School Rhymes in today’s Congolese society: A sociopragmatic approach

Abstract

This paper focuses on the impact of school rhymes on social security and cohesion in the Republic of Congo. It aims to elucidate the nature of the skills that are installed in schoolchildren through the teaching of school rhymes in order to make them capable of acting in favor of social security and cohesion later. Today, the Republic of Congo is going through a socio -cultural and institutional crisis, to a certain extent. This is illustrated by the depravity of morals and the recurrence of acts of violence perpetrated in the streets of large cities and in schools by adolescents organized into criminal gangs known under the names 'kuluna', 'Arabs' and 'Americans'. The investigation is documented mainly with the data collected from the manuals of school rhymes published by INRAP CONGO in collaboration with the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education and Literacy in 2011. It is revealed in the light of a descriptive and contextual approach that school rhymes fill an ideological function, a commitment to serve the homeland; the Congolese nation. As such, this research falls within the framework of the performative aspects of language in Dell Hymes’ (1974) sense.