Every September, South Africans are encouraged to celebrate their heritage. We speak about the languages passed down by our parents and grandparents, the stories they carry and the importance of keeping them alive. Yet in many classrooms, those same languages have little room when learners study science, work through mathematics or write a test.
What are we telling young people when we celebrate their home languages as part of their identity, but expect them to use English to prove what they know?
Testing language, not learning
English matters. It helps South Africans communicate across language communities and can open doors to higher education and employment. Every learner deserves the opportunity to become proficient in it. But valuing English is different from making it the main language through which a learner’s understanding of every subject is judged.
A learner may understand a scientific process and explain it confidently at home. Ask them to write that explanation in English, however, and the answer may become shorter or less precise.
If they receive a low mark, have they misunderstood the science? Or have they struggled to express what they know in a language they are still learning?
The distinction is easy to miss because tests produce a single result. A mark does not always show where the difficulty began. When the language of a question is unfamiliar, a learner must first work out what is being asked.
When the answer must be written in English, they must find the words before they can show their reasoning. A subject assessment can partly become a test of English proficiency.
That matters in South Africa, where many learners begin school learning through an African language and later move to English for subjects beyond language study.
The Department of Basic Education acknowledges that this transition comes too early for many learners. It has also identified a substantial achievement gap between those who continue learning and being assessed in a familiar language and those who must do so in a second language.
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Parents who choose English-medium education are responding to a real world in which English carries economic and academic power. Their concerns should not be dismissed.
The history of Bantu Education also makes promises about home-language teaching understandably sensitive. Quality matters: learning through a familiar language must come with strong teaching, good materials and continued opportunities to develop English.
But why should that opportunity require learners to move away from the languages they know best? Becoming proficient in English and learning through a home language do not have to be competing ambitions.
Unesco’s guidance on multilingual education supports sustained learning through a familiar language while an additional language is developed. It points to benefits for literacy and for learning subjects such as mathematics and science.
Leaving identity at the classroom door
The question also reaches beyond test results. Language carries ways of describing relationships, sharing knowledge and making sense of the world. Children hear it in conversations with family, in stories and in the explanations people give for what happens around them.
If their home language disappears whenever learning becomes formal, education risks sending the message that the knowledge held in that language belongs outside the classroom.
That is a strange message to send in a country that asks young people to reconnect with their roots. We cannot treat indigenous languages as important during Heritage Month, then leave them on the margins of intellectual life for the rest of the year.
A language should be able to do more than describe where a learner comes from. It should also help them investigate an idea, ask a difficult question and imagine where they might go.
From Heritage Month praise to classroom policy
Change is under way. South Africa’s mother tongue based bilingual education programme has extended the use of home languages alongside English into Grade 4 teaching and assessment. The department reported that 11,948 schools were implementing the programme in 2025.
That is an important step, but its success will depend on what happens in classrooms: whether teachers have support, whether learning materials are accurate and whether assessments allow learners to demonstrate understanding across languages.
There will be practical difficulties, especially in classrooms where learners speak several home languages. Those challenges require planning and resources.
They should also prompt us to examine an assumption we have lived with for too long: that assessing everyone in English is automatically the fairest way to assess what they know.
South Africa does not need to choose between English and its indigenous languages. It needs an education system that develops both.
If we want children to value the languages of their parents and grandparents, those languages must have a place wherever knowledge is created, discussed and recognised. Otherwise, we are asking learners to celebrate their heritage while leaving it at the classroom door.
