Going through the District Information of School Education (DISE) reports of the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is a heartbreaking task. In the last decade, nearly 2700 Kannada medium primary schools have closed down across Karnataka. The fate of more than 25000 schools hangs in balance with student attendance in single digits. Bangalore Rural reports an alarming decrease from 1750 to 653, Bengaluru North goes down by 100, and schools in Bengaluru South drop by more than 200. Three days ago, newspapers reported the closure of eight Kannada medium schools in the city as per the orders issued by the DPI.
We are in the middle of the celebrations of the 61st Kannada Rajyotsava: as usual Kannada flags flutter high, plenty of Kannada promises are being made, and Rajyotsava awards have been conferred on several Kannadigas who have given their services to the Kannada land and language.
Let us put these two above pictures side by side: seems a totally ironic juxtaposition. How can a State that cannot save its mother tongue drum up feelings about the Kannada imagination?
It is this cold irony that troubled literary critic D.S. Nagabhushana who refused to accept the Rajyotsava award. The negligence and apathy of the State government is appalling to DSN. The Supreme Court judgement declined to uphold the State government’s decision to make Kannada as medium of instruction in primary schools simply because the counsel, he says, “represented popular Kannada sentiments and failed to make a strong legal arguement. Otherwise, we were likely to have won the case. Secondly, the government is yet to push the Central government to take steps for Constitutional reform to address the issue since three years.”
DSN finds support in Baraguru Ramachandrappa’s views who finds the situation in Karnataka equally disturbing. However, he says, that language can never be an isolated issue. “This is a complex issue. If you start thinking -- many things will be implicated. Our economy, aspirations, lifestyle, it is all interlinked. If you have to set this right, you need to dismantle many others. It is difficult in the current scenario to have primary education for every child in Karnataka either in Kannada or in its mother tongue, I agree, but I believe it is possible over a period of time with sincere and sustained effort.”
The problem with the attitude of the government is rather grave. Instead of being motivated to change the existing scenario, they throw their hands up in the air helplessly. “A serious thought needs to go into why the number of admissions into Kannada medium schools is depleting,” stresses Ramachandrappa. “Go to the grassroots and check what’s going wrong! Two government schools, one near Kanakapura and another in Sira taluk, have exponentially increased the number of students. It is simply because of the effort by the respective school headmasters. Why doesn’t government take measures based on such success stories?” asks Ramachandrappa.
Nagabhushana observes, “Attraction towards English as an administrative and (perceived to be a) superior language is not recent.” But what for him is depressing is the fact that Kannada language has to be imposed on people to learn it. “Gandhiji, for instance, implemented the idea of Nai Talim (Basic Education for all) that saw education more holistically: it was a protest against the dominant career-based English education. Unfortunately, the IT-BT boom in the past two decades in Bengaluru has again taken us back to where we began,” laments the 99-year old activist, H.S. Doreswamy.
As considerable employment generation is by multinational corporations or the like, English becomes a necessary tool to get into those jobs, and therefore impetus is being given to those criteria which would fetch employment. English is seen as one of the major skills to be built in a student. “We are heading from knowledge-oriented learning which was provided by vernacular languages to skill-oriented education,” observes Ramachandrappa.
Mother tongue is not the only issue about closing down Government schools. It is also about admission and attendance. Are the government schools badly off, does the Department of Education have insufficient funds or infrastructure or technology? This is not true. They have even partnered with Azim Premji, Akshara, Agastya, Sikshana Foundations etc. to enhance curriculum, mode of teaching and inculcate interest for science and technology among students. Government schools have a long-standing history of training teachers for at least 20 days every year which most private schools cannot afford to do. Despite all this, why has the government failed to reach the expected target of running schools with minimum number of students?
G.S. Jayadev -- the founder of the Deenabandhu Trust -- who runs an extraordinary experimental school in Chamarajnagar district for the last two decades, says: “The main reason for parents not opting for government schools is not an issue of language , but the lack of feedback mechanism from the teaching and administrative staff.”
“On the other hand, they are wooed by the attractive marketing techniques of private schools (which in reality are in no way better than government ones). Unfortunately most private establishments are investing all their energy and resources in saying how they care for these children, and do not do much about content and teaching. Parents think these are signs of advancement,” explains Jayadev on why the government schools are losing out.
“Introduction of Kannada in pre-primary schools is an effective step,” Baraguru Ramachandrappa adds. “You have to attract children before they get admitted into private English schools for kindergarten. In fact, I had suggested the government to convert Anganavaadis to pre-primary schools during my tenure as the Chairman of Kannada Development Authority (2001-04).”
If a Kannada medium school located in a remote village of Chamarajanagara district has been able to pull off incredibly, the Government machinery has a lot to learn. Symbolic acts will help a government go to polls, but it will not take society in the right direction. If language has to be preserved, we need vision of the government that is supported by parents and teachers alike.
