Educational Genocide: Examining the Implications of Mother Tongue Use on the Education of Mathematically Gifted Learners in South African Classrooms

Abstract

In 2001, South Africa launched the National Strategy for Mathematics, Science & Technology [NSMSTE], where stakeholders concurred that skills for the 21^st century would be achieved by identifying mathematically gifted youth and teaching them in English. In 2024, the same department proposed a Mother Tongue-Based Bilingual Education [MTBBE] where learners of the 21^st century should be taught mathematics in the mother tongue. Although the two policies share the same vision of an African fit for the 21^st century, they are contradictory in terms of language of instruction. This theory paper used an ethnomathematics template to analyze the claims made in the mother tongue and their implications on gifted education. South African researchers rarely focus on gifted learners who have the potential to become future scientists. Through an Obscure Features Hypothesis [OFH] as a theoretical lens, the paper raised two questions focusing on what seems obscure and what seems violent in the mother tongue proposal. This is important because idealistic educational reform initiatives tend to move through cycles that consolidate rather than dismantle the inherited but violent patterns of inequities. Innovative solutions start by noticing obscure features and then building a solution based on them; hence, the analysis identified four obscure features as follows:

• Teaching mathematics in the 11 official languages promotes ethnic rather than global mathematics


• It is flawed to claim that learners learn better in the mother tongue if the language is deficient in mathematical concepts


• Once ethnic languages have been intellectualized, they take a new form different from the mother tongue


• Intellectualization has inherent transgression as experts borrow from the same English they demonize.

In terms of violent mathematics, proponents of the mother tongue are:

• Using violent emancipatory language to justify their proposal


• Acting like glory hounds because they propose a solution for a problem in another department


• Dragging mathematics into ethnic languages where the concepts are not present.


• Although these features work against all learners in general, they have negative implications on efforts to nurture the mathematically gifted who have the potential to become Africans for the 21^st