Cambodia's marginalized indigenous populations are steady gaining opportunities due to a replacement trilingual education programs. Now, the government is starting to expand the comprehensive efforts.
Twelve-year-old Chhean Srey methamphetamine hydrochloride dreams of being an instructor once she grows up. It’s a goal that currently, because of a sweeping and innovative education program, is accessible.
Srey meth attends a straightforward, three-room school in Cambodia's Kratie province where she, together with some seventy different students of Phnong ethnicity, benefits from multilingual education. The students begin learning in their first language before the national language of Khmer is step by step phased into the course of study.
This is a forceful sendoff from the past. In Cambodia, ethnic minorities have long been obstructed from education. The long distance to travel to school was a deterrence, and people who did attend usually faced discrimination or lagged behind as a result of an absence of understanding, as classes were taught in Khmer by Khmer teachers.
"Children there couldn’t speak Khmer at all," says Kron Ka Sung, an ethnic Kreung from the northeast Ratanakiri, where 64 % of the population is indigenous.
This meant attending rates remained low, dropout rates were high, and extremely few indigenous kids advanced to secondary school level, explains Jan Noorlander, a program director for ethnos women at non-profit organization Cooperative for assistance and Relief everywhere (CARE).
Education is simply one of the ways in which Cambodia's twenty four ethnos groups face vulnerabilities. Among these communities, food insecurity is heightened by deforestation, kid mortality is high, and health care is low. Indigenous people face discrimination in several aspects of public life, as well as employment. From a young age kids are typically needed to assist their parents to work in the fields and at home.
Contextualized Communication
Over the past thirteen years, non-profit organizations are working to provide higher learning opportunities to the country's ethnic minorities by rolling out trilingual education to the remote areas. Since 2003, CARE - supported from UNICEF and the government - has led a sweeping trilingual program that has seen indigenous kids taught in their own local language from preschool through to 3rd grade, with bridge learning into Khmer, before transitioning to Khmer-only instruction within the fourth grade.
The approach has concerned setting up community -based schools, training ethnic teachers who are usually well-known by the students and their parents, and developing indigenous language, contextualized textbooks with input from native village and commune leaders.
As several of those languages are primarily oral, the method has first backtrack to collect, formalize and present these as written languages that takes roughly 2 years, according to UNICEF.
Contextualized textbooks are developed in 5 indigenous languages for young Cambodian kids.
So far, the results are promising. Over 4,000 kids attended multilingual education schools in 2015. Enrollment doubled between 2009 and 2015, and teaching in 2 languages has led to higher literacy rates in ethnic group communities, according to CARE.
"Children can read and write in indigenous language—their language," said Ka Sung, who serves on the College Board committee in the commune. "Now the community understands the benefits of education," added 64-year-old Deng Song, an ethnic Tampuen also from Ratanakiri. "After they gain knowledge, they can begin a big or small business, for their future."
Already, specialists see Cambodia as a pacesetter within the region for its institutionalized approach, involving both the high level of government officials and the community, according to the minister. However government commitment and funding is probably more significant when considering the small numbers of ethnic minorities, who structure only 1.5 % of the country’s 15 million primarily population.
This approach, however, has its critics, significantly among nationalists involved about secession. "Sometimes it is a sensitive issue," acknowledged Dr. Naron. "[But] teaching in their mother tongue does not produce a [second] state; it simply affords the chance to transition to Khmer. This can be the most effective method of integration."
The minister added he's more involved about alienating minority groups, notably in the northeast, where in the past the brutal Khmer Rouge regime strategically created bases to attractiveness to those who benefited least from development. "Exclusion will produce social issues," he said. "Education is the only equalizer. Perhaps they are poor, or they are made, however once you have education, it equalizes opportunity… It's good for the country."
Excerpted from: DW