THIS question has come up for detailed consideration every now and then at various places. ‘Loud Thinking’, too, has picked up this issue on countless occasions. That is because no society can ignore its importance. For, when a society follows a wrong model of language-learning, it is only inviting trouble for it in the long run. Visiting schools and discussing educational issues with right people has been an integral part of my professional work. That often took me to forlorn frontiers of our school system. One of those frontiers relate to language-learning. This is one terribly ignored area in our philosophy of schools.

 

Two major happenings have made themselves visible in the past quarter of a century. The first relates to mushrooming of so-called English medium schools; and the second relates to a terrible shrinking of number of schools giving instructions in Indian languages --the language schools, so to speak. Every family wishes to send its wards to English medium schools, while Marathi and Hindi and other medium schools are either running with scant numbers of students or even closing down -- in the process rendering many talented teachers jobless. These dirty ‘new’ normals, thus, have already been menacing the school education scenario at least for the past two decades. This retrograde process needs to be examined thoroughly again -- and possibly altered suitably with refreshed ideas on school education. When such a scrutiny is to be undertaken, the first requisite is honesty in accepting reality.

 

Let us face this ugly fact -- the quality of teaching of all subjects in English is awful, to say the least, in shockingly high numbers of the so-called English medium schools. Neither do the kids learn English well, nor does such education ensure good jobs once the kids grow up. And one of the most critical and oft-repeated reasons cited is lack of proper knowledge of English. The youngsters seeking jobs cannot speak or write a sentence in English -- which used to be billed as the major plus point in the job market when the idea of ENGLISH-MEDIUM schools was promoted a couple of decades ago. The result was diabolical, to say the least, on several counts -- which the society has not missed, but does not seem to have the courage to admit.

 

This is obviously a failed model, necessitating an active and no-nonsense reconsideration of the so-called English-Medium-School model of education. It is against this reality that it may not be a bad idea to think of reintroduce the old concept of school education which sent out kids with a much better grasp of not just the English language but also other languages critical to their life’s overall success and happiness. That will help in reviving many Indian-language-medium schools on the verge of closure. And that will, more importantly, help our young ones in schools to have better grasp of multiple languages -- at least their respective mother-tongue. It must be made clear here that I am not against studies in English medium at all. I know countless schools under different educational boards imparting world-class learning opportunity to their students. The purpose here, thus, is not to run down all schools. The purpose is to point to the flaws in the overall model of school education -- particularly as regards language-learning.