"I’m a man of leisure. That’s because I have an English degree and can’t get a job,” wrote Jarod Kintz, the humorist, in his book E-mails From a Madman. A bare English degree may have its own limitations in the job market, but knowing English and being conversant in it of course adds on, at least in an Anglophile society that we are, a saleable and at times even a compensatory dimension to one’s credentials as a prospective employee.
The concern for the English lexicon of those running the so-called elite schools is quite understandable. With the increasing nonchalance of the majority of government schools towards academics, these English medium schools have become a saleable commodity. The craze for what they generally call “spoken English” at times becomes quite awkwardly pronounced in schools which are cursed to pass through a deliberate and compulsive transition to the English medium tribe, simply because they find it difficult to carry on without a forceful articulation of being linguistic apartheids, that is, having a pronounced bias towards English in comparison to other subjects, especially languages. Thrusting English from the top level is an ongoing activity in such schools. English books, English plays, English songs, a compulsion to speak only in English lest the vernacular-free zone status of the campus is jeopardised, repeated threats of fine if caught conversing in the vernacular — there are so many pressures that loom large on these supposedly elite campuses standing guarantee for excellent communication skills in English and thus a secure future for their end-products.
Seeking to cope with the market pressure, the proprietors and those made responsible for running these schools often tend to forget that the target group being addressed by them consists of those in their formative years, that is, small children still in the process of learning their primary language. It is the diversity of experiences and exposures that enriches your expressions, whetting the desire to learn new words, new phraseology and ever-newer ways of putting your ideas across. Obviously, giving an opportunity to someone to express his thoughts and thus to look for new words and coin new sentences, is the best way out to strengthen his language. An enlightened parent or a school worth its name will use such an opportunity as a first step towards the much-desired inculcation of the reading habit. But how many of us do it?
In schools of the referred genre, mounting efforts to impose English invariably knock off or at least retard the very process of learning one’s own language in what linguists call the critical period. The self-styled educationists associated with such schools often ignore the fact that unlike the first language, that is always imbibed, learning the second language is an academic process. Instead of allowing them to make voluntary access to the new phraseology in order to react to ever-newer situations and exposures, when those in their growing years are expected and forced to cling to the set of situational sentences taught in the language lab or through the so-called smart boards in an equally smart classroom — they are actually deprived of the opportunity to learn their primary language and that too during a critical period.
It is often said that it is one’s proficiency in his primary language that decides the pace of his learning a second language. It is indeed essential to learn English as it is an international language. However, the approach conditioned by the presumption that conversing in one’s own mother tongue during the early school days is detrimental to the pace of his learning the second language is absolutely unfounded. Without impeding their spontaneity in the mother tongue by exerting numerous pressures, if those in their formative years are given an opportunity to listen to and read something which they can identify and relate to, I think we would be doing justice to them. I have a strong feeling that by way of imposing linguistic restrictions we have been guilty not only of effecting a kind of stratification among the juvenile learners but also of blunting their sensitivities and spontaneity, as both these attributes are closely linked to expression.
Today, when the market forces are already getting hyperactive, it is high time for us to review not only our approach towards learning an international language but also our priorities. What kind of a generation do we want in the days to come — that of human templates programmed to reproduce the extended version of well-learnt situational sentences, or individuals who can think, feel, innovate and create? The choice is ours.
pant.rajshekhar@gmail.com
