Noted playwright, poet and Jnanpith recipient Chandrashekar Kambar has appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to come up with a national policy on the medium of education “to protect and promote all mother tongues of India so as to uphold cultural and linguistic diversity”.
In an online petition, for which he is seeking support from like-minded people, he says the country’s education system needs to make “a judicious use of mother tongue-based bilingualism”, without reducing the medium of instruction debate into a “native language vs English” issue.
He says English should be taught as a second language, systematically, so that learners can gradually transfer skills from the familiar language to the unfamiliar one. This will guarantee that children do not become “aliens to their own heritage”.
Prof. Kambar says that although the recent Supreme Court judgment (striking down the Government Order making Kannada/mother tongue the medium of instruction in primary schools in the State) prima facie looks Constitution-based and conclusive, the issue warrants “unbiased and critical rethinking” since it is a “delicate and sensitive” issue concerning children and learning.
Prof. Kambar cites linguistic research to counter the position that learning in English medium helps children learn better. He says language is not just a pipeline through which information is passed on, but a complex system through which people categorise and code experience. “This is a psycholinguistic fact, which cannot be refuted,” he says.
He adds that schools need to nourish not just communicative function of the language, but also “the creative, argumentative and descriptive functions”. Language is a store house to share values and worldviews through which children of the present could connect to the past.
UNESCO declaration in 1953:
“It is axiomatic that the best medium for teaching the child is his mother tongue. Psychologically, it is the system of meaningful signs that in his mind works automatically for expression and understanding. Sociologically, it is a means of identification among the members of the community to which he belongs. Educationally, he learns more quickly through it than through an unfamiliar linguistic medium.”
