Education in the new world order: Multilanguaging frontiers- I

I gave a public lecture at the University of Seychelles on the topic that preoccupies me as I ask the world: why do we use monolingual (aka. colonial) lens if we need to maximize human potential to know and to be. Several realities ring true and they are concerning:

1) Majority of the primary school readers are at least 3-4 years below their expected proficiency levels
2) There is a vast Matthew effect in reading development: the poor are getting poorer and it seems like a journey of no return.

Our new world order is that of discontinuous continuities where there is a constant disruption of orderliness and simultaneous recreation of new ones. Many more children learn to speak and succeed in more than one language and the vast majority would have proficiency in at least 3 by the time they are 6 years old (a threshold age for language acquisition). Our contemporary children do not have 'mother tongue'; they have a repertoire that contains many languages that 'leak into each other'. The boundaries cannot hold! Besides, these have always been artificial in many complex multilingual spaces such as South Africa. One needs to stress that these new generation of speakers make sense of the world in which they live and of who they are. There is no mental or identity confusion as the old stories imposed on natural human gift: multilingualism. In terms of use, I have termed this versatile way of using at least three languages in the same speech context  as multilanguaging. More articles are forthcoming to explain this phenomenon.

The questions are: Why do we still stick to monolingual norms when the majority of the world populations are multilinguaging? Why are textbooks written in one language when readers can speak more than the language of writing?  However way one looks at it, we seem not to tap into the full potential for human capacity. Even more, we frustrate the speakers and question the nature of their being. The real problem is our thinking that language is the tail end of our teaching instead of a means to learning. Once language teacher forego their focus on what languages look like to what speakers do with their languages, we will have reached a milestone in this journey for multilingual education and literacies---an age of multilanguaging.

Related sites:
 @leketimakalela
www.leketi.makalela.co.za