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Viewing articles tagged 'literacy'
Viewing articles tagged 'literacy'
4 articles
The Kon Tum mission, 1851
In the last weeks of 1850 a French priest of twenty-five, guided in by a Vietnamese deacon, reached the Bahnar villages of the Kon Tum basin. The mission that followed produced the first written form of any of our languages, the first dictionary, the first school, and the first outside description of who lived in the highlands and where. It is t...
The schools, and the language they are not taught in
In a century and a half our children have been taught in our languages for only a few short stretches: by the Kon Tum missionaries, in the French schools of Darlac, in the Protestant mission schools, and in a bilingual program the Republic of Vietnam ran with American money in its last years. Every government since 1955 has in the end made the c...
Schools, language and the university gap
Our children start school in a language they do not speak, under a rule that is written in no decree: Vietnamese only in the classroom. Primary school nearly works. By fifteen the system has lost half of them. A Rhade teacher will pretend not to understand a Rhade child who asks him a question, because that is what he has been told to do, and a...
Writing our languages
Our languages were spoken for thousands of years before any of them was written. Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the 1970s, French missionaries, a French administrator and his teachers, American missionaries and linguists, and our own people put them into the Latin alphabet, one language at a time, each for its own reasons and e...
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