New Education Policy’s language prescription fraught with future risks

The Narendra Modi government’s prescriptions for the medium of instruction in primary schools in the National Education Policy are tantamount to playing with fire.

The policy suggests that the mother tongue/local language should be the medium of instruction till Class 5 or even Class 8. The nativistic pitch – which may have some pedagogic benefits, too, at an early age – is a can of worms for a country like India, which sees many people migrating across its length and breadth for better jobs and a better life.

While the Centre has said after the NEP recommendations were made public that the language policy is a broad guideline and that the implementation would be up to the states, many states would perhaps implement it, as they have been organised on a linguistic basis.

The guidelines can create problems, and I say this with experience.

In 1984, I spent a year in Guwahati as a Class 3 student. My father had been posted there. I was admitted in arguably the best school there and had to learn the Assamese language.

But there was no other difference with north India, where I came from. My family hired a private tutor and I barely scraped through in Assamese, but all the other subjects were within my comfort zone.

I shudder to think what would have happened if I were in that situation now, and states had decided to implement the recommendations with zeal. I would have understood only my English and Hindi lectures and all the other subjects would have been incomprehensible in the regional language.

My only option would have been a school run by a linguistic minority trust, if there were a good school of that sort. The constitution permits religious and linguistic minorities to run and administer educational institutions of their own.

In other words, if this prescription is implemented in letter and spirit, it will make life difficult for short-term migrants. What about the families of military, paramilitary and central allied services staff, who can be posted anywhere in India? What about the IT professional from Chennai who lands a job in Gurugram when his daughter is in Class 4 and gets another job in Mumbai the next year?

What about the migrant labourer from Bihar who starts working at a construction site when his son is in Class 2 and then moves to Mumbai when he is in Class 4?

Are we offering an incentive – in a country with strong and deeply held regional-linguistic identities – for many students to fall by the wayside and have their learning outcomes plummet just because we wish to celebrate “tradition” in the most unthinking of ways?

It is important that the present government realises that the present three-language formula – with schools having English or Indian languages as the medium of instruction, as a matter of choice – is best suited for India.

The country sees large-scale migrations, both blue-collar and white-collar. Should people have to weigh their choices of free movement for better opportunities against the future of their children?

Some may say that this is scare-mongering. That the recommendations are fairly carefully worded for any such prediction to come true. But we have to remember that strong regional-linguistic identities across the length and breadth of the country are likely to create real problems. Not just enhanced linguistic chauvinism but also real problems in learning outcomes across disciplines.

This is a potential prescription for the dumbing down of the families of the upwardly mobile, even as the elites take to international schools to insulate themselves against the policy.

The anti-English pitch inherent in the policy won’t help one bit. Despite its colonial past, English does become a link language for the country. Just as Rafale, despite being French, becomes a pride of our military might for many these days.

Without English as a link language, how does one foster a pan-Indian public sphere? No single Indian language is acceptable to people across the country. Its spread may not be thick in any state, but English remains the language of inter-regional communication. It is English that binds, say, Chennai and Delhi into a common, national, public sphere.

There have been schools that have given more importance to the local language, like the famous Sardar Patel school in Delhi. But that should be a choice – with parents also choosing schools for their children as per their circumstances. There cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach, which the policy seems to be hinting at.

This isn’t all. Students will start by learning mathematical and scientific terms in the local language. That is, until class 5 or class 8. The Lowest Common Multiple (LCM) will become Laghuttam Samaapvartak in Hindi.

Leave alone the fate of the Tamil student whose family happens to get a posting in, say, Agra in UP, the transition to English medium in later classes – as science higher education is still about English books – will be an effort even for local students.

One doubts how many enthusiastic supporters of the present policy on social media will indeed be able to understand a notification in Hindi by the UP, Rajasthan or MP governments. It isn’t that they don’t know the language. It is that their parents chose to offer them an English education, which is the language of the market in the global capitalist order. Also, most modern academic disciplines the way we know them today emerged in the modern west, and most Indian-language translations are literal rather than an organic aspect of the lifeworld of those languages. They constitute a modern break, rather than a continuity in those languages.

It isn’t that English is imposed on us as a society. The fact remains that it offers better job opportunities and also a privileged social status. Working class people also choose to get their children educated in the English medium.

The mother tongue is indeed conducive to better learning outcomes in early childhood. But that is something that also depends on the home environment. Many families choose to talk to their children in English, thus complicating the notion of the mother tongue. This isn’t imposition but a choice, as parents want their children to speak English fluently. The mother tongue is best promoted at home, and not as something imposed in a centralising manner by the state.

One argument for the centrality of a native language is that many nations pursue education in their own language rather than English.

However, this argument falls flat when one sees the complexities of the country. It isn’t possible to offer linguistic uniformity to India. Attempts to make Hindi replace English in the 1960s led to a powerful anti-Hindi agitation among Tamil speakers, because they saw Hindi as completely alien to them. Cultural concerns apart, any imposition of Hindi would have put their children at a disadvantage vis-à-vis Hindi-speakers.

It may be true that many Indian languages have a strong etymological association with Sanskrit. But it is impossible to make it a language of official use. One, very few know it. It is more a language of ritual and classical texts than a language of daily use, and this has been its reality throughout Indian history. Its closest parallel in the west would be Latin in medieval Europe.

Two, Sanskrit carries the pejorative tag of being a “Brahminical language” in the eyes of many, and would not be acceptable to Dalit and minority groups. In Tamil Nadu, with a history of the Dravidian movement, neither Hindi nor Sanskrit as an option will wash. English alone links it linguistically to the rest of the country.

In its constant trysts with experimentation and nativism, the government seems to be inclined to create fresh educational problems rather than solving existent ones.

It would be best not to tweak the existent three-language formula and permit parents to decide whether they wish to choose an English- or Indian-language medium of instruction for their children. The state should ideally not order these decisions, which are best left for families to make.