Column The multilingual imperative

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Save & Share Article

What’s this?

Digg	My Yahoo	Fark
del.icio.us	Newsvine	Reddit

Rate This Article

Rating:  0

Kancha Ilaiah is a leading Dalit rights advocate who believes that India’s school education system has two distinct structures; regional language education is meant for Dalit-Bahujan children while English education is mostly meant for the upper castes. His belief that this division is mirrored in government and private schools inspired him to spearhead a campaign to switch government schools in Andhra Pradesh from regional languages to English as the medium of instruction. He believes that a) language is different from culture, b) most of the “mother tongue gang” educates their children in private English schools and, c) traditionally disadvantaged groups need English because it is a vocational skill.

This feisty professor of political science at Osmania University saw recent success with the AP government agreeing to introduce English from the sixth standard in 6500 schools. The next phase of his campaign advocates starting English earlier (Kindergarten) and convincing other states. His more controversial thoughts involve asking the State reorganization committee for a review of linguistic states and adopting English as the national language because “this will allow the poor and productive masses to learn the language of administration and globalization”.

I work for a people supply chain company running out of inventory. I am agnostic to the dogmatic, emotional and ideological issues that sabotage healthy debate around education and training reform; private vs government delivery, traditional vs. child centric curriculums, long term vs short term courses, accreditation vs. outcome centric and English vs. regional instruction. All we should care about is employable people and as Deng Xiaoping quipped, if a cat catches mice does it matter if it is black or white? India has so far failed Noah’s test (predicting rain is not enough, building an ark is all that matters) and we should act immediately to improve the employability of our youth.