3ll_language

Modern education was redefined in terms of a purely modernist paradigm, where indigenous knowledge, its method and processes of appropriation, were not only ridiculed but also completely discarded for the sake of establishing the unquestionable supremacy of European knowledge. No need or rationale (utilitarian argument) was found to improve and adapt the indigenous knowledge to suit the modern educational needs. The condition of vernacular education in numerous new schools of north India, supported by the government, was worse off. In these schools only dominant languages such as Sanskritised Hindi and Bhadralok Bengali were given the recognisable status for mother-tongue education. Popular languages
or dialects such as Maithili, Bhojpuri, Braj, Awadhi, Santhali and Chattisgarhi were neither utilised nor recognised for advancement of mother-tongue education. Although some of these popular languages have had rich and accomplished literacy traditions, they were not given judicious representation in the modern educational system.
...both standard Hindi and English have come to symbolise the hegemonic dominance of the regional and national elites. While English sits at the top of the social-cultural hierarchy, Hindi enjoys a secondlanguage acquisition status as it coexists to struggle
for its identity and native self-respect...Some of these local dialects and languages (particularly the tribal languages) might face extinction sooner or later, but the social cost of their disuse is now being felt. It has further marginalised the lower groups and strata, prevented them from being associated with emotive nationalism, empowering literacy and enlightened citizenship. To the extent the ordinary masses have a strong expressive identity through their language, they have lost all trust in the affairs of the state, which developed not only a weak but also a disempowering educational and linguistic structure during the last one century.

English education was introduced by the British with the twin purpose of impressing upon the natives the value of western thought and of preparing them for taking up jobs to assist in the administration of the country. The first proteges were Hindus and there developed a Hindu middle class which began to demand concessions from the government without offering subservience in return. The British then began to encourage the Muslims to adopt English education in order to develop a counterpoise to Hindu middle class assertiveness. But among both com-munities English education was strictly an upper class affair in which the lower castes had no role.

The English Hatao' movement of the 60s, concentrated mainly in north India, has gradually been replaced by a pan-Indian demand for 'English Sikhao', cutting across all classes. Now more than ever, most Indians consider English to be the language of opportunity providing access to know-ledge, power and material possessions.
... This has had a considerable impact on well known government-aided schools teaching in the regional medium. To cope with this new demand, educa-tional trusts running established regional medium schools have added English medium divisions to existing classes.
The vitality of our regional cultures depends on the vibrancy of our regional medium schools And if these schools have to stem the exodus of students, English teaching in these institutions must significantly improve...

- The English Juggernaut Regional Medium Schools in Crisis, John Kurien, Hindustan Times, 30/04/2004, N20 /eldoc/n20_/30april04ht1.pdf

'How to save Marathi?' has lately been the refrain in many spoken and printed presentations and discussions at popular as well as more serious levels of communication. Marathi is felt to be losing ground to Hindi and English. But the less kind but more relevant question still remains to be asked: c Why save Marathi?' What is it that one saves by saving Marathi? To save Marathi is to save the language, the literature, and the culture embodied in these two, all three associated with a certain region. One should begin by asking: How has this peculiar state of affairs come into being? How and when did the Marathi language come into existence? One mustn't forget that language constantly changes over time not too rapidly, otherwise the change will disrupt communication between grandparent and grandchild.

- LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY AND LINGUISTIC IDENTITIES IN INDIA, Ashok R. Kelkar, New Quest, 01/07/2001, /eldoc/n00_/01jul01NEQ.pdf

