In response to Comment on MA Education in Hindi

While I agree that English is becoming the medium of communication globally, one must understand that we have in our education system a large section of the society who study in their vernacular. They in fact form the majority of our population. Do we deny them the need to think more theoretically by denying htem access to tertiary texts in their language?

Why is India so obssessed with educating its people in English anyway? So many countries worldwide have highly quaified thinkers and doers who know only their native language and are not conversant with English. However, the world gives them their due space. We translate texts into English French writings or German research or Japanese technologies and herald them as seminal works. These philosophers or researchers could not have possibly written such world wide acknowledged treatises in English. They also could not formulated their thoughts with such clarity and precision if they had been denied tertiary education in their own language.

Yet, in India, where we supposedly respect natie knowledge, we require the encoding of that knowledge to be in English. I think this paritiality exisits for one reason alone - to save costs. You see in our sector we do not want to spend too mch on education. Texts in English are difficult to source in tertiary education and when takes into account the costs of translating the requisite works into other languages and then publish them and distribute them..., why the cost is too prohibtive to imagine. We would rather have fewer articulate thinkers and doers than pay such exhorbitant prices to develop our future. However, since we cannot couch it in such terms, we state that this done so that no one is kept out of the circle of globalisation!!! That these thinkers and doers for whose ultimate benefit education in the vernacular is denied would anyway be kept out of the circle since they are not articulate enough in the new 'world language' is conveniently ignored.

We seem to not realise that language has a huge impact on the mind. There are a few feelings, thoughts that we primarily encode in our first language even if we have been exposed to other languages and have graduated to thinking almost exclusively in a language that is not part of our linguisitc community. The brain thinks pictorially, however, abstractions require to be worded. It is for this reason that children are not assumed to be able to think in the abstract. They who have limited access to language would naturally be not able to articulate their abstract thoughts. It is for this reason that deaf and dumb people were often termed dumb. Their access to any language was delayed and their stages of acquisition are more prolinged than those of a physically enabled child. However, today we recognise that we were the ones blind to the brilliance of some of these physically enabled people and are therefore keen on developing programmes that enable these people to access tertiary education in their own language. Yet, we refuse to extend the argument that language encodes thought and therefore limited access to language will also limit the thinking prowess of so many of our vernacular students.

We must also understand that proficiency in communicative English is not enough to be able to engage in texts that demand higher levels of discourse strategies. This requires fluency in the concerned language and fluency in thinking. The two are so interconnected that the lack in one is assumed to be the lack in the other. Genrally, we ignore the lack of language skills of a student and assume that it is their cognition that is average or below average. We understand, today, the difficulties of a dyslexic person. We understand that the person is merely deficient in picking up langauge skills, but is most likely to have above average intelligence. We are trying to include them in our study programmes. However, the average person who may not be skilled wnough to pick up two or more languages is denied his intelligence, because he is not able to engage with tertiary texts in a lnaguage not his own.

Given today's economic environments, the need to teach others to communicate in English is absolute. However, who decreed that individual research and philosophising must be articulated in English as well? If we look at models of countries that exhibit innovative thinking, we will find that most allow their people to study almost exclusively in their own language. I have met German Profs who speak more 'tukda' (broken) English and even the University peon manages to speak more competently in English. However, these Profs are highly acclaimed thinkers. Communication is achieved and their thoughts are shared with many because they were allowed to articulate in their language and now are improving their skills in the new 'world language' to communicate and not to philosophise or innovate.

Thinking is an extremely individual activity and to ensure that people be highly skilled in English to do manage in higher academia seems to me grossly unfair. At present, it is denying our country the treasures of knowledge encoded in one or the other vernacular. It demoralises an entire task force that is actively seeking recognition for its worth and is denied its rightful place of being considered an equal merely on the grounds of its incompetency in a particular langauge. In the future, I fear we will have lost many many languages. Today, there are many of us who do not know to read and write in mother tongue and have gradually lost our competency in languages like Hindi, which we did know to read and write in, simply because we think exclusively in the language of power - English. I doubt we will emphasise the importance our linguistic ethnicity to the ext generation, if we follow this trend. Even if we do stress that our vernacular be learnt, children most likely will not retain the language as their thoughts would be expressed primarlity in English. When a language is not worthy enough to articulate complex thoughts in and be recognised, then why teach it to children? Let them learn only the language that the world trades in. Let them learn only the English language.

Since languages encode cultures, with the death of languages, our cultures will be lost in the annals of history pages as well. The very structure of a language indicates the world views of its people. a very simple example would be the recognition of an object as masculine or feminine. It clearly encodes the paprameters of what constitutes masculine and what is feminine. While some might say there is all the more reason to switch to one of the most neutrally gendered languages of the world, English; we also would lose the ability to identify other living and non-living entities as equal to human life. The rules for the placement of an adjective before or after a noun is another example of structured world views. Does a particular linguistic community give more credence to a person, place etc., or is the description more valued? How important is abstraction to an average user of the language? Does a particular language allow for a more epigrammatic style of expression than another? Some languages follow more elaborate grammar rules than others indicating a highly evolved structure of governance within that community. Some tribal languages, for example, have fewer grammatical rules and their governance structure is also fairly primitive and simple. The examples I hve given are extremely basic and there are actually many more nuances to studying the realtionships between langauge, mind and society. However, I am sure you get my point about the importance of a language to any ethnic community.

In a world that is busy rediscovering its past to recover its future, we seem to be in a mighty hurry to erase our past that we have held on to for so long. Do we really want the death of our languages?