Let Communities Decide. Against the Blanket adoption of UNESCO’s MTB-MLE in Myanmar.

This essay looks at how Myanma citizenship is constructed through language in education policies and the relationship of the State to minority ethnic groups. Language is far from the only cleavage between these groups and the State school system (e.g. many voices from minority ethnic groups also assert the need for a historical syllabus that better reflects their community needs (Thein Lwin et al 2001)), but as we will see it has been both a symbolic and constitutive element of the ongoing inter-ethnic tensions. The essay will make two main arguments: Firstly, that language in education is not a proxy per se for separatism and that individuals and communities who choose their mother tongue as a medium of instruction primarily do so because of cultural needs rather than political aspiration. Secondly, that policy initiatives imported from other countries and via global institutions are not always appropriate and may exacerbate rather than solve existing problems.

There are at 135 recognised ethnic groups in Myanmar with distinct languages (Bradley, 1999, 99), though it is Burmese, the language associated with the majority Bamar/Burman ethnicity that is the sole official language of administration and education. Since independence from British rule, the national government, while offering some rhetorical support for ethnic languages in the classroom, has mostly downplayed and prohibited non-Burmese languages in government schools as part of a decades long assimilation…