The Language of Learners

Context: The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 fails to propose and uphold a multilingual approach to education.

Importance of mother tongue in education: was highlighted by -

• Elphinstone’s Minute of 1824, Macaulay’s Minute of 1835 and Wood’s Despatch of 1854:
• UNESCO’s 1953 declaration on the use of mother tongue for the conceptual clarity and cognitive growth of students.
• Kothari Commission: first time after independence highlighted the importance of languages in education system.
• NEP 1986 along with Plan of action 1992, National Curriculum Framework NCF 2005, Right to Education (RTE) 2009 and the draft NEP 2020, have reiterated the significance of mother tongue.

Issue with Multilingualism in Indian Education: The above mechanism failed to make an impact. This is because we fail to recognize the following two facts -

• No Classroom is Monolingual: All classrooms are multilingual in the sense that children arrive in schools not with “a language” but with a “verbal repertoire”.
  • This is not only true in the case of urban metro cities but also in small cities and even villages.
    • Udaipur, in addition to having Hindi, has Mewari, Marwari, Wagdi, Gujarati, and there is constant inter-language fluidity, among others.
    • Language used in a school of Tidi village (Udaipur): include at least Wagdi, Mewari, Hindi, some words and expressions of English, all often with a tinge of Gujarati.
• People learn languages only for instrumental or integrative reasons: The three-language formula has been a failure because it does not pay any attention to the fact.
  • Many people from south India do learn Hindi when they see jobs or increments coming their way.
  • Students in North India invariably choose Sanskrit as the third language — it ensures high marks without much work.

• Multiliguality constitutes the backbone of “mother tongue”: for e.g. there may be two meaning “late”: delay (in English) or lie down (in Hindi) – depending on the language used.
• Allowing the voice of every child to find a space in classroom processes and thereby breaking the frozen paradigm of “a teacher, a class, a textbook and a language” where the teacher reigns supreme.