The Special Bilingual Education Program: Pace-Setter for a Harmonized Educational System in Cameroon

Abstract

This article considers the government’s strategy to densify young learners’ education in their Second Language (L2) through a Special Bilingual Education Program (SBEP) as a pace-setter for harmonizing the Anglo-saxon and the French subsystems of education. This article is guided by Foucault’s (1997) theoretical perspective of Governmentality which according to Dean (1999), identifies an approach towards thinking about the state and different mentalities of government. Three hundred and eighty (316) informants from the SBEP centres provided data for this study through Questionnaires, Interviews and Observations. The results revealed that: there is a SBEP where learners are partially immersed in their L2 with a shift in teaching approach from the Skill-Based Approach (SBA) to the Competency-Based Approach (CBA); learners, teachers and parents have a positive attitude towards the program; parents from Francophone homes had already taken the lead in fully immersing their children in the Anglo-saxon subsystem of education; and teachers and learners have made proposals to ameliorate and maintain the program. This article recommends that rather than stick to the Arts Series, the program should consider including learners from both the Arts and Science Series in the Second Cycle.