LANGUAGE EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT:
A Contribution towards an Alternate PolicyThe foundation of a good education policy can only be laid on a good language policy. Education Commission Report all over the world including the American Report, A Nation as Risk, and the Bullock Report in UK have highlighted the importance of language in education.
That mother tongue is the best medium of elementary education, has been accepted by educationists all over the world. Wherever a mother tongue is sought to be assimilated with another language, or taken for granted due to a created standard, or, is replaced by another language, thus resulting in literacy education in a second language, it results in the linguistic, cultural, educational deprivation of the child. Such attitude of neglect and assimilation, whether it is sought to be justified in the name of mainstream or integration, results in the creation of insularity and elitism among the majorities and a tie up between the economic exploiters, the cultural imperialists and the elites among the majorities.
An education programme, in order to become an effective instrument of development in a plural society, must give support to the development of bi- and multi-lingual competence in the polity and build bridges between illiteracy and functional language, between language(s) of low functionality and language(s) of knowledge at different stages of education. Drop out, stagnation, wastage in formal education, persistence disunity and disintegration can only be effectively fought by recognising multiple languages and cultures as resources to build upon.
In plural societies oral culture dominates non-formal communication. In the culture of the school, although oral communication determines the quality and momentum of interaction, it is the written language which is the language of textbooks and other instructional content. That is why children entering the school encounter hostility in the teacher, teaching material and methods employed to transmit knowledge.
The traditional societies of developing countries are dominated by adults. Adults not only decide what is of interest to the children. Most children's books are written by authors who pretend to know age and level-specific language of children and in the mane of graded reading material dish out by and large, uninteresting and uninspiring material. These have little relevance to the abilities the child acquires through informal and intimate communication with its eco-culture.
In plural where majorities plan for minority education, they also decide what is good for the minorities invariably, in the name of integration nationhood, economic benefits, political compulsions, the minorities are called upon to give up their language and culture and assimilate the minority view. The minority children thus begin schooling with double handicap, one being the gap between their own language and the school language, and the other gap between the spoken language to which they are somewhat exposed and the written language.
Like India, most Third World developing countries have a colonial past. Through colonial language teaching-research, the host countries are exposed to all theories and practices prevalent in their respective countries. In the name of modernization, schools chase the mirage of changing methods and materials, all of which are not rooted in the cultural ethos, and all of which are not rooted in the cultural ethos, and all of which lead to shadow cognition and contribute to greater confusion.
In the dominant monolingual milieu, one language is considered a barrier in learning another and many languages are considered inconvenient. In the multilingual context, where many languages are learnt naturally and effortlessly and many languages complement one another in many domains, one language is a facilitator in acquiring another. In the absence of pedagogical strategies for bridging transition from one language to another and in the face of condemnation of multilingualism by the elite committed to the values of dominant monolingualism, language education suffers on all counts. Since there is ample evidence of correlation of mathematical skill and language skill, there is no wonder that mathematics education becomes poorer in these countries. Since the proficiency required for the acquisition of knowledge through various medium languages is seldom attained, the education system as a whole remains bereft of creativity and innovativeness. It remains a pale replica of the colonial education system serving the elite's interest.
There is still a good deal of confusion about learning a language, learning about a language, learning through a language and language as a factor in the psychological development of a child or a person. Therefore, there is equal confusion about establishing goals for a language learning programme. No wonder that age and grade level-specific language proficiency scales are still not available in the country.
Neither the traditional three Rs nor the learning of modern skills, exhaust the transactional context of language use. While materials progress form the smallest grammatical elements to discourse and text, the reverse process of breaking a text into analytical structural components are not known. However as grammar-translation method still reigns supreme, most learning material is presented through compulsory texts and supplementary or optional reading.
In the field of initial literacy, the major points f departure are provided by the Central Institute of Indian Languages. It has designed a presentational device for the classroom, the underlying assumptions of which are (a) Shape similarity, (b) Pattern perception, and (c) Contrastive observation. Instead of the dictionary order in which the alphabet is traditionally memorised, letters are presented in groups according to the similarity of their shape. Contrastive features keeping two units within a group are emphasised while teaching learning thus hastening recognition and retention. Words are formed, first using the letters of one group and subsequently with all groups available to the learner. While so doing the secondary symbols of vowels are freely used from the beginning. It may be emphasised here that, although languages of India belong to four families, all writing systems, barring Roman and Perso-Arabic, belong to a single family. This underlying unity is exploited for easy learning as well as transfer from one script to the other.
