Language dilemma

At the Panchayat Union Middle School near Tirupathur, Tamil Nadu.-D. GOPALAKRISHAN

English must be seen as a major means of communication of knowledge for Indian children, who will otherwise remain quaint products of an age long gone.

ONE more State, Tamil Nadu, has decided to start teaching English to children from Class I. Some years ago, the Left Front government in West Bengal, which had for years made teaching of English in schools optional, restored it to the syllabus from Class I onwards. It had realised, after one generation of youngsters paid a heavy price, that without English the young would lose access to higher education, to better employment opportunities, and to the prosperity these would have brought to the State in the fullness of time.

There are still a number of States where English is taught either as an optional subject or not at all, and others where it is taught from Class VI onwards. The decisions are basically political and make no sense in any other terms. The products of these schools in States such as Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh cannot hope to compete with those whose knowledge of the English language is better even though they may have a degree of intelligence that would have, with fluency in English, taken them to greater heights in different professional fields.

This is to place a greater emphasis on myopic political considerations and dismiss what ought to be a major concern for all policymakers: the providing of the best opportunities possible to all children to go as far as their abilities will take them without being shackled by factors that are imposed on them arbitrarily.

It is time for politicians in these States to wake up and smell the coffee, to get real and shed the now-antiquated posture that to promote English is to be disloyal to the nation and to be a lackey of a colonial power. The fact is that English needs to be seen for what it is today, not only in India but in the world as a major means of communication of ideas and knowledge, without which our children will remain quaint products of an age that has ceased to exist.

The tired argument that the Japanese have become a developed country without English or that other European countries have done so will not wash any more. In those countries ideas and concepts developed and were expressed in their own languages as the ideas and concepts grew, just as in the case of English. When the telephone was invented, so was the word. It is unfortunate that in India there was access to English only as a means to that world of advanced ideas and concepts; the languages of the country had no equivalents for them.

Modern medicine cannot be taught in any of the Indian languages, nor can advanced technology of different kinds; indeed, studies in any professional field assume a high degree of fluency in English. This is a reality, one which cannot be altered by any number of laws and rules. The different languages simply do not have the vocabulary. Even if they do manage to find words, using them in the increasingly globalised world of knowledge and ideas may not be possible.

This is not the real dilemma though. The necessity of learning English is well known. A look at the mushrooming tutorial and teaching shops in every city and town Brilliant English Academy, Oxford English Tutorial Home, Goyals English Academy: Fluent English Guaranteed in Six Weeks is enough to make evident the frenzy to learn English.

The danger is in what is being taught, not only in these teaching shops but in the thousands of schools across the country, particularly government schools. This danger can be understood if one were to talk for just five minutes to teachers of English in these schools. Most of them and this is said with responsibility, being more conservative than is warranted cannot speak grammatical English and their pronunciation is appalling and at total variance with the accepted pronunciation even after allowing for the fact that we have our own way of speaking the language.

These are the teachers, and one can well imagine the kind of English that they teach. When students from such schools, who make it through university because they have to only write in English, end up in professional institutions such as medical colleges, their lack of speaking skills is not only a handicap but a danger. Highly complicated subjects are taught in English and are often incomprehensible to these students, who rely on written notes and made-easy textbooks to pass examinations.

One has had the misfortune of consulting doctors whose knowledge of English is so poor that one is apprehensive of the correctness of their advice or diagnoses. (It may be a subjective observation, but one has come across relatively fewer such doctors in the southern States, where the teaching of English is distinctly better than in the north.) Many will agree that a large number of nurses all over the country know little or no English they neither understand it nor communicate in it and that can prove fatal to a critically ill patient.

One is taking the medical profession only as an example; the principle holds good in all fields in the field of academic enquiry into any subject, in information technology, aviation and others. It is not as if everyone in these professions has a poor knowledge of English. Very many speak and write excellent English, and apart from the great advantage it gives them in their day-to-day work, it helps in their research and in their obtaining international recognition and respect for their skills. But, given this, there still remains a very large number of professionals whose English is either non-existent or appalling.

One of the greatest shortcomings of our policymakers is their almost child-like faith in numbers. The assumptions that this can lead to, have, in the initial five-year plans, cost the country a terrible amount in actual shortfalls in overall development, socially and economically. And in this small but vital sector, English language teaching, one sees this playing out as a tragedy that can have, like all tragedies, just one end. Assertions are made that so many thousand teachers of English have been placed in so many thousand schools, but what kind of teachers are they? Has anybody tried to find out?

Not so long ago, one was given the task of setting up a television channel, which involved, among other things, recruiting professional anchor-journalists who were to work in English, television producers, video editors and others. That was when the dimensions not of total ignorance but of the degree of unfamiliarity with English became frighteningly clear. And yet the candidates who appeared had the requisite degrees and certificates; in other words those giving them these degrees and certificates were either themselves just as ignorant of the language or, worse still, compromised with quality, which is nothing short of subverting the system.

This is a dilemma that all of us must consider and determine what can be done to resolve it; it is not for the government only to find a solution. Across the board there has to be a refusal to compromise with a clear, confident knowledge of the language; in todays world we can do no less.