Column The multilingual imperative

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: 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.

The employment prospects for English speaking youth are 400% better than those from regional language schools. They not only have geographic choices (labour mobility is low for youth who are not multi-lingual) but have an unfair advantage by speaking the language of business. Language is an emotional subject but just as the adoption of standards like windows, railway gauges, internet protocols, etc lead to greater inter-operability and usage, English has integrated our diversity. As a country with 22 languages in our constitution, English is a “subsidiary official language” that is used for most official and inter-state correspondence. Historian Ramachandra Guha considers not forcing the adoption of Hindi as the official language as one of the geniuses of the independent India’s founding fathers. He attributes some of the troubles of Sri Lanka with its Tamil North and Pakistan with Bangladesh to their insistence on thrusting a language onto a reluctant people. So English is a gift.

But English also has downsides. Languages capture the ethos, dreams and experiences of a culture but tragically of the 7000 languages spoken in the world today, 1 of them dies every 2 weeks. As David Harrison, a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore, says “When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, mathematics, landscapes, edible flowers, myths, music, the unknown, and the everyday”. The death of languages has many reasons but experts view the global adoption of English as one of them.

India’s culture has strong roots and is not one of the five “global hotspots” for language extinction recently identified by National Geographic. But India must accept that non-English schools have poor employment outcomes. English is like Windows; an operating system that we may not like but without which we are handicapped in the world of work. Regional languages have their place but making our children multilingual (code for learning English) must be made a policy priority in the long overdue agenda for education reform. Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan has deeply impacted the quantity problem by getting children into schools. Now it’s time to think about the quality problem and English fluency lies at the heart of making our education system more relevant, useful and inclusive.

I may not agree with everything that Prof Ilaiah believes in, but his framing the problem of English instruction as a divide between government and private schools is brilliant, true and sad. Unlike the reform of labour laws and higher education where the blurred boundaries between the state and centre create policy orphans, the reform of government schools lies fully within the mandate and authority of state governments. Hopefully, they will take the lead of private educators; my grandmother ran five Hindi medium schools in Kanpur for 5,000 students for forty years and never tired of trying to fix my Hindi weakness (which she did). But given the realities of employability, with a heavy heart, she has now moved all her schools to English medium. I hope all 82-year old education patriarchs and policy makers are as pragmatic as her.

Reservation is only one of the tools available to help backward castes and tribes. Making our education, employment and employability ecosystem more inclusive is a more sustainable, effective and scalable solution. English education is a great place to start.