Early childhood education is the right path for shaping a successful generation, for building peace in the minds of men, and for emphasising compassion rather than individualism.
The early childhood developmental stage from birth to eight years old is crucial for shaping the mind, heart, and behaviour of an individual within his community and for making him ready for later life. Studies over several decades have given added weight to the importance of early childhood education, during which the child’s brain is tuned in to his or her environment and ready to acquire key skills, basic building blocks, and foundational concepts.
During these early years, the child is also immersed in an environment rich with language. This bestows primary vocabulary with basic spellings from the mouths of caregivers, parents, grandparents, and the wider community and includes expressions of happiness and sadness, a large variety of words, prayers, and wishes for blessings, among others.
This language, called the “mother language” or “mother tongue,” is vocalised around the newborn and constitutes his gateway into life.
Sociologists consider this mother tongue to be the backbone of the child’s social and cultural identity as well as the matrix that defines thoughts and feelings. The mother tongue also helps to develop essential emotional skills like self-confidence, the regulation of emotions, self-expression, self-respect, and positive self-belief. These skills are essential for later activities like problem-solving and healthy risk-taking.
Consequently, children that are raised in this way and speaking their own mother tongue stay attached to their roots and connected to their cultural identity and values. Speaking and expressing oneself properly in the mother tongue is a matter of self-esteem, pride, and confidence.
Language is thus a primary means of keeping culture alive. Language loss intrinsically and extrinsically leads to cultural loss. This, in turn, leads to very real consequences on communities and social cohesion.
Even a good translation, whether domesticated or foreignised, cannot convey the same essence compared to the original language. This could explain the fact that the best way to assimilate the depth of a country’s culture is to understand its people’s language, especially in the globalised world of today that is pushing young people to acquire multiple languages for better personal and professional growth.
As a result, learning a foreign language has become essential for many people in order to secure wider professional opportunities.
NATIONAL BRANDING: How many times have friends from the Arab countries surprised us in casual conversation by narrating excerpts from famous Egyptian films starring Ismail Yasseen or by quoting a TV series with Adel Imam or Fouad Al-Mohandess that they might have watched a hundred times and thus know better than Egyptians themselves?
Such foreigners feel proud to pronounce Egyptian expressions as they are delivered by the actors in these films in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic, the most influential from the east to the west of the Arab world.
Although Egyptian cinema is among the most important in the Middle East, and people often refer to it as the “Hollywood of the Arab world,” many young Egyptians, especially those born and raised at the beginning of the third millennium, do not really appreciate the priceless cultural value added by these iconic cinematic artists.
Perhaps the language’s sheer accessibility explains their loss of appetite for this facet of their native culture.
Studies have shown that children who are taught to read and write in their mother language and grow up in a healthy educational environment can connect naturally with their culture through language. Such children are more likely to feel a sense of belonging, and they more easily develop a positive self-image of themselves and their homeland.
Language is also a vital factor in a nation’s branding, and it is the carrier of the country’s intangible heritage.
NATIVE AND FOREIGN: Over the last few decades, the Arab world has faced numerous unprecedented educational challenges due to the adoption of innovative strategies for emphasising multilingual education.
This outward-looking policy reflects a strong desire towards openness and a sentiment of appreciation for other cultures and an innate acceptance of cultural diversity. It helps to break down the barriers of ignorance and to improve the cognitive capacity of students in schools and universities.
In Egypt, a wide range of international schools emerged in the last decades of the last century, including British, French, US, Canadian and ultimately Japanese. Each of these schools brings to the market an educational curriculum that reflects the essence of its country of origin as an ambitious and promising “product”. It is also one that is wrapped in its own history and embedded within its own mother language.
But what about Egypt’s history? And what about the Arabic language, which is the native language of this country?
Many families pay for private tuition alongside that provided at school to teach their children Arabic and offer them the basics of religion. Other families, conscious of the importance of the past, insist on also tutoring their children in Egyptian history to raise their awareness and strengthen their ties with their country’s past.
What I consider disappointing and even frustrating is that the native language is sometimes not counted in the final GPA of some students, which is entirely incomprehensible.
Last week, I listened carefully as my friend Mohamed Abdel-Latif, a world-leading education expert, underlined the importance of the mother tongue and the crucial role it plays in shaping an individual’s cultural identity and personal development.
“A child gets the native language when he is closely tied to family, community, and cultural traditions... Language and culture are so intertwined that one cannot survive without the other,” Abdel-Latif said.
In the Egyptian context, it is entirely unacceptable to exclude the native language from the panoramic cultural scene provided by international schools in Egypt and encourage only the acquisition of foreign languages.
A foreign language is important in today’s globalised world as it is of great benefit for better academic outcomes and attractive professional opportunities. However, at the same time it is a language learned outside of an individual’s home and community and is not typically used as a primary means of communication.
Let us close this debate by saying that both the mother language and foreign languages are a necessity in today’s world and both are important and should be adopted according to circumstances.
However, one should not exist at the expense of the other.
* The writer is a member of the House of Representatives’ Foreign Relations Committee and a researcher at the French National Centre CNRS-Sorbonne University.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 3 August, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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