In the middle of a pandemic, with schools and universities physically closed and no date set for their reopening, the government has come out with a National Education Policy (NEP) document that suggests the road ahead might be a bit different from the one we knew before. One thing that has excited the public is the section titled Multilingualism and the Power of Language, which says: “Wherever possible, the medium of instruction until at least Grade 5, but preferably till Grade 8 and beyond, will be in the home language/mother tongue/local language/regional language…. This will be followed by both public and private schools.”
It is ironic that this is essentially identical to what Macaulay proposed in 1835 in his famous Minute on Indian education: that Indian children be taught in the local language until Class 5, and even up to Class 8 if they wished, after which instruction should transit to English-medium for those who wished to eventually join the civil services. How times have changed! In the years since Independence, so many of our primary schools have become English-medium that Macaulay’s Minute, which once felt like a racist insult, now feels as populist in global India as Mao’s Cultural Revolution!
If what the government were proposing was that all education be in a local language medium, I would agree that it was radical, though no different from what successful modern countries like China, Japan, Russia and all of Europe are doing. But the government has pulled its punches and limited the ambit of its prescription to Class 5, the end of elementary school. Local languages, it would seem, are merely being offered as a more efficient way of readying children for the same English-medium instruction we have now than as ends in themselves. Private schools must switch to local languages for their primary classes; nowhere does the document suggest that elite private schools should not exist at all.
Is education in the local language a good thing? If we look at the faces of the EWS (Economically Weaker Sections) children admitted to English-medium schools in an attempt at affirmative action, then it becomes clear that understanding their lessons is better than spending the years till the end of Class 5 in a haze, unable to follow or participate in class. Many teachers switch to the local language to include these children, and this rarely poses a problem to the other children in the class.
English as a subject will be taught, however. For children who do not speak English at home, this is definitely a more efficient way to learn it. Our EWS children just do not have enough exposure to English, even in elite schools, to shorten the sad, mute phase where English is taking shape organically in their heads. They do not learn English easily, just as our other students do not end up learning, say, Chinese: there is not enough exposure. But if English were taught as a subject, these children would see equivalences between concepts they already know from home and new words in English, and make the transition to English more painlessly after primary school.
Textbooks already exist, because it is actually easy to adapt a language for teaching science. Almost all new concepts come in the form of nouns, and Indian languages have a long history of adding nouns to their lexicon. Malayalam in the 12th century took in a large number of Sanskrit words, almost all of which were nouns, and in Urdu, too, almost all the Persian words added were nouns. There is no such thing as a language remaining ‘unfit’ for scientific discourse for very long.
It is possible that this shift is intended as a way of unseating the old elite to make place for new blood—Indians who have everything but English and are ready to enter the fray. So what? For too long ‘our’ children have grown up not knowing ‘theirs’ as equals, and this is a big part of why our society is so divided today. Primary education in the local language is being done in at least one top school in Delhi, Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, and it is sad that the success of their experiment has not emboldened more English-medium schools to make the switch on their own.
The writer is a linguist and author based in New Delhi (Views expressed are personal.)