The India Act of "1813 was the first important landmark: in the East India Company's education policy", (Basu 1982: 91) for it included "a clause requiring the annual expenditure by the Directors of the East India Company of a lakh of rupees on education" (Report of the Com-mission on Christian Higher Education in India 1931: 63). Earlier the Company had refrained from such commitments, but now the earlier ban on private enterprise in education in its territories was lifted in 1815 (ibid). In 1833 the Company's allotment to education was increased to ten lakh rupees (Chamberlain 1899: 32). But the government's commit-ment was never adequate to the task. For it adopted a 'downward filtration' approach as first proposed by Lord Auckland in 1839, and described by Nurullah and Naik thus: "the Company was expected to give a good education (which then necessarily meant education through English) to only a few persons (these may or may not be from the upper classes) and leave it to these persons to educate the masses (through modern Indian languages)" (Nurullah and Naik 1951: 113). The implicit class and caste bias of such an elitist policy was inevitable. It was only strengthened further by the adoption of Macaulay's minute of 1835 in favour of English as the medium for European learning. This effectively destroyed the old indigenous system of education and put the new western one decisively beyond the reach of the masses. The Company's Education dispatch of 19th July 1854, called the Wood Dispatch, rejected this theory in principle, but "replaced it with the doctrine of state withdrawal in favour of a system of grants-in-aid to privately managed institutions...

Article 29 (i) provides that any citizen having a distinct language, script, special care of the economic and educational interests of the underprivileged sections, particularly, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes is laid down as an obligation of the State under Article 46. Though education is in the concurrent list of the Constitution, the state govenments play a very major role in the development of education particularly in the primary and the secondary education sectors.

- Through the eyes of a foreigner, Sharada Prahladrao, Deccan Herald, 16/12/2001, N20 /eldoc/n20_/16DEC01DH10.htm

Thus there are various dimensions to the issue of link language. If the objective of having Hindi as link language is to be realised perhaps the Northern States have to learn compulsorily a South Indian Language and implement the three language formula successfully. A solution to the link language issue has to be found out because on it rests the intra-regional balance and harmony in India's Federal System. The solution by itself depends on the (i) Uniform implementation of the three language formula i.e. Regional language, English and Hindi strictly all over the country with compulsory teaching of a South Indian language by theHindi States; (ii) It is better to allow a common link language to evolve gradually; (iii) In the meanwhile English shall continue to play its role.

Many educators have expressed that the present school system in India is too centralized, elite-dominated and urban-oriented. The new cultural curriculum and pedagogy must take into account the life-views and living styles of the communities to which the school-going children belong and adapt the content of learning to their needs and aspirations.
The Constitution of India provides full freedom to the states to choose a language or languages in a region as Official language(s) (Article 345). It also allows linguistic minority groups to receive education in their mother tongue and to set up institution of their choice for this purpose (Article 30). With the result, there is inevitable flexibility in the weightage assigned to different languages in the total educational programmes in the framing of language curricula, in selecting textbooks, and so on.
Since 1980 the domain of 'education' in policy making has been brought under the Concurrent List of the Constitution, allowing both the Union and state governments to initiate legislation on educational policies.

Amid sharp controversies concerning the role of different languages in education, a broad consensus was arrived in the Three-Language-Formula around the sixties which provided a basis of policy for a minimum requirement of languages in school education. The Formula has been differently interpreted by different states. The choice of determining the second or third place for Hindi or English was left to the individual states.

A foreign language can tend to alienate those that are raised speak their own mother tongue...and can cause a cognitive disconnect

Language is an important vehicle for the transfer of samskaras or impressions from the speaker (or writer) to the listener (or reader). Language, however, is not merely a vehicle of communication or transfer of messages, but it also serves to give shape to the contents of what is being conveyed. Such is the case, because the speaker is also conducting an inward dialogue with the self and inducing a like inward dialogue in the listener. So the growth and development of language goes hand in hand with the growth and development of the culture which that language serves. Indeed, sometimes even a single expression in frequent use may come to be seen as revelatory of a culture.

The teacher is the focal point and a catalytic agent in the educational process of the tribal child. Unfortu-nately many teachers are non-tribals working in tribal schools. Unless they have knowledge of a tribal language or a language of wider communication prevailing among the tribals forming a school community, the teacher is at a great loss. In the interest of health, classroom community interaction, the teacher' must learn the language of tribal community.

