Name one developed country that educates its population primarily in a foreign language. Take your time. I'll wait. Japan industrialized in Japanese. South Korea in Korean. China in Mandarin. Germany in German. Israel (a settler colonial Apartheid state) literally revived a dead language rather than educate in English. Finland has 5.5 million speakers and didn't switch to English because "it's more practical." Every single developed country on earth educates in its own language. Zero exceptions. Now name one former colony that kept the colonial language for education and successfully industrialized. Also zero.This isn't about decolonization or cultural pride. This is about the engineering pipeline. In South Africa 7% of the population speaks English as a home language. 99% of education from Grade 4 onward is in English. The real matric pass rate using cohort methodology is 57.7%. We produce roughly 3,000 engineering graduates per year for a country of 62 million people. Most students don't fail because they're incapable, they fail because they're trying to learn complex technical content in their third or fourth language. The cognitive load of simultaneously translating AND learning kills their performance. China has 1.4 billion people and produces more engineers than the rest of the world combined. They teach in Mandarin. India has 1.4 billion people and can't achieve a manufacturing takeoff despite decades of trying. They teach their elite in English while 85% of the population is excluded from the technical pipeline. Same population. Different language policy. Radically different outcomes. Some of you may argue that "African countries are just too diverse!". Well the Soviet Union in the 1920s, in a devastated peasant economy literally built universities in over 100 languages. They created written scripts for languages that had never been written down. They developed technical and scientific terminology in Uzbek, Kazakh, Georgian, Armenian, and dozens more. If they could do that with typewriters in 1925, we can do it with computers (and potentially LLMs) in 2026 and beyond. UNESCO research shows children learn better in their mother tongue. South Africa's own research shows students can't transfer knowledge between their home language and English. The data is not ambiguous. Every time an African country attempts industrialization through English or French medium education, it's trying to do something that has literally never worked anywhere in human history and expecting different results. So why are we still doing this? The "but English is the global language" argument: China, Japan, South Korea, and Germany all teach English as a second language. Their students speak English fine. They just don't try to learn physics in it. We can do both. The "African languages can't handle technical content" argument it is to put it bluntly, stupid. Linguistic determinism is myth and you can't honestly still believe this crap in 2026. They said the same about Hebrew, Korean, Finnish, and Mandarin. Every language that industrialized had to develop technical vocabulary. That's a solvable problem, not a permanent limitation. I'm genuinely asking: what is the argument against mother-tongue STEM education that doesn't also apply to every language that has already successfully done it? Sources/Further Reading: The UNESCO press release summarising the report: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/new-unesco-report-calls-multilingual-education-unlock-learning-and-inclusion South Africa faces critical shortage of engineers: https://iol.co.za/thepost/news/2026-03-18-south-africa-faces-critical-shortage-of-engineers-60000-professionals-needed/ Sibanda, R. & Tshehla, L.P.,2025, ‘From mother tongueto English: A language policy shift at a multilingual township school in Gauteng’, South African Journal of Childhood Education 15(1),a1598. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajce.v15i1.1598 South African Matric Pass Rate: https://www.actionsa.org.za/57-7-real-matric-pass-rate-results-mask-a-school-system-that-is-still-failing-too-many-learners/ Sibanda, R., 2019, ‘Mother-tongue education in a multilingual township: Possibilities for recognising lok’shin lingua in South Africa’, Reading & Writing 10(1), a225. https://doi.org/10.4102/rw.v10i1.225   submitted by   /u/SSuperMrL [link]   [comments]