On vernacular education

The English Education is being forced down our throats in this country.

What do we have in our country today:

• An elite deracinated class who speaks only in English even with their kids, who look at their own country like a westerner. Who pose to be modern but are just western as the knowledge the pop culture they consume is all in English. 
• People who speak very well in their own native languages do well in their fields, but feel ashamed for not being able to speak good English.  
• The divide between the English speakers and Non-English Speakers that is only increasing. 

This situation will only get worse with time as capabilities of learning a foreign language are varied among different people and the penetration of English education is becoming deeper.

Three courses of action

A) Should we allow this to continue and try to increase the English speaking population?
People give the analogy of Swatch Bharat- just because the percentage is low now we should not give up we have to keep at it. At the risk of going into unpleasant details, what we are doing is not ensuring sanitation(education) for everyone. We are forcing people to use western type of toilet when they can use Indian style which is more comfortable for them given their present habits. By forcing it we are only making them averse to change and the problem won't be solved.

B)Completely remove it and replace with Sanskrit :Could prove to be disastrous as a top down imposition of a language not spoken popularly will not work, just as it is not working at present with English.


C)We could try and find a middle ground where vernaculars can provide a means for the student to get high education without losing the English advantage.

I strongly support the C option.

There is an example of this being implemented where the student is not losing his link to vernacular. Sardaar Patel vidyalaya, the only private school, teaches in hindi medium till 5th standard and switches to your regular English medium from 6th standard, while keeping Hindi mandatory as language. And the students perform quite well as per the academic standards as shown in the link. There are various approaches to solve the problem and this school has given us a model to build on. 

In this blog I am taking out the arguments of Sir bully Mammoth's blog and trying to address them one at a time.

         Firstly, I could have learned English from the one good English teacher at my school without  the tons of others science and math teachers who spoke utter rubbish in the name of English. I am using English because the Indian society as a whole has adopted it as the high status language. EVERYONE wants to flaunt the fact that they speak English as though it is a great gift. Equating it to high status, we are excluding and shaming a vast majority from joining the conversation. 

     If given an option I would use my native language on social media. But English does have a large audience on the Internet. So it is out of a compulsion that I use English though I am much more expressive (and funny) in my native tongue.

        People monetise their English advantage in/out India. Should it mean others who are as smart be deprived of any opportunity? And should we spend our resources in teaching in a language Alien to our country without leaving room for an alternative?
It is not just that they dont have a career because of being a native speaker. The Supreme Court gives court verdicts in the same colonial language. The sign boards everywhere are in English. We are doing the job of the colonial overlords in their language even after them leaving for 70 years. In a way English speakers are not just monetising their advantage,  we are making life difficult for others.

1) Among the top 10 countries in terms of GDP, four (USA Canada UK India) are English speaking countries and contribute 30% to world GDP.  So the wealth is largely concentrated here. We better not forget they are the native speakers of English. They speak to each other in the same language as they are educated. Hence, they don't find it hard to accept English as a medium of instruction. It is only in India it has been difficult to permeate.

English has nothing much in common with our native languages. The script, the pronunciation, the consonant sounds. the meanings- NOTHING! It is a completely alien language imposed on us because of colonisation. Hence to this day only 10% speak it and not many understand it.

We might have more English speakers than the United Kingdom. It doesn't mean a thing if the English speakers in our country don't contribute much to our economy.

"The informal sector constitutes largest portion of the economy in terms of value addition, savings, investments etc. The share of formal sector is around 12 -14 percent in our national income while that of informal sector is more than 30 percent." excerpt from this report.

The informal sector doesn't have much English speakers.They are the small businessman, vegetable vendors,milk vendors, shopkeepers. The point is that the highest contributors of the GDP don't have the English advantage and are still able to contribute so much to the GDP. What will they do if given a better quality education in their vernacular.

To participate in global economy India needs English is the argument. My question is for that do we need every person to be educated in English? We have enough people to act as translators already!
 Let us take a look at the bottom 20 countries in terms of GNP per Capita.

Rank	Country	GNP per capita ($)	Mass Language(s)	Official Language(s)
1	Congo (DRC)	100	Lingala, Kingwana	French
2	Ethiopia	100	Amharic	Amharic
3	Burundi	120	Kirundi, Swahili	French, Kirundi
4	Sierra Leone	130	Mende, Temne, Krio	English
5	Malawi	180	Chichewa	English/Chichewa
6	Niger	190	Hausa, Djerma	French
7	Chad	210	Sara, Arabic	French/Arabic
8	Mozambique	220	Emakhuwa, Xichangana	Portugese
9	Nepal	220	Nepali	Nepali
10	Mali	240	Bambara	French
11	Burkina Faso	240	Sudanic languages	French
12	Rwanda	250	Kinyarwanda	Kinyarwanda/French/English
13	Madagascar	250	Malagasy	French/Malagasy
14	Cambodia	260	Khmer	Khmer/French
15	Tanzania	260	Swahili	English/Swahili
16	Nigeria	260	Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo	English
17	Angola	270	Bantu	Portugese
18	Laos	290	Lao	Lao/French/English
19	Togo	310	Ewe, Mina, Kabiye, Dagomba	French
20	Uganda	320	Ganda, Luganda	English

*table borrowed from Sankrant's blog

MOST of them(except two) are using their colonisers' languages as their official language and also using it is a medium for Education. Many of them are using English. This has not really helped in alleviating poverty in the case of the above twenty countries. It has also contributed to the dying of indigenous languages (just like it is happening in India.) Hence being a English speaking country hardly means you are out of trouble. You have to waste a lot of resources to get your people educated  in this foreign language while bidding a lot of them good bye when they migrate to the first world countries.

