THE ABC-Z we want to rush to with three and four-year-olds are not the crux of linguistic intelligence, neither is the English language we want them to learn before they even understand anything of their mother language.

Linguistic intelligence is the potency to learn language, it is inborn and it is not associated with any particular language, which is why anyone can learn any language.

And language development begins even before children are born and they respond when you talk to them while they are still in the mother’s womb. 

Thus, by the time they are three or four, their linguistic development has gone a long way, but is still growing, in leaps and bounds.

And so we should not fetter it with ABC to Z, binding language to the written word forestalling its full development, further jeopardising everything by foisting a foreign language on these infants when the mother language is still finding its feet. 

Research has long established that introducing the second language before children have mastered the mother language is detrimental to the development of both the mother language and the foreign language. 

When children have mastered literacy in the mother language, the foreign language is learned with the greatest ease. 

Whenever the learner encounters problems in learning the second language, there is a solid reference point, the mother language, and the second language is spurred on. 

In our case, we foist the English language on the children when the mother language is fledgling and confusion reigns. 

We start them off in English, and when the child encounters problems in learning the English language, he/she asks: “Ko lion chii? Ko zebra chii? Ko elephant chii?” 

You can’t say lion ishumba because in the child’ mother tongue inventory, shumba does not exist, mbizi does not exist, zhou is not there… What are we doing, how far will the children go with this confusionist approach? 

Many, many, times I have faced difficulties explaining to children words and concepts they meet in the English language because their limited Shona cannot carry the explanation in Shona, and their understanding of the English language itself cannot assist the child beyond a certain limit. 

This disables the children and they lose confidence in themselves and this is a terrible thing to do to a developing child. 

Our pre-schools, ECD centres and schools are all complicit in this debacle.

The other day, I came across an ECD school bus with the motto:

‘WE ARE THE ENGLISH SPEAKERS’ inscribed across it. 

I was totally dumbfounded; here, in Zimbabwe, my African country, what are the children being taught, what are they being raised to become?

The English language, in Early Childhood Education for Shona, Ndebele, any African child is totally misplaced, and it is harmful to the development of the child, intellectually and socio-culturally. 

That child is forced to be a little Englishman or woman at age three and four, thus being gravely shortchanged. They will never develop as well as they would in their own socio-cultural milieu — in their mother tongue and mother tongue context. 

All over the world, peoples have developed without the English language; the Japanese have reached extreme heights as Japanese — everyone drives a Japanese car the world over, but they are not English, nor are their children taught in English, they are not even European (for those of us who think that there is superiority in being European). 

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was the first to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon. They are not English, their children are not taught in English and today, they (Russians) have the largest nuclear arsenal in the world — so, where is the superiority of the English and their language? 

The Chinese are proud developers of MiG fighters and more. They have built an economy that surpasses that of the West but they are not English and their children are not taught in the English language.

All over the world, people learn in their own languages and excel, but here, we do not believe in ourselves. 

We forget that speaking English language fluently is not a measure of intelligence.

The English language is a total hindrance to the development of our children when foisted on them from the very early ages. 

It is not an indicator of anything for a pre-schooler or an ECD learner to speak English; it is not a measure of their intellectual development, indeed it is a measure of the disturbance that we have cost them to go through.

When I was studying in the US some years back, in the School Apartment Building I lived, I had neighours who were from South Korea, fellow students. The couple had a nine-year-old little girl. They first came to the US in May. Their daughter did not understand English at all; she did not speak it. I was friends with the child but we could only communicate using sign language. 

But by August, only three months later, the child was fluent in English — we could converse no end. In three months, the child had mastered the English language. 

The very language yatinofumira kudzidzisa vana vachiri kuyamwa can be learned in three months or less. 

The child had been schooled in Korean all this time; she was perfectly grounded in her mother language, and so learning the second language was not a problem

But here, in Zimbabwe, we abrogate every rule, we overrule and override the mother language in its formative stages, disturbing, stunting its growth and development, and the second language itself is rootless because the mother language itself is shaky and it does not go too far. 

We do the children injustice; they are hurt; they are not at home in their mother language, they are not confident, they cannot explain the simplest things in the mother language, neither can they in the  English language.

No child has to learn in a foreign language; research has indicated the same, it is a right for each child to know and understand itself and this does not happen when the mother language is denigrated and ignored. 

These children do know they are Africans and something is wrong that the who they are and where they come from should be relegated to the dust bin.

If we cannot see how wrong it is for a child to be taught in a foreign language, we surely need to go back to the drawing board.