Date: 10/09/2022

Relevance: GS-2: Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Education, Human Resources

Key Phrases: The National Education Policy 2020, Strong Home-School Partnership, Knowledge Deficit, Targeting Mechanical Learning, Getting A Better Sense Of Their Cultural Background, Multilingual Programme In The Early Years Of Schooling.

Context:

• There has been a raging debate over the need for children to have their mother tongue as the medium of instruction in schools.
• Although educationists have emphasized the importance of learning in the mother tongue to enhance a child’s learning and overcome glaring inequities, there has been an equally steady demand for English-medium schools in several States.

How the English language is acting as a barrier for the Indian population?

• English-medium education is a profound tragedy in the Indian education system today as English has become both the dream as well as the despair of millions of people.
• The inability to learn in English — not English as a language but as a medium of instruction has led to a deterioration in learners’ productivity as well as outcomes.
• It is only for those who are at the top that English has become almost a home language.
• Besides many private schools which teach in English, Government schools too in States like Tamil Nadu are switching to English medium under parents’ pressure and fear of losing students.
• Presently, the student is made not only to read and write in English but also to learn that language itself and this twin burden on the student results in slower rate of learning.

Factors that have created the tremendous aspiration for English learning:

• Aspiration for socio-economic advancement and opportunities that open up with English language learning from an early age.
• Inadequacy in the language leads to loss of economic and educational opportunities.
• Dalit activists have highlighted the unfair education system of India with English for the classes and Mother Tongue(MT) for the masses and thus it comes out to be among the most exclusionary education system, in the world.

Can the Indian population be denied education in English language?

• English must be taught effectively but as a second language in a way the entire non-English speaking world is also learning it today and the way it was taught in India till the 1980s and 1990s.
• There are political forces, especially Dalit groups, who insist that English has been the language of liberation for them.
• They look at it like that because of the denial and the deprivation of Dalits in the education system, and that’s important to acknowledge.
• The pedagogical aspect of a child learning a second language is much better if the proficiency and confidence in the first language is established in the first four-five years.

How the language policy can be reoriented?

• The National Education Policy (NEP), 2020 recommends that the home language, mother tongue, local language, or regional language wherever possible should be the medium of instruction until at least Grade 5, but preferably till Grade 8.
• There is an almost-complete consensus among educationists, linguistic experts, and psychologists that the mother tongue or the native language of the child is the only appropriate language of learning for the child.
• The mother tongue, home language, or the first language educationally means the language which the child uses to connect to the world, to people, to nature, to the environment, and to make sense of everything that’s going on.
• This is the language that helps the child to build, grow and develop in every way.
• A child can be taught any number of languages, particularly later in life, but the medium of learning in primary schools should be the mother tongue.

What are the benefits of learning in mother tongue(MT)?

1. MT is vital in framing the thinking and emotions of people which causes the comprehensive development of a child helping the student express himself/herself better. This will thus make school learning two way communication between teacher and students. Understanding the subject would boost the confidence of the student and propel him/her to continue with his/her schooling thus, lowering the drop-out rate.
2. Educating children in their mother tongue will also build a strong home-school partnership in their learning. Parents will be able to participate in their child’s education and make the experience of learning for the students more wholesome.
3. It will also benefit the primary school teachers as many of them find it difficult to express themselves in English and hence are not able to transfer as much knowledge as they would like to, thus creating a knowledge deficit.
4. Providing primary education in mother tongue will also decentralize the task of textbook making which will bring the content in textbooks closer to children and make them understand the syllabus better and thus targeting mechanical learning.
5. Learning in a foreign language also brings a sense of alienation from ones’ own culture and heritage. Education in mother tongue will help the students in getting a better sense of their cultural background and therefore helps him/her progress in life his/her roots intact.

• Case Study: A survey by Oxford University revealed that children, who have their mother tongue as medium of instruction outperform the children, who have a foreign language as the medium of instruction. Their ideas were rich, nuanced and original with much better observations and analyses than even some of the English-medium students who had studied only in English right from the beginning.

In what way an enabling environment can be created in classrooms where students come from diverse backgrounds?

• There is a middle path available, the implementation of which requires vision, commitment, and patient efforts to build up systemic and individual capacities.
• A multilingual society such as India needs to imagine and implement a strong and viable bilingual/multilingual programme in the early years of schooling.
• In a truly bilingual/multilingual programme, differing languages would not be taught separately as distinct subjects, but would be integrated into the daily life and work of the classroom.
• This is especially easy to imagine in preschool settings, where there could be spaces in which switch overs between the MT, the regional language, and English are encouraged.
• In such preschools, it is important that the MT is used when new concepts are being introduced or discussed.
• MT should also be used for giving instruction and building relationships.
• English should be introduced with the objective of achieving basic conversational proficiency in the early years.
• Where more than one MT exists in a classroom, there are constitutional provisions for providing MT-based instruction if 10 students in a class of 40 students speak the same language.
• In more diverse linguistic contexts, even if media of instruction move between the regional language and English, the curriculum and pedagogy could make spaces and provisions for welcoming and including the different languages of a classroom.
• The multilingual approach thus, is much more flexible, closer to the child, and inclusive.

Conclusion:

• MT-based education has significant cognitive, academic and socioemotional advantages, especially during the early years.
• However, this does not mean that we shut the door to English in our preschool classrooms.
• This myth must be broken that our education system is class and caste neutral.
• A powerful political movement will have to take place to make the language of learning a choice that is made democratically.
• A considerable amount of investment will need to be done for this.
• It is worth considering that we lose nothing by encouraging multilingualism in our classrooms, but stand to gain much.

Source: The Hindu

Mains Question:

Q. What are the benefits of education in mother tongue in primary schools? In what way an enabling environment can be created in classrooms for a comprehensive learning and enhancement of cognitive capabilities where students come from diverse backgrounds?(250 words).