The HINDU
December 6, 2014
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Today's Paper
» OPINION
December 6, 2014
The ongoing Sanskrit vs. German controversy is being
seen by some as the sign of a sinister conspiracy to change educational
options, and by others as a much-needed corrective to bring back “Indian
culture” into the schools. It might be more productive to see it
instead as a welcome opportunity to discuss the real and persistent
problems of our education system, not all of which have to do with which
languages children get to learn. The attempt to implement the teaching
of Sanskrit in schools seems to be supported by a remarkably uninformed
view about what sort of language policy we require today. And this is
not to say that previous governments had any greater insight into how to
handle either the medium of instruction problem or the issue of how
many languages to teach and at what level.
Education budget cut
Far
more disturbing than the Sanskrit-German debate was the news last week
that the new Central government has decided to cut Rs.11,000 crore from
the Education budget (
The Hindu
, “Social sector funds slashed,” Nov. 27). The favouring of physical
infrastructure over “the social sector” (health, education, social
security, nutrition, etc.) disregards the intangible factors that go
into strengthening knowledge bases and the setting up of infrastructure
in the first place. One of the implicit casualties of the massive cut in
the Education budget is a proposed 12th Plan programme to revitalise
Indian language resources in higher education. The rationale for this
programme was that generation of knowledge in Indian languages would not
only create new intellectual resources but transform the
teaching-learning process in positive ways. The access-equity-quality
triangle emphasised by policymakers could effectively be strengthened
through a focus on Indian languages. Since the default medium of
instruction at the tertiary level was actually a local language rather
than the “mandatory” English, the deliberate blindness of successive
governments to this fact was depriving students across disciplines of
good quality resources. This linguistic divide affects the majority of
tertiary students in the country. Thus, investing in Indian language
materials at the basic and advanced levels is a sustainable (not to
mention cost-effective) way by which Indian higher education could be
strengthened.
We should note here that the emphasis
is not on how many languages the student learns but on whether s/he is
developing cognitive capabilities. This too has been a serious blind
spot in modern Indian education over the decades, right up to the recent
May 2014 Supreme Court judgment on the non-enforceability of
mother-tongue instruction. The Court invoked the right to freedom of
speech and expression in this instance to say that children and parents
could choose the language in which the child wanted to be educated. With
all respect to the learned judges, one wonders if they sought expert
opinion in the matter or merely relied on their common sense. If they
had done the former, they might have found out that worldwide research
has proved that the most effective teaching and learning happens through
the use of the mother tongue. If exposing a child to English at a very
young age is dictated by opportunism and a skewed sense of what makes
social mobility possible, this choice flies in the face of language and
education research as well as the most enlightened pedagogic practices
available. If mother tongue or Indian language education is not
practical today, it’s because of the enormous lack of good educational
resources in those languages, another need that state initiatives have
failed to address adequately.
Parallel with China
Since,
these days, China is the favourite country of comparison for us, we
should pay attention to the fact that students in China start learning
English in the fourth standard and for the most part study all their
subjects in Mandarin. In my experience, the English fluency of the
average Chinese undergraduate ranges from functional knowledge of
English to complete proficiency, with an emphasis on reading and writing
rather than speaking. Even those with functional knowledge are far more
capable of dealing with the world of higher education today than most
students I encounter in India. The single most important variable here
would have to be that of mother tongue instruction combined with later
exposure to a language that gives students access to resources not so
readily available in Chinese. It’s a different matter that Internet use
is so heavily policed in China. However, every person I know inside and
outside the university has figured out how exactly to access the
resources they want, which is much more than can be said of Indian
students who don’t experience government-imposed firewalls. So, again,
is the ability to navigate the digital domain related to language skills
or critical skills?
Lack of clarity
The
inability to create a systematic curricular exposure to language and
critical skills is perhaps what prompts periodic outbursts like the
Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) directive to replace German
in Kendriya Vidyalaya schools with Sanskrit. Combined with this lack of
application is what can only be seen as the extraordinarily resilient
prejudices about what constitutes “Indian culture.” We routinely tend to
forget that this is a modern concept, mobilised by colonialist as well
as nationalist perspectives on our society. Lack of clarity about what
education is for leads to muddled thinking about what should be done in
the space of education. We should not confusedly believe that the
primary task of education is to pass on ways of living — we do that in
almost every domain of social engagement. The task of education is to
foster and strengthen cognitive capacities that can equip students to
produce original knowledge on their own terms, for which we are likely
to need bilingual and trilingual education. Debating whether we should
learn Sanskrit instead of German is a distraction from the real tasks
that lie ahead. We need to reorient the language debate to focus not on
learning the language (any language) but learning how to think.
Language use analysis
The
CBSE circular of June 30, 2014, instructing its affiliated schools to
observe ‘Sanskrit Week’, introduced the topic by stating that “Sanskrit
and Indian culture are intertwined as most of the indigenous knowledge
is available in this language.” It’s shocking to see that people in the
business of education are unaware about the fundamental histories of
language use in our country, and that mere assertion can pass for
accurate information. Apart from the facile collapsing of “culture” onto
“knowledge,” the circular’s statement about Sanskrit as the language of
indigenous knowledge appears as a sweeping generalisation when you look
at it from the point of view of medical, artisanal or performing arts
knowledge forms. Even if we stay with just one example, that of
indigenous medicine, and even if we stay with the venerable Council of
Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and its Traditional Knowledge
Digital Library (TKDL), a quick overview of the books listed would show
that the languages of indigenous knowledge include Persian, Arabic, Urdu
and Tamil in addition to Sanskrit. The library currently lists 137
Tamil books on Siddha, for example, with 157 Sanskrit books on Ayurveda.
Some of this knowledge is also available in Malayalam, like the
important works on
vishavaidyam
.
Coming to contemporary language use in India, it
would be important to note that just as modern Kannada, Marathi or
Telugu for example have drawn on Sanskrit to build their vocabulary,
they have equally strongly drawn on other languages. Here are some
sample Kannada words that reveal the original language coiled inside the
present day usage:
adalat
,
vakila
,
javabu
,
ambari
,
gulabi
,
sipayi
,
taakathhu
,
firyadu
,
bunadi
,
najooku
(Persian/Urdu). This kind of sampling could be replicated for any
contemporary Indian language, and an exhaustive mapping exercise might
reveal fascinating borrowings and transformations that gesture well
beyond language use.
Most of our languages cannot
sustain teaching and research in the context of the modern university
and its disciplines. We need to create critical vocabularies across
several conceptual domains. Students need to learn the ability to
distinguish between levels of meaning, to contextualise/translate, and
to create new concepts that capture the life of our societies and our
institutions. And in doing this, they have to learn to draw on multiple
linguistic resources.
Ensuring the entry of Indian
language resources into the mainstream of our higher education system is
a long-delayed project. By bringing these resources into a national
educational structure, we will be (a) expanding the analytical abilities
of these languages, and (b) making the curriculum more relevant to the
society we live in. The long-term objective should be to make the
student bilingually proficient, so that he is able to bridge effectively
the conceptual worlds of the local and the global.
(Tejaswini Niranjana is with the Centre for Indian Languages in
Higher Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.)
The
long-term objective should be to make the student bilingually
proficient, so that he is able to bridge effectively the conceptual
worlds of the local and the global.
It
might be more productive to see the ongoing Sanskrit versus German
controversy as a welcome opportunity to discuss the real and persistent
problems of our education system, not all of which have to do with which
languages children get
to learn
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