A matter of medium

The medium of instruction will remain a debatable issue in a country as diverse as India till policymakers on education shift their focus to substance. Form should not be an issue. Linguists and pedagogues across the world agree that if a child receives primary education in mother tongue, her cognitive skills and ability to learn a second or third language are enhanced. Their findings are based on empirical evidence; nowhere do they talk of scrapping other languages. Therefore, the recommendations made by the RSS-affiliated Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas to the HRD Ministry that no foreign language should be offered as an alternative to Indian languages and that the medium of instruction should be mother tongue alone take a step backwards. 

Maybe such noises about the monopoly of mother tongue and glorification of Indian culture, by exclusion of others perhaps, make good politics; they cannot translate into either providing jobs, or creating a rich pool of knowledge. They are not worth consideration for the new education policy currently under formulation. Atal Bihari Vajpayee Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, the Hindi-only university in Bhopal, received only three applications for its engineering courses. And despite their uproar against English and in favour of Konkani and Marathi in Goa, post-election, the BJP has gone soft on English-medium education. 

The three-language formula followed in schools emphasises elementary learning in mother tongue only. Yet students are moving to English-medium schools to improve their chances of employment. India has been able to take advantage of call-centre jobs that require a workable knowledge of English. The insistence on mother tongue may deny Indians the sole advantage they enjoy over other Asians. Presumably, shakha members send their own children to English-medium schools; by putting a reverse gear on education they seek to check Indians out of the global job market. The NCERT suggests better pedagogy in teaching languages, including English, across schools to improve students’ employment potential in the global job market. Last week HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar insisted that “the government’s role must be of a facilitator and not a controller”; he should reject these unenlightened recommendations and act on his own words.