LANGUAGE
AND EDUCATION
Language and education can be considered together
in four possible contexts:
I.
Language is a medium of education in and out of the classroom.
II.
Education has to provide for the teaching of the learner’s
Own Language.
III.
It also provides for the teaching of the Other Languages.
IV.
Finally, education may also seek to provide not only for learning
this or that language but also for learning about these languages
and language in general as a social institution.
Knowing a language and knowing about
it are quite different things. It is idle to include languages in
the curriculum without specifying which kind of knowing is being aimed
at.
One understands by ‘education’ the
arrangement for transmitting the heritage of insights, impressions,
expressions – of culture in fact – from one generation to the next
and by ‘language’ the instrument made socially available to everybody
for sharing one’s perceptions, feelings, desires, experience with
one or more than one other person. It is not difficult to see, then,
how language has come to be not just a medium but the medium
of education – especially, formal education.
I
In respect of subjects like literature,
history, social studies one expects both the teacher and the taught
to verbalize freely and in quantities. But one does not extend this
expectation to technical or experimental subjects. One does not mind
a tongue-tied mechanic or engineer, and an uncommunicative physician
or musician – indeed our society also expects if not welcomes this.
Arguments for giving a place for language in technical and experimental
courses, for recognizing, say, English or Marathi as a subject in
ungraduate courses in agriculture, commerce, the natural sciences
tend to fall on deaf ears. But this deafness on the part on specialists
in these fields is likely to prove dangerous in the long run. One
would certainly prefer silent proficiency to voluble inefficiency;
but an articulate proficiency is even better. The latter should not
be looked upon as a happy accident but consciously striven for in
the educational scheme. It is an elementary need of the age of science
and industry that technical mastery be communicable through language.
For a mother to get her daughter to
cook or a cobbler to get his little son to take up the family trade
is an entirely different proposition from attending a school of home
craft or leather craft. The two differ not merely in the social setting
of the teaching operation. A mother may need to demonstrate visually
how much salt goes with what sort of vegetable rather than specify
the quantity in grams. And this may not matter really. But one cannot
think of training a wireman or plumber in the same terms. But that
is of training a wireman or plumber in the same terms. But that is
exactly what happens quite often in India. The net result is quite
painful for anyone hoping to get work out of a workman in accordance
with precise instructions. The product of a craft school is, furthermore,
incapable of giving precise instructions to his subordinates
or apprentices or of mastering newer techniques that have come into
use after he left the craft school. It is not enough to stock a polytechnic
or craft school with hardware. The training methods must successfully
overcome age long resistances to formalization.
The situation is equally dismal – at
a higher level! – if one turns to fields such as classical music,
engineering, law, medicine, and experimental sciences. If our technicians
are only slightly better than skilled labour, our professionals are
often only glorified technicians. Not that there are no first rate
persons in India in such fields. But their achievements tend to stay
with them rather than be transmitted to the next generation. Their
results and innovations are not passed on to others. They fail to
take an academic interest in their practical work. India lags behind
in research in law, medicine, and the like. Indeed whatever new is
being created or imported into the country does not get widely disseminated
to the intelligent layman as anyone who has tried to get Indian professionals
to communicate to the public will have realized.
The story of the sure remedies of the
grandma literally dying with her because she did not tell anyone else
about them and the story of the backwardness of medical research by
the side of a advances in medical practice are both stories of the
survival of the medieval approach to things in this country. We have
the best technicians and professionals but they are inarticulate,
they either cannot or will not be ready to communicate with each other
or with others. It is time we realize that technical education and
technical advances are not possible without a liberal and skilled
use of language. And I mean skilled use – not just an acquaintance
with the technical terminology but the capacity to present one’s say
clearly and systematically – as a teacher or a consultant or a client
or a popularizer or a discussant or whatever.
We often hear discussions on the choice
of the medium of education – whether Own Language or some other Link
Language. The medium of education was first narrowly understood as
the language of the classroom floor or the examination hall – then
interpreted as inclusive of the so-called library language. At the
lowest level of education there just is no alternative to Own Language
– ‘Own Language’ is here understood as the regional standard language
which the learner is more or less at home with, whether the learner
learned it from his immediate family as a first language or not. It
does not make sense, for example, to have the adivasi children exposed
to the regional language that they do not know – a smoother transition
over the first two or three years through the employment of bilingual
teachers knowing the adivasi child’s Own Language is essential if
the child is not to acquire a permanent distaste of all formal education.
Again, at the highest level of education it is equally clear that
one cannot limit oneself to the Own Language of the learner as the
medium. One cannot study Ayurvedic medicine without knowing Sanskrit
or Hindustani music without some Hindi or chemistry in its higher
reaches without reading German. The needs at the educational levels
in between the highest and the lowest are not so clear cut and need
to be a studied with care. In so doing, one must constantly bear in
mind that language is a medium not merely for imparting information
but for organizing thoughts. For organizing one’s thoughts or following
the contours of someone else’s thoughts more than a perfunctory knowledge
of the language is required – this is often overlooked by those glibly
talking about a “quickie” course in English as a prerequisite to undergraduate economics
or philosophy.
II
To realize the heavy freight that a
language carries is to realize how heavy a responsibility the language
teacher is called upon to bear. Indeed he has to share it with the
other teachers. George Sampson, the English educationist, has said,
“Every teacher is a teacher in English.” (English for the English,
London, 1922) Thus, a teacher who uses, say Marathi as a medium of
teaching is also thereby a teacher of Marathi. The popular administrative
assumption that just anybody knowing Marathi can be assigned the job
of teaching Marathi has to be reversed. On the contrary, even for
teaching the other subjects a good control of Marathi is necessary
so that the teacher will also be in a position to nurture the Marathi
of his pupils. The teacher formally in charge of Marathi is simply
the leader of this operation. The full meaning of Sampson’s dictum
has to be seen in some such terms.
Now, can one assume that the language
being used as a medium in the first years of school is already known
to the child entering the school? So put, the question looks obvious
enough. But it is not uncommon to see Indian children floundering
through an English-medium pre-primary or primary school, the parents
and the school authorities making the gratuitous assumption that though
the children do not speak English at home somehow they will muddle
through and learn other subjects with the help of a language that
they do not know!
And then I have already made a reference
to the Korku or Koilam child being called upon to learn in
Marathi without having learned Marathi in the first place. The same
is true, though somewhat less acutely so, of the child who speaks
some non-standard version of Marathi facing a teacher impatient with
his failure to use standard Marathi whether passively or actively.
It is high time that the teacher and the school administration realize
the child’s predicament and adopt a less casual and more sympathetic
approach.
When a Marathi-speaking child learns
Hindi, he is not expected to give Marathi the go-by: rather it is
just that he is expected to learn a new language in addition to
his own – simply for the purpose of opening up new channels of communication
to him. Similarly, standard Marathi is to be looked upon as a link
language for the various regional versions of Marathi found in Maharashtra;
in any case it is not the private property of any region or class.
The school child should neither be made to feel that he is no good
if he cannot use standard Marathi correctly nor be led to believe
that he has nothing to lose by not being able to use an acceptable
version of standard Marathi. Rather standard Marathi should be presented
to him as a window to the wider world outside the family and the village.
Just as one can speak, say, Kolhapur Marathi correctly or write poems
or stories in it, one need not exactly find it beyond oneself to master
standard Marathi and make it one’s Own Language.
Does this mean that there is no teaching
problem for those pupils who happen to speak standard Marathi at home?
Not at all, because quite a part from the dialect diversity at the
regional level and the language diversity at the all-India level,
a developing country like India is facing a more subtle problem –
a problem that is not much talked about that may turn out to be the
most important one in the long run. The problem is that of meeting
the need of moulding a language nurtured in an agricultural, feudal,
rural society with poor communications in such a fashion that it can
cope with the triple needs of a modern society, namely:
(a)
impersonal, standardized expression of science and routinized
contents
(such that it is accessible to those
who need it);
(b)
richly distinctive expression of novel ideas and personal feelings
in literature and thought (such that the individual is not submerged
in the midst of a mass society with its pressures for confirmism);
and
(c)
the expression of shared ideas and feelings (such that it is
has wide access and appeal in journalism and public life but avoids
stale clichēs, snob appeal, or esoteric; argon).
The problem is not something to be
solved in the classroom. The instrument is to be forged by the writers
and speakers themselves. What the teacher can do is to make the student
aware of the problem and master the instrument as it is being forged.
Liveliness is ensured through visual and audio-visual aids,
dramatization ranging from question-answer to a full-scale dialogue,
the choice of graded connected texts with story or other interest,
and, finally, relating all this material to the learner’s own interests.
Habituation is ensured through audio-aids, memorization of connected
texts ranging from nursery rhymes to dialogues, and drilling; it is
essential for building a working base in phonology and grammar. Improvisation
– coping with “unseen” texts and producing “unseen” texts – is encouraged
by variation drills, guided dialogue and composition, and learning
to learn new words, idioms and constructions. A controlled and limited
use of grammar and of explanations of meaning and grammar in Own Language
need not be taboo so long as these do not usurp the main goal.
Finally, while the use of phonetics and grammar in the class-room
has to be indirect and limited, a good and up-to-date knowledge of
these subjects is essential on the part of the language teacher and
the teacher-trainer.
IV
So far we have concerned ourselves with the place of language
in education as its medium, with the teaching of Own Language, and
with the teaching of Other Languages. In so doing we emphasized the
distinction between the knowledge of language in a practical sense
and the knowledge about language. We shall now attempt to find a place
for this latter sort of knowledge under the educational sun.
The study and research in linguistics has only recently
been put on the academic map of India at the postgraduate level, Welcome
as this encouragement to linguistics is, it is not enough. It is only
proper that a knowledge about
the fundamentals of language – about what makes it tick and what makes
a problem out of it – be disseminated beyond the circle of specialists.
Even as a citizen should know the history and geography
of his country, he should have some basic notion of this very important
social institution, this important aspect of his very make-up – at
the very least, he should not entertain elementary misconceptions
on the subject. In a multi-lingual country like India, this is not
merely desirable but essential.
At the primary or secondary school level, it is not inconceivable
that a and a certain understanding about language and about the languages
around oneself can be nourished as a part of the teaching of history,
geography, and social studies. Linguistic science need not be a formal
subject in the curriculum; the teaching of Own Language provides a
good occasion to inculcate a clear awareness of sound and writing
systems, of grammar and vocabulary, of the emergence of meaning and
of language variation. Naturally, this means that the text books will
have to be recast and the teachers reoriented. A clear-headedness
in these matters may have a beneficial effect on Other Language learning
and teaching. Turning to the collegiate level, linguistics can certainly
be offered as a subordinate elective subject. This will help the diffusion
of a better appreciation of language and its problems among the educated
laymen.
What languages to teach how many to teach, whom to teach
them, and in which language to teach other subjects – we have all
found ourselves discussing these questions at the practical and political
levels. But the why and how of language teaching is equally important
to consider. If the neglects of Other Language teaching can be costly,
the neglect of Own Language teaching can be paralyzing. The prospect
of a generation coming up that commands no language sufficiently well
to meet the pressing needs of a modern society is very grim indeed.
COLOPHON
This was published in Vishveshvananand indological journal
13; 1-7, 1975 (Acharya D. Vishwa Bandha commemoration Volume, part
–II). Also reprinted in South
Asian Language Review 4:2:1-8, 1994 (Creative Books, New Delhi).