2) Our Indians so far have created many jobs in the IT sector. There are a lot of cutting-edge technologies to work on. The humongous STEM research that is published can be translated and used by everyone. If the no. of college educated students increase, won't the no. of entrepreneurs also increase? Won't the economy grow? Ours is the fastest growing economy FFS! All we need is a lot of skilled youngsters who create jobs. Should we care about the English speaking jobs? How long will we act as the software coolies of the West!?

3)        Compare India with EU. Noone uses a common language there. Their site uses translations everywhere. Their site is available in 24 different languages. Our government is also trying to get its government websites translated into all of the indigenous languages.
        Even in United nations diplomats use their translation devices. World leaders don't speak to each other without interpreters(human and machine). When the process is running so smoothly in the world. How can it not work in our country? We have been great at adopting technology! At least at the important places like the courts, parliament, Banks we can deploy the required systems.

    The scripts in India are different for different languages. Not like in EU. This is a problem that is very difficult to solve. So we need to choose a common script understandable to everyone. The best possible script that comes to mind is Devanagari. English doesn't find much resistance in the South because of  high literacy and some hindi aversion. So we can use a couple of languages for the required signage in every city for the Indian travellers. At present even in Telangana , three scripts are used on every railway station(Eng,Tel,Urdu).

     Besides all of this , there is Software present in the market based on optical character recognition which can help people who don't read the script in a certain part of the country. Also Kids should be given options in class to learn different scripts.

4) STEM has a lot of it's literature in English. But how many of us really use it and try to apply it in the present system? If we can pick up the texts now and start translating or develop a tool to translate to vernaculars, it would become a big project , but it will open up so much knowledge for the native speakers. We have so far deprived the native speakers from this knowledge.

     Translation done by one person who understands the languages well, consumes much less effort and is more efficient than that required in decoding English at every step.

    I take liberty to share my experience in college. I studied in an NIT which was supposed to be a good reputed one, was even doing well in the national rankings. I could count on my fingers the number of professors who could communicate well and get the point across in English. These people were
Ph.d holders in their respective fields who had many publications to their credit. The knowledge transfer would have been much better if it was a vernacular medium college. If this is the situation in universities, imagine the plight of the teacher in schools in remote villages.
       Even today the way my mom explained to me some concepts in my mother tongue are crystal clear to me than most of the stuff taught in school. People easily ignore the benefit of learning in a medium they understand. But it does make a lot of difference.

5) One can argue that English speakers are in demand in the present job market. A reason why the spoken English classes are thriving.
          The vernacular medium of education will definitely fail without the texts being translated into the languages. As long as we call a semaphore-a semaphore even in a Hindi college people wont be able to digest the information.
            The question is do we need to continue with this screwed up present system as it is and keep producing the mediocre graduates? We have a lot of unemployable engineers for a reason. They don't get the subject AT ALL. In most of the cases the textbooks we are asked to refer have complicated English, which many find difficult to understand or is tough to digest no matter how good we speak. Spoken English doesn't guarantee a good vocabulary. So many skim through their undergraduate studies without having to study their specialisations because of their communication skills. They naturally face a tough time in office, but that is a different story.

6)
Mobility reduction due to the removing of English as a link language is a farce argument because you can learn a language without having it as a medium. I learnt Hindi  despite being a Telugu with Telugu friends in a Telugu state around me because I had a good Hindi teacher. It didn't require the science teacher to teach her subject in Hindi to me. Even today English isn't the link though we are striving hard to make it.
       Forcing a person to be limited to his locality due to the vernacular medium is as much a crime as it is to make a student in a remote village quit education midway because she cant learn English. We have to leave it to the parents to decide to send their kids to English or a vernacular medium. We should at least present the chance to a village kid to become a doctor by studying in a language he understands.

7)
Economies are made of people. Of what the people make of it. Restrict a major section of people from higher education because of this English apartheid our economy is doomed no matter what. And with the present system we are not just enabling the services sector, we are enabling the brain drain too. We are losing most of our talent to the English speaking countries. Also our fellow citizens are so comfortable with the language that they lose their roots and start behaving like a foreigner. This is leading to a growing divide between the English speaking and Non-English speaking folk.
Even if we make it a free market there won't be many left to take advantage of it as all of them have left for the English speaking first world countries, where they value merit and many smart thinkers were left to their fate of either the caste based employment opportunities or taxi driving cos they can't speak English.

      English has been the sole reason for the increase in the number of rootless wonders we have around us. We have elevated the status of English so much that we stopped appreciating what we have here. People read Marx more than Kautilya, Shakespeare more than Kalidasa for a reason. Ram Leela is boring whereas comiccon cosplay is the coolest thing ever!!! English has become too cool to resist. We have turned the country into a wannabe America. If the medium of our education is changed to our Indian languages, society as a whole will benefit with a large number of rooted, proud, self-respecting and modern individuals.

And finally one doesn't need to be a Nehru to see the obvious flaws in the present system.