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Column The multilingual imperative

Manish Sabharwal
Posted: 2008-07-05 21:06:32+05:30 IST
Updated: Jul 05, 2008 at 2106 hrs IST

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: 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...

Comments

» english education

Posted by prof.s.divakaran Jodhpur University on 2008-08-04 04:17:42.261569+05:30
This column has commended Kancha Iliah whose writings are mostly uninformed and inflammatory.How he continues in the Political Science dept in Osmania U is surprising.The man is a bigot. Is he prepared to foot the cost of educating one child in English? We do not need Kancah Iliahs for the dalits, we need late Rajaji who suggested better schooll education with afternoon timings so tht the rural parents are enabled to send the children to school instead of making them work in the field. No more Kancha Iliahs and charlatans of the like please.

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» english education

Posted by prof.s.divakaran Jodhpur University on 2008-08-04 04:17:31.369113+05:30
This column has commended Kancha Iliah whose writings are mostly uninformed and inflammatory.How he continues in the Political Science dept in Osmania U is surprising.The man is a bigot. Is he prepared to foot the cost of educating one child in English? We do not need Kancah Iliahs for the dalits, we need late Rajaji who suggested better schooll education with afternoon timings so tht the rural parents are enabled to send the children to school instead of making them work in the field. No more Kancha Iliahs and charlatans of the like please.

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» english education

Posted by prof.s.divakaran Jodhpur University on 2008-08-04 04:17:18.749762+05:30
This column has commended Kancha Iliah whose writings are mostly uninformed and inflammatory.How he continues in the Political Science dept in Osmania U is surprising.The man is a bigot. Is he prepared to foot the cost of educating one child in English? We do not need Kancah Iliahs for the dalits, we need late Rajaji who suggested better schooll education with afternoon timings so tht the rural parents are enabled to send the children to school instead of making them work in the field. No more Kancha Iliahs and charlatans of the like please.

Reply Forward

» english education

Posted by prof.s.divakaran Jodhpur University on 2008-08-04 04:17:16.581058+05:30
This column has commended Kancha Iliah whose writings are mostly uninformed and inflammatory.How he continues in the Political Science dept in Osmania U is surprising.The man is a bigot. Is he prepared to foot the cost of educating one child in English? We do not need Kancah Iliahs for the dalits, we need late Rajaji who suggested better schooll education with afternoon timings so tht the rural parents are enabled to send the children to school instead of making them work in the field. No more Kancha Iliahs and charlatans of the like please.

Reply Forward

» english education

Posted by prof.s.divakaran Jodhpur University on 2008-08-04 04:17:11.20686+05:30
This column has commended Kancha Iliah whose writings are mostly uninformed and inflammatory.How he continues in the Political Science dept in Osmania U is surprising.The man is a bigot. Is he prepared to foot the cost of educating one child in English? We do not need Kancah Iliahs for the dalits, we need late Rajaji who suggested better schooll education with afternoon timings so tht the rural parents are enabled to send the children to school instead of making them work in the field. No more Kancha Iliahs and charlatans of the like please.

Reply Forward

» english education

Posted by prof.s.divakaran Jodhpur University on 2008-08-04 04:17:08.092986+05:30
This column has commended Kancha Iliah whose writings are mostly uninformed and inflammatory.How he continues in the Political Science dept in Osmania U is surprising.The man is a bigot. Is he prepared to foot the cost of educating one child in English? We do not need Kancah Iliahs for the dalits, we need late Rajaji who suggested better schooll education with afternoon timings so tht the rural parents are enabled to send the children to school instead of making them work in the field. No more Kancha Iliahs and charlatans of the like please.

Reply Forward

» english education

Posted by prof.s.divakaran Jodhpur University on 2008-08-04 04:16:59.925228+05:30
This column has commended Kancha Iliah whose writings are mostly uninformed and inflammatory.How he continues in the Political Science dept in Osmania U is surprising.The man is a bigot. Is he prepared to foot the cost of educating one child in English? We do not need Kancah Iliahs for the dalits, we need late Rajaji who suggested better schooll education with afternoon timings so tht the rural parents are enabled to send the children to school instead of making them work in the field. No more Kancha Iliahs and charlatans of the like please.

Reply Forward

» english education

Posted by prof.s.divakaran Jodhpur University on 2008-08-04 04:16:46.164858+05:30
This column has commended Kancha Iliah whose writings are mostly uninformed and inflammatory.How he continues in the Political Science dept in Osmania U is surprising.The man is a bigot. Is he prepared to foot the cost of educating one child in English? We do not need Kancah Iliahs for the dalits, we need late Rajaji who suggested better schooll education with afternoon timings so tht the rural parents are enabled to send the children to school instead of making them work in the field. No more Kancha Iliahs and charlatans of the like please.

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» Multilingual Imperative

Posted by Pranjal Das on 2008-07-08 08:05:17.067346+05:30
I can't agree more. Failure to adopt English as a common medium of education is one of the great hypocrisies of modern India. The starting point for bridging the rural urban divide is to educate rural India in English medium

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