In the coming 2019-20 academic year, students enrolled in any of the thousand government schools with English-medium sections will be learning from bilingual textbooks.
P.C. Jaffer, Commissioner for Public Instruction, said that the textbooks, which will be prepared for children enrolled in class one, will have information in both English and Kannada. According to department officials, this exercise is being being carried out as an experiment to see if children can pick up English more easily.
Mathematics and English will be NCERT textbooks. “For Kannada [as a language], the existing textbooks will be used. NCERT does not have textbooks for environment science for classes one and two. So we will have to follow the State syllabus,” said a source.
Officials are, however, yet to translate the textbooks. “A majority of the books have large images and very little text. We will ensure that the books reach the school before the academic year begins,” said an official.
The Department of Primary and Secondary Education held a meeting on Friday to discuss the modalities of rolling out English-medium sections in schools for the 2019-2020 academic year.
Majority of the schools in Bengaluru
So far, 948 government schools, which will officer English-medium sections, have been identified. The department is in the process of identifying another 52.
A majority of the schools are in Bengaluru (112). Belagavi with 73 schools will have the second highest number of schools. The department has identified four to five schools in each assembly constituency. At eight, Kodagu has the least number of English-medium schools.
A large number of schools from Bengaluru have been chosen because a majority of the admissions made under the RTE quota in the past years in private unaided schools that offer English as medium of instruction were from Bengaluru.
“From this year, admissions under the RTE quota are restricted to government and aided schools — majority of which run classes in Kannada. So there will be a demand for English-medium sections in Bengaluru,” a source said.
Student strength
The Department of Primary and Secondary Education is yet to take a call on whether there will be a cap on student strength in English-medium sections. Officials are anticipating a huge demand.
“Ideally, we should not refuse admission to any child, but we are in a dilemma as we are worried that it will come as the cost of the quality of instruction,” said an official.
Teachers, who are competent in teaching in English, will be transferred to these schools.
