In
India, any issue that concerns learning or education, soon turns into
a hot potato. Curricula, duration of courses, optional subjects,
languages, you pick the name and you would find that it had been a
hotly debated issue sometime in the past. There are many reasons for
this, but the prime reason for the issues to become so critical is
that they all somehow get related to the future prospects, either
that of admissions or career of the students. India's education
system is highly competitive, like in many other countries. To get
admitted to a top engineering, medical or a management course, one
needs to score very high marks. Everyone wants to get admitted to one
of the top schools because it helps tremendously in the career
prospects. If students and their parents sniff even a slightest whiff
or a waft, that they feel might lower their chances of high score,
they all would move in unison to oppose any prospective change.
Fortunately,
language learning has never been part of this charade for high scores,
for the simple reason that language scores were never included in the
qualifying scores for admissions to higher courses. So, except for
few grumblings and grievances that language learning is an
unnecessary burden on student, no one really cares about the number
or what languages are being taught to the students.
In
India, the education sector is considered as a joint sector, where
state as well as federal Governments both can enact laws, rules and
regulations. Both can decide about the policies. With such kind of
situation, confusion and chaos are natural and this is what happens
often. Let me narrate my experiences as a student to highlight this.
I went to primary school within a few years from India's
independence. At that time the general feeling was that we should
reject everything connected with British, including English language.
Following this policy, state Government abolished teaching of English
from primary schools. Readers may not believe, but I literally
learned my ABC in eighth standard or in the secondary school. At that
time the matriculation examination was given after eleventh standard.
This meant that when I passed my matriculation, I had learned
English as a language for precisely four years and my knowledge of
English language was of very poor standard. When I went to college, I
found it difficult initially even to follow the lectures delivered in
English.
To
improve my knowledge of English, I was advised to take additional
English (which was at higher level) as an additional subject and
also take up private tuition. This improved my writing skills to some
extent and I managed to clear all English papers including Additional
English. I still had one more big disadvantage as I found myself to
be extremely poor in communication skills in English and used to feel
scared even to answer a phone call in English. The situation improved
only when I joined a top class all India institution for my
engineering studies and my feