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The reasons for such a sorry state of affairs are not far to seek. They
are, most of the time, related to the kind of disjunction between language,
education and society that I have been trying to underscore in these lectures.
Unless we keep the issue of human exploitation and suffering at the centre
of our agenda, we may not go very far in conceiving and implementing constructive
language and education policies. |
It is a matter of great concern for all of us, in particular for the Government
of India and the CIIL, that in spite of large scale national level initiatives
in the fields of literacy and primary education, the real literacy rate
has hardly improved, even if we entirely trust the government's own figures.
This is a very serious problem and the way we are trying to handle it simply
shows how insensitive we are to the historical and contemporary aspects
of human condition. First of all, we tend to conceptualise literacy in minimalistic
terms calling anyone who can write her name and count till ten literate.
Secondly, in some sense, we still subscribe to the orality/literacy divide
where higher cognitive abilities of rational analysis, inferencing and deduction
are associated with literacy rather than with orality. When we approach
predominantly oral societies with literacy programmes, we assume that their
existing systems of knowledge are of no consequence to the literacy programme
and to their future. There is now substantial evidence to show that the
orality/literacy divide does not exist; there are extremely rich oral traditions,
which do not show any cognitive deficits. And literacy as a communicative
practice may manifest in different forms in different societies. Once again
most literacy drives ignore the possibility that several groups may already
have full-bloom literacy practices in specific domains. The primary school
manifestation of this minimalist and generalist view of literacy is of course
minimum levels of learning (NCERT 1991) which view knowledge as linear and
additive consisting essentially of discrete skills. |
When we intervene in a society, which, according to us, has no tradition
of writing of its own, we rather hurriedly put together a reader for them
in what we think is their language. I don't think most of us realize that
for the community it is a great moment and the whole process may have quite
unpredictable and often undesirable consequences. First of all, we codify
their language. We do this according to our perceptions and not theirs.
We also assume that we don't need to understand their extant systems of
knowledge and communicative practices. Secondly, we don't appreciate that
the new book and the codified grammar and dictionary will become a norm
for them and they will now begin to see their own language and culture through
these artefacts, constructed largely by outsiders. Thirdly, we provide them
with a new technology, a writing system. This may become the key to enter
into several prestigious languages and cultures, but, may also, in the process
stigmatise their own language and communicative practices. Further, these
people may now start keeping records they never did before and this may
lead to new kinds of problems. I am not at all arguing against literacy,
universal elementary education, readers or grammars. I am only trying to
hint where these projects might lead us unless we work with a comprehensive
vision of language, education and society. |
Thus whatever be our domain of activity, teacher-training or materials
production, literacy or language evaluation, we cannot meaningfully deal
with any piece of the puzzle unless we at least have a faint vision of the
picture as a whole. The broad outlines of that picture have been known for
some time now. The meta-narratives of rationality and Marxism went sour
in a variety of ways, but till date we have no viable alternatives. We recognize
the limits of objectivity and we recognize that in a variety of ways language
constitutes the limits of our thoughts. We also recognize environmental
pollution and gender discrimination and the role of language in these phenomena.
But other than enlarging the scope of rationality, I am not sure how to
handle these problems. Similarly, in spite of a variety of failures of the
Marxist experiment, we know for sure that a handful of powerful people appropriate
an enormous surplus produced by the masses even though the overall picture
of socio-economic relations is far more complicated. We need to rework the
base and superstructure relations and we need to understand the role normative
structures, in addition to production relations, play in society. The select
elite uses not only riches, land, water, and other resources for exploitation,
but also language and various communicative practices. Finally, as I have
tried to argue in these lectures, our history has been marked by a disjunction
between the study of language and society. Perhaps, it may be rewarding
for us to study the role of language in revolutions for freedom and justice,
in colonization and wars and in Marxist economies and in market economy
and globalisation. The postmodernist (see Anderson 1995) critique of rationalism
and structuralism is, probably, justified in demonstrating the death of
some meta-narratives in certain domains and in underscoring the stifling
pressures of uniformity. But the way it often celebrates and sanctions 'tolerant
indifference' and 'happy nihilism' is perhaps not helpful. I hope with some
major revolutions for freedom and two world wars behind us and with varied
experiences in Europe, Russia, Yemen, UK, USA, Latin America and India,
we should be able to fill in some details of the outlines of a future world.
There are no short cuts. We need to undertake a collective conceptualisation
exercise. In that project, I have no doubt language will have a central
role and the new agenda of linguistics will be characterized by the interdependence
of language and society rather than by their disjunction. |
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