of Africa.

Who Benefits?

The current system serves certain interests.

Former colonial powers maintain cultural and linguistic influence. France created La Francophonie specifically to preserve French language dominance in former colonies. French aid to education in Africa has historically been contingent on French-medium instruction. The language creates dependency: African elites educated in French are oriented toward Paris, not toward their neighbors.

African elites who have mastered colonial languages benefit from a system that excludes the majority. Their children attend private schools with better instruction; they can afford tutors and foreign education. The colonial language becomes a class marker, separating those who "speak properly" from those who don't.

International institutions find it convenient. English and French are the working languages of aid, diplomacy, and global commerce. Training Africans in these languages means training them to interface with existing power structures — not to challenge them.

The African masses bear the cost. Their children sit in classrooms learning little. Their languages are dismissed as "vernaculars," unsuited for serious thought. Their knowledge systems — agricultural wisdom, medicinal practices, philosophical traditions — are excluded from formal education and slowly lost.

What Works

The evidence points toward solutions.

Mother-tongue-based multilingual education works. Children begin learning in their home language, building strong foundations in literacy and numeracy. They then gradually add national and international languages as subjects before transitioning to using them as mediums of instruction.

Ethiopia implemented this approach and saw primary school dropout rates decline by around 20%. Burkina Faso's Programme d'éducation bilingue found that children in bilingual schools had higher pass rates on primary certificate exams, repeated grades less often, and stayed in school longer than those in French-only schools.

The key is gradual transition. Research shows that 1-4 years of mother-tongue instruction is insufficient — children need longer to build the cognitive foundations that support second-language learning. Strong bilingual programs produce students proficient in both languages; weak programs produce students fluent in neither.

Political will is shifting. Since 1990, 11 of 19 former French territories have begun or expanded the use of local languages in schools. Today, 79% of former French colonies use local languages in education, compared to just 16% at independence. France itself reversed course in the 1990s, recognizing that French-only instruction was failing to produce French speakers.

Rwanda's experiment is instructive, if cautionary. In 2008, Rwanda switched its medium of instruction from French and Kinyarwanda to English — virtually overnight. The goal was to align with East African neighbors and attract English-speaking investment. The transition was chaotic. Teachers who barely spoke English were suddenly required to teach in it. But Rwanda was at least making a choice, however controversial, based on its own strategic interests rather than colonial inheritance.

The Deeper Question

Education reform can't be separated from broader questions of sovereignty.

African countries spend roughly 4% of GDP on education — comparable to other regions. But they face structural constraints that don't appear in budget figures.

Brain drain pulls trained teachers abroad, where salaries are ten or twenty times higher. Countries invest in training educators only to watch them leave.

Debt service crowds out education spending. When 40% of revenue goes to creditors, there's less for schools.

Curriculum design is often influenced by donors who have their own ideas about what African children should learn. The World Bank and IMF have promoted particular educational models as conditions for loans. NGOs from wealthy countries run programs with Western pedagogical assumptions.

The French-language grip remains tight. France controls printing presses, textbook distribution, teacher training programs in former colonies. Breaking free requires not just policy change but new infrastructure.

True educational sovereignty would mean African countries deciding what their children learn, in what languages, toward what ends. It would mean curricula rooted in African realities — the soil, the climate, the history, the challenges. It would mean valuing indigenous knowledge alongside global knowledge, producing graduates equipped to solve African problems rather than to emigrate.

The Stakes

What's lost when education fails?

Individual potential. Every child who can't read is a mind that won't develop, a career that won't flourish, a contribution that won't be made. Multiply this by hundreds of millions.

Economic development. Research shows that each additional year of quality schooling increases earnings by about 10%. Learning-adjusted years of schooling — accounting for how much students actually learn — are even more strongly correlated with economic growth. Africa's learning poverty is an economic catastrophe in slow motion.

Democratic participation. Citizens who can't read can't fully engage with written information — laws, contracts, ballots, news. They're more vulnerable to manipulation, less able to hold leaders accountable.

Cultural continuity. When education happens only in colonial languages, indigenous languages weaken. Knowledge embedded in those languages — about plants, animals, social relations, spiritual practices — disappears. The loss is irreversible.

The Question

Africa is the world's youngest continent. Ten to twelve million young people enter the labor force every year. Yet the continent creates only about three million jobs annually.

If those young people are educated — truly educated, not just processed through failing schools — they represent an extraordinary resource. They could build, create, innovate, transform.

If they're not educated, if they emerge from schools unable to read their own names, they represent something else: frustration, wasted potential, instability.

The colonial education system was designed to produce subjects, not citizens. It was designed to make Africans legible to European administrators, not to develop African capabilities. It was designed to extract — talent, loyalty, culture — not to nurture.

Sixty-plus years after independence, that system largely remains.

Changing it requires more than new textbooks or teacher training. It requires a fundamental reimagining: What should African children learn? What languages should they learn it in? What knowledge matters? What kind of adults is education trying to produce?

These are not technical questions. They are political questions. And until Africans have the power to answer them on their own terms, the miseducation will continue.