The Editor, Sir:

Let us keep patois out of our schools. It should remain what it is, a street language.

Patois is a word of of French origin which means to handle clumsily. It is often applied to any language that is spoken badly.

So patois as a second language? Who needs one? Let us try to master the one we now speak, and make it mandatory that our children learn the language of our trading partners so that they can communicate on an international basis.

Leave the English language as it is. We have mutilated it enough.

Under 'colonialism'

We have been so eager to crawl out from under 'colonialism' now we want to abandon the English language, the most widely spoken language across the globe.

Ask the millions of Jamaicans living abroad now what patois has done for them. I rest my case.

I am, etc.,

GERALD A. HEDMANN

P.O. Box 20

Morant Bay, st Thomas