ABSTRACT
The sociolinguists Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson (1996b) point out the striking fact that in much educational policy work, even in policies on education for all, the role of language is seldom considered. This myopia on the part of the donors and the researchers who guide them, they claim, continues a pattern set at the first UNESCO conference of African Ministers of Education, in 1961, which set a target for universal literacy, but gave little thought to the language in which literacy should be achieved. The same was true of a succession of British conferences held to ‘assist’ colonies to organise their education systems when they became independent states in the 1960s. Invariably language was given very little attention, and if raised, the focus was only on the learning of English (see Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 1996b; Phillipson, 1992; Brock-Utne, 2000).