The monolingual tribal child faces cognitive and communicative problems where the instruction is in the major regional language... tribal children suffer for speaking in their mother tongue and not being able to speak the school language. They neither understand the language of the text nor the teacher. As the teacher does not know the language of the learner and the parents neither know the language of the text book nor the teacher, the break is almost complete. The education is therefore merely symbolic.

Very often the multiplicity of tribal languages and small members of learners in each class are cited as hurdlers for giving instruction. Language as a medium should not be mixed with language as a subject. Language as a subject can be taught at different levels drawing students from different levels drawing students from different classes into a single level. It requires will to instruct in tribal languages. Secondly the socio-linguistic setting is closely related to the strategies of instruction.

'MUMMY and Daddy live in an adivasi wasti in Khed, Maharashtra where power, water supply, All India Radio and Doordar-shan have yet to reach, They are dongri landless labourers, puzzled by their children's use of a strange new language made compulsory in schools since last June." Who is this Mummee who has taken over from aai Who is Good-morning Daddee?
The change is rapid: alarmed rural teach-ers are discovering that a Class I student is now more at ease using English than an older bunch in, say, Class 7. It's a generation where the slowest lad is stuck with a zero in Marathi but top scores in English. "Why does my son call me Mummee? I don't like it. For generations our children have addressed mothers as aai" grumbles for every drink of water?"
The change tests the resilience of the academic staff, too. Teacher Javed Pathan says he once trudged miles to the closest town of Chakan to shop for cake. "My 20 adivasi students of class I and II, with no access to TV radio and power supply, refused to memorise Pat-a-cake since they had never bitten into or marvelled at a cake. I had to even explain the meaning of bakery' he says.
With the obvious success of the experiment, the State will release the my English textbook for standard second, this June. "The revised syl-labus is approved by the Governor. We see no reason to change the pattern or curriculum, because rural children are now including familiar English words in vernacular conversations at home."
"The nursery rhymes have proven the simplest learning experience," says D V Hardikar, special officer for English, describing the easy to grasp message of rain rain come again for kids in a drought-stricken State. In nine months, Meera's little cat has come a full circle in Maharashtra.

The Tamil Nadu legislature has adopted the Compulsory Education Act. Complaints have been aired in this context about the nature of the instruction imparted by the state's Tamil medium schools: complaints of excessive reliance on textbooks, of the use of a version of Tamil that alienates lower caste pupils educational structure is pyramid-shaped, the higher the grade the steeper the incline a student from a marginalised community has to traverse.

The instructional method most prevalent in schools that of chalk and talk also reduces the sense of affinity students need to develop in order to make use of their education. Another dimension that is lost due to the rigid conception of 'good' Tamil is the cultural capital accumulated in dialects.
By correcting the speech of the children belonging different com-munities, we dispossess them of their cultural capital. A poignant example of the sort of loss was observed by me in a Chennai school where there were a number of children from fishing communities. When their teacher introduced the word 'champanki', these first standard children insisted it was a variety of fish. The teacher, who was an upper caste vegetarian, did not agree. The powers vested in her by the state and society ensured that her contention that it was a flower prevailed.

- 'Learn Thoroughly': Primary Schooling in Tamil Nadu, Aruna R, Economic & Political Weekly, 01/05/1999, /eldoc/n00_/01may99EPW.pdf

The teacher in a typical school generally adheres to the common belief that the nonstandard variety which the child already knows is inherently inferior to the standard variety. It is often assumed that the child merely knows a 'dialect' and comes to school without a "language' which has to be taught to hi in. In fact this view is actively propagated by the protagonists of standard variety in all fields of activity. However, from the linguistic point of view, nothing could be farther from the truth. What the teacher fails to understand is that all varieties are equally systematic and differ from each other in a regular way in terms of sound, vocabulary and sentence structure, and the deviant form its pupil produce are deviant only from the point of view of the standard and are not inherently wrong. A particular variety comes to be accepted as standard not because of its inherent superiority but because of social factors [Eklavya, 1984:6].