'The right to know is like the right of life', wrote Bernard Shaw. 'It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing'. In a multilingual and pluricultural world one language cannot be the vehicle of required knowledge. So is the case of a pluricultural country. Keeping in mind the needs of its multilingual policy, India has adopted a three-language formula as strategy for education. Any child passing through the school system is required to learn the state official language, which is the majority mother tongue in the state, the official language and associate official language of the Union, Hindi and English. As the state official language is the language of wider communication within the state, Hindi and English are languages of wider communication within the subcontinent of India. They complement one another in their use in different domains, styles and registers. Besides these major and educationally recognised languages of wider communication there are intervening layers of languages of wider communication such as Nagamese in the North East India, Sadani or Sadari in the Central India and Desia in the South Eastern India, whose education potential is yet to be examined. Being languages of communication among tribals and non-tribals of the regions they have greater integrative potential which could be used as educational springboard for further education.
There is an inspired debate in the country about the number of languages to be learnt, the stage and age at which a second and further language is to be introduced, the efficacy of mother tongue education, many languages as factors of integration or discord and disunity, and the need for adopting a single national language for promoting national integration. Those who engage in this debate juxtapose ethnic identity with political unity, learning of many languages with quality of education, localism with nationalism and internationalism, and regional language with national language. These debates favour the privileged and the vested interests who refuse to see that the three levels of education envisaged by the Education Commission of India (1963-66) correlate with the three socialisation processes (Singleton 1973 : 7-21). They are blind to the fact that one code with its diverse dialects, sociolects, styles and registers operating in diverse domain and stages. (Srivastava 1985). In view of the realities existing in the third world countries, the three-language formula as a strategy appears to have been a sound pedagogical posture.
With the waves of educational theories since World War II, the focus of concern at different times has shifted from the subject matter to the child and vice versa, but seldom to the medium. Thus while curricula have been expanded to provide for new subject matters and textbooks or emphasis has been given on the psycho-social development of the child, the medium of education has been taken for granted. In the process, various modes of language and contexts of their use in an interactive society have been lost sight of.
Caste studies show that both primary and secondary education are either a priority for white collar groups, or, are differentially available to white collar and non-white collar groups. In any case the effects of both on schooling is the same. The curriculum seeks to meet the aspirations of learners for white collar jobs and by and large becomes irrelevant to the large majority of children who come from lower meddle class or working class homes. This orientation determines the curricular content and technology and techniques of learning.
Because of uncritical importation of theories and models even in the combination of education with production work one finds a broad spectrum. Jalaluddin (1985) categorises the various approaches in this regard as follows: '(a) Educational programmes and productive work are parallel activities without having any correlation. (b) Educational programmes are sub-ordinate to productive work where educational programmes are introduced just to enable the learners to acquire certificates needed by the economy. (c) Production work is subordinate to academic curricula, where the aim of introducing production work is to illustrate or demonstrate theoretical knowledge; and (d) Academic curricula and production work are combined as a learning continuum with intimate correlation'. Needless to point out that even in this categorisation there is no awareness of the need and possibility of linking teaching register and context-specific language which could bridge the gap between the academic curricula and productive work.
Science and technology education is supposed to bring to bear a scientific temper on productive work. But research in universities, presents diverse scenes in formal and non-formal sectors of education. As King points out, 'The emphasis is on more and more information correctly remembered, and ideally quoted from the textbooks. The very goal of promoting more science can thus be counter-productive. Whole sections of science Knowledge are pushed further and further down the school system; concepts once taught in higher secondary are introduced in the primary school. The overloaded science syllabus then requires more traditional teaching and memorisation; it is difficult to justify time on experimentation and discovery. Hence the increasingly academic status of science in school'.
'Different approaches to this oppressive teaching of science have tried over the last 15 years, particularly during the 1970s and most have sought to reinstate the importance of discovery, observation and independent judgement. Methodologies have included the use of kits, materials development, simplification of language, teacher orientation, national talent searches, science fairs, science centres, etc. In general, and perhaps inevitably, these activities of intervention and change have not been carefully monitored: the process of adding up what has been learnt is a decade old and more of experimentation is just beginning'.
All these new beginnings can still remain a non-starter as 'The persistence of English as the language of Indian Science and Technology automatically precludes the participation of the overwhelming majority of India's population in the scientific culture' (Ashok Rao 1981). Most children are forced to conceptualise and be creative in an alien medium; not only because of English, but because of use of artificial standard and inappropriate register of Indian languages wherever they are used. As Kulkarni and Gambir (1981 : 48-49) have pointed out, the content may be satisfactory, but wrong language use bars communication and consequently remains a barrier to learning. Since the classroom practices and procedures are teaching centered, all these problems remain largely under-perceived.
If quality education is to be imparted to millions of children coming form diverse linguistic, socio-economic and eco-cultural settings, then the strategies adopted must be equally varied, while aiming at achieved comparable qualitative goals and targets. The system must be made interactive and learning accented.