ABSTRACT
Mother tongue education is often advocated as the ideal system of education for all children. However, because it is informed by the mother tongue ideology, it inherits all the problems associated with the concept of mother tongue (see chapter 2). The main problem is that mother tongue education programmes frequently ignore the dimension of intra-language variation. Therefore, this chapter provides a critique of mother tongue education, arguing that it is not always the panacea it is frequently made out to be. We point to the problems associated with mother tongue education and propose an alternative concept, namely the use of a literacy bridge (this concept will be fully explained and illustrated later on in the chapter). Our main example is Africa and in particular South Africa, as there has been a long-standing debate about what the best medium of instruction is in the educational systems of African countries: should it be a former colonial language such as English or an indigenous African language? (For a basic introduction to the language situation and educational system of South Africa, please refer to chapter 6.) But we also consider what might be seen as a more unusual example in the context of a discussion of mother tongue education: namely, the situation of African-American children in the US system of education.
