The Great Indian English Medium Drama

“It must be an English Medium one”

“Of course, it is”

“Umm….why not a Bengali Medium school?” I intruded into the discussion about picking out a school for our cousin and the rest of the lot unanimously threw me out of the boundary with the simple words, “Because we are sane.”

Well, it did hurt me. I handed them a few logic, fought my cause but was frankly outnumbered. Even my parents, who sent me to a school with a very much vernacular atmosphere, raised voice against me. I was subdued, and thought to allow all my ideas a second chance and tried to make comradeship with the trend.

Let us have a glimpse of their points:

• The students from a vernacular background cannot comprehend the lectures and books in the sphere of higher education which are mostly in English. Educationist Helen Abadzi’s words support this,
  

   “If they cannot read fast enough, (which comes with either practice or familiarity) then all their mental attention is taken up in decoding the letters… If a child cannot read quickly, it cannot follow what text books or teachers are conveying. They can spend eight years in school and remain functionally illiterate.” 

  
  
• Their academic performance suffer a lot as their talent is not appraised just because of their inability to write proper English sentences or the hurdles they experience in explaining their views due to the lack of verbal competency. Adjuvant to poor academic performance and failure, financial problems arise as they cannot get jobs despite their potential. Speaking to The Hindu on the issue, Vice Chancellor of Pondicherry University J.A.K Tareen said the problem is common in all places where the education takes place in the vernacular medium. Although it is important to learn one’s mother tongue, by restricting education to the vernacular medium means that the student has only a confined scope in the future.
  
  
• These learners face a lot of mental pressure and anxiety... it has been noted that such learners start assuming the people who are fluent in English are more intelligent & capable and thus start undermining their own potential ultimately spiraling down to the dungeon of  inferiority complex or depression. The picture is clear from the experience of a young man, Avinash, who has desperately moved from one after another institute for suitable coaching in English, "If there are thirty students in a class of spoken English; it might be motley of ten with the background of schooling from convents and twenty from vernacular medium schools. But after five classes, all from vernacular medium schooling shy away from attending the classes, while the ten from convent remain in the class."

After an open-minded thought none of these seem invincible.

• There is much fuss about speed of reading and comprehension. Taking extract from the same Helen Abadzi text we get “people must be able to read one word per second, or per 1.5 seconds at the outside, to be functional readers.”  If a student entering graduation have not managed that speed or even a satisfactory grip in English, it would be logical not to blame the vernacular medium but the institution that brought her/him up.
  
  
• Coming to the economic-distress-in-future issue, I would love to quote from a report, published in The Economic Times, stating, “The fact that the  Laborers too send their children to private or English-medium schools, despite monthly fees of Rs 300-500, which equals two or three days' wages, adds up to the economic burden”. In urban areas, the middle-class, or often low income group kids are sent to English medium schools crowded with pupils from the well-off families. Eventually, they suffer from psychological stress, trauma, humiliation, inferiority complex and hatred towards their own ménage, often ending into a newsflash of juvenile suicide.
  
  
• Lastly, pretending that English training from the toddler-time bring up a wordsmiths is a betise. The ones having English-speaking and reading habit at home will soon become front-runners leaving the rest behind; ensuring the very same fate of Avinash. “Often most of the students beat about bush over the ways they can develop their proficiency in effective speaking… guys and girls struggle to catch up with the techniques of speaking well in a very competitive atmosphere of learning in such classes.” Srikant Mohanty opines.

 Finally it is proved that children who learn to read fluently in their mother tongue can easily learn English later from an experiment in Zambia. The lesson found is: start with mother tongue, and introduce English later. The issue in India is not vernacular vs. English. Rather, a good foundation in mother-tongue improves English learning later. But the experience from the Abolition of English at Primary Level in West Bengal is quite contrary. 

What’s wrong then?

 At this point I would like to express some of my concerned ideas behind this malady.

1. One misery is that English in vernacular schools is taught through vernacular.This makes the students form things in their mother-tongue and translate into English, which leads to grammatical errors. The students need to be taught English in English.
   
   
2. Reading books, magazines, fictions and newspapers completely transform one’s ability to speak better. Reading brings excellent changes in vocabulary and improves the caliber for speaking. It is an excellent habit, to read an English newspaper completely every day. It must not be assumed that admission into an English medium school is tantamount to being a sahib. The domestic ambiance plays the prime role.
   
   
3. The tragedy is also at the basic standard of school-level education in India, irrespective of the ‘medium’ which is pretty evident from the massacre at The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (a global evaluation process by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Secretariat that gauges where schoolchildren stand alongside their peers from other countries. This academic Olympics measures the performance of 15-year-olds in their reading, math and science abilities). In the last assessment in 2009, students from  Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, showpieces of India's education and development, stood second last among 73 countries. “Thousands of private schools have come up, especially in the Hindi belt, with outlandish names like Saint Convent School, or even Popatlal Convent School. But not even the teachers in such schools know decent English”, mentions SA Aiyar, the famous columnist of Swaminomics (TOI).
4. When vernacular is the medium, the woe steps up further. The terminologies, prepared from moth-eaten Sanskrit words, make me feel pity about the ones indulging into them. This could have been avoided at ease by using the exact international terminologies in vernacular scripts. (We are very much familiar to the reverse; I guess we all do a lot of texting in vernacular in Roman script.)
5. Another Himalayan mistake is giving a damn to everything else and just staying within a biased ‘All Izz Well’ kind of narcissistic cocoon, rather a catacomb.  This attitude is essenced from the news like India backs out of PISA, 2012.

My conclusion is the current craze about English medium schools along with its hatred towards the vernacular is nothing except a frivolous tomfoolery. Learning at par to the international standard of education is the most crucial aspect to be stressed upon with immediate effect rather than dawdling in search of a supernal solution. The noble laureate Indian educationist Rabindranath Tagore once averred that “mother tongue is equal to the breast milk of the mother”, the first nourishment to face the hardships of the world. A tree, however orotund it is, cannot stand a breeze if it has lost its roots. [This author is aware of the fact that metaphors are not logic. I think I have put enough gumption for those who are disposed only to the horse sense.]

If you have hold your patience up to the last paragraph of this 1300 word bore, I guess it was not that rot. Just reminding you, it is from someone whose Alma-mater is a through and through Bengali medium school and who never joined any spoken English institute or workshop.

Sunabha Ghosh (Executive Editor)

About the Author:

Sunabha Ghosh is co-founder and the current executive editor of The Analyst.

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