- Language and the Nationality Question, Sadhna Saxena, Economic & Political Weekly, 08/02/1997, /eldoc/n00_/08feb97EPW.pdf

Language cannot be analysed outside the context of sociocultural forces. In the case of the Indian student being educated in English, by institutions, and the media, 'a dissociation of sensibility' also needs attention. During the course of a recent talk-show on 'Ragging in col-leges',the discussion veered towards the issue of teasing freshly admitted students from a 'vernacular-medium' background. Students from professional courses, all articulate in English, spoke of the need to have 'sympathetic feelings for these outsiders who feel lost in a new and strange environment'. "It isn't right to trouble a village simple-ton," said one of the participants. Such sentiments may from compassion, no doubt, but they also reveal a serious and widening attitudinal and class divide. In several educational institutes, such students are placed in a separate language class to facilitate their learn-ing. Inevitably, however, the tag of being 'a vernacular' attaches itself to them and affects their interaction with their other classmates as well as with staff members. Lack of com-petence in English, they feel, brings about an inferiority complex, loss of confidence in class participa-tion and in group discussions, social withdrawal, and at times, even a sense of shame at one's own family background.

1. Different Approaches for Achieving EFA - Indian Experience, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, 01/01/2003, R.N00.41
- pg 34-35

2. Ministry of Human Resource Development - Annual Report 2003-2004, Government of India, 01/01/2004, R.N00.30,
- Language education- pg231-242

3. Literacy in Development: People, Language and Power, Street, Brian (Ed), Education for Development, 01/01/1990, R.N30.2

4. National Curriculum Framework For School Education - A Discussion Document, NCERT, 01/01/2000, R.N20.3, - Language Education- pg 38-42

5. National Policy on Education 1986 - Programme of Action 1992, Government of India, R.N00.33,
- Development of Languages Ch 18- pg 94-98

6. National Policy on Education 1986 (As modified in 1992) National Policy on Education, 1968, Government of India, 01/01/1998, R.N00.34
- part 3 Development of Languages- pg 39-40

8. Scheme of Financial Assistance to Voluntary Organisations for Promotional Activities Relating to Indian Languages, Ministry of Human Resource Development, R.L52.1

9. The Position of Languages in School Curriculum in India, MG Chaturvedi, BV Mohale, NCERT, 1976

10. Sixth All India Educational Survey, Main Report, NCERT, 1999, - Ch 11. Languages and Media of Instruction in Schools, MK Gupta, pg. 158

11. - Education for all, Learning for all, Learning conference 2004, MHRD and Azim Premji foundation- language - R.N21.24

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1. Socialisation. Inequality
- Learning from Conflict, Kumar, Krishna, Orient Longman, 01/01/1996, B.N00.K8
- “Two Worlds” Ch 4 pg 59-74

2. - Education For Social Change, Desrochers, John, Centre for Social Action, 01/01/1987, B.N00.D2, 4. language Education
- “Medium of Instruction” pg 286-290

3. - Pivotal Issues in Indian Education, Kochhar, S.K., Sterling Publishers Pvt.Ltd., 01/01/1981, B.N20.K1, 293
*Language Problem- Ch 24 p.g. 294-321

4. Learning Techniques
- The Child's Language And The Teacher - A Handbook, Kumar, Krishna, National Book Trust, 01/01/2004, B.N20a.K2

5. Second Language Acquisition: Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Aspects of English in India, Agnihotri, R K & Khanna, A L, Sage Publications, 01/01/1994, B.L52.A3

6. Gandhiji's Solution of the Language Problem of India - Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Lecture Series-1, Saksena, B.R., MGMRC, 01/01/1972, B.L52.S10

7. Great Debate, The: Language Controversy and University Education, Shah, A. B. (Ed), Lalwani Publishing House, 01/01/1968, B.L52.S5

8. Education and Democracy in India, Ch 6 Pedagogy and Politics: The Case of English Textbooks, Shalini Advani pg 79, Manohar, 2004, B.N00.V1

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