ISSUES IN THE NATIONAL AND EDUCATION LANGUAGE POLICIES
7.10 The analysis of policies
7.10.3 Evaluation of education restructuring policies
The Malawi education policy needs to move from a singular autocratic policy toward a more democratic one. From the 1994 democratic elections, the socio-
political situation has remained fluid on the implementation with hardly any interaction at the various levels that we have referred to in the preceding paragraphs. This therefore has had no impact on the power relations between the top officials and the masses on the ground.
What is required is a re-conceptualisation of the policy problems a result of the implementation of how these problems relate to, strategise around and review the agendas of different policy actors and how these affect the existing social relations in education. Sound policies need to have the scope and pattern which can deal simultaneously with what is possible and desirable towards embarking on a comprehensive language education policy for social equity and economic growth. The Ministry of Education and Culture therefore needs to plan with regional counterparts how to effect and implement policy reforms. This should aim at strengthening and improving conditions of the pedagogical process, which includes better infrastructural inputs, professional and pedagogical support and provide more curricular support in terms of the development of language teaching and learning texts and other materials.
The Ministry of Education and Culture needs to promote a culture of debate on how to improve and restructure the relationship between the state and the civil society. This will help to make policy implementation process more democratic, consultative and accountable to the masses it serves. This is a process that requires careful conceptualisation because of the unequal and uneven power relations in the various parts of the constituencies (Humpreys and Reitzes, 1995, in de Clercq 1997).
The argument here is that in a country of scarce resources such as Malawi, this would allow for the empowerment of ethnolinguistic communities that have since 1968 been excluded from using their viable local languages as media for instruction and have also been prevented from participating in planning to question the legitimacy of government policies that fail to deliver. Such an
evaluation process entails that the state be endowed with sufficient organisational and institutional capacity and resources for mediating between different groups.
The educators therefore need to be centrally involved in the implementation of such reforms among the various actors at different levels. The authorities should move towards a more evolutionary policy planning whose aim is to improve the fit between the intention of the policy change and the condition on the ground, to blend top-down policy initiative and bottom-up participation and to promote continuous interaction between all policy actors (de Clercq, 1997). Inthis way the current language policies would cease from being viewed as mere gestural and rhetoric political slogans and policy makers would now be involved in the handling of the practical problems. This would be an important part of reformation.
To this end the situation requires policy researchers to develop strategic skills and knowledge to understand and take into account the cost effective approach in order to intervene and change the system. These would be policy priorities upon which plans can be made for reform strategies. In practice not all five local languages can be used as instructional media, if we consider the costs of producing of learning material in all of them. The Ministry would therefore need to develop common policy priorities and plans for intervening in the education system. We shall return to the question of which languages should be adopted for development later in this chapter.
Other intervening processes would include mobilisation through well-focused campaigns and pilot programmes to be carried in all regions. In addition the Ministry needs to work in partnership with non-governmental educational organisations such as publishing houses, language development bodies, such as the Centre for Language Studies, and other interest groups, to plan and evaluate how to deliver better quality services and activities from the most rural areas, which have the least facilities. Above all there is the need to strategise and devise programmes to change the culture from a monolingual view to a multilingual one
which would give it more ethos. It also needs to build a national managerial and leadership capacity towards a multilingual society.
This aspect is important as there would be key implementers of the educational reform who would engage with existing educational teaching and learning problems and practices. These implementers would thus need to break the formal conservative and often bureaucratic attitudes to enable them use their discretion to modify policies when necessary (de Clercq, 1997). Once the policy reforms can build a capacity of educators, a path would then be set towards redressing the current impasse.
So far the education leadership which also includes the ruling politicians, has turned a deaf ear to these issues. Thishas resulted in the lack of decisive direction and inappropriate strategic intellectual skills and knowledge in the implementation of the so-called revised 1996 policy. If policy formulation and reforms are to bemore effective in creating conditions beneficial to all, there is a need to improve its role on many fronts. Itwill need to conceptualise adequately the policy problem and develop strategic priorities, plans and programmes.
Furthermore, it will need to be more rooted in the realities of the Malawian situation, and make more effective strategies which would have to include some form of backward mapping as an implementation approach, discussed above. This is another aspect of evaluation and of policy development.
7.10.4 Textbook writing and materials developmentinthe promotion of indigenous