A similar effect was seen in Ethiopia after the downfall of the Derg, a communist military dictatorship, in 1987. The Derg had mandated that education be in Amharic, a Semitic language with its own script, very different from Oromigno, a Cushitic language spoken by the Oromo people and written in the Latin script. A study from 2017 looking at Oromo children educated just before and just after the change showed an 18-percentage-point increase in literacy. Newspaper readership was also 25% higher among the mother-tongue educated people, which very likely meant greater political participation.
1987年，埃塞俄比亚共产主义军事独裁政权Derg倒台后，也出现了类似的情况。Derg规定教育必须使用阿姆哈拉语，阿姆哈拉语是一种闪族语言，有自己的文字，和奥罗莫语非常不同，奥罗莫语是奥罗莫人使用的一种库希特语族语言，用拉丁文书写。2017年的一项研究调查了教育改革前后接受教育的奥罗莫儿童，结果显示识字率上升了18个百分点。在接受母语教育的人群中，报纸的读者群也增加了25%，这很可能意味着政治参与度更高。
Of course, parents may be more concerned that their offspring speak English, rather than that they learn history or arithmetic. They may think it worth sacrificing some of the knowledge and understanding that can be gained from being educated in the mother tongue for better prospects in the labour market. But there seems not to be a trade-off. A forthcoming study looked at 12 schools in Cameroon which taught children in Kom rather than, as is standard practice, English, during the first three years of school. Not only did Kom-medium children perform better in all subjects than English-medium ones in third-year tests; in the fifth year they even outperformed English-medium children in English.
当然，父母可能更关心他们的孩子讲英语，而不是学习历史或算术。他们可能认为，为了在劳动力市场获得更好的前景，牺牲一些从母语教育中获得的知识和理解是值得的。但妥协似乎本就不存在。即将进行的一项研究考察了喀麦隆的12所学校，这些学校在入学的头3年用Kom语教学，而不是像标准做法那样用英语教学。
“Parents are right that speaking English works for a child,” says Zia Abbas of The Citizens’ Foundation (TCF), a charity that runs 1,500 schools in Pakistan at which children are taught in Urdu. “But they don’t understand the difference between English as a subject and English as a medium of instruction. The children end up not learning English, and not learning anything.”
“父母认为讲英语有益于孩子发展的看法是正确的，”公民基金会的齐亚·阿巴斯说，公民基金会是一个运营者1500所学校的慈善机构，这些学校都用乌尔都语教学。“但是他们不理解英语作为一门学科和英语作为一种教学媒介之间的区别。”到头来没有学英语，而且什么也没学到。”
Some governments have taken this on board. In Pakistani Punjab the new Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf government, which took power in the province last year, is to reverse the previous government’s move from Urdu to English. “We don’t have enough qualified teachers,” says Murad Raas, Punjab’s education minister, “and children in the rural areas can’t learn in English. They must be taught in a language they understand.” Punjab is developing a new Urdu-medium curriculum.
一些政府已经考虑到了这一点。在巴基斯坦旁遮普省，去年上台的新巴基斯坦正义运动党政府将扭转上届政府从乌尔都语转向英语的趋势。“我们没有足够的合格教师，” 旁遮普教育部长穆拉德·拉斯说，“农村的孩子不能用英语学习。他们必须用能理解的语言来学习。”旁遮普正在开发一种新的乌尔都语中等课程。
Uganda has implemented mother-tongue instruction for the first four years in 12 different languages, and seen big improvements in learning in some languages, though not all. Kenya, too, is moving in the mother-tongue direction. Last month the government introduced a new curriculum which includes a half-hour lesson in “literacy”— in the mother tongue—every day.
乌干达在头四年用12种不同的语言实施母语教学，并在一些语言的学习上取得显著进步，尽管并不是每种语言教学都取得成就。肯尼亚也在向母语的方向发展。上个月，政府推出了一项新课程，包括每天半小时的母语“读写”课。
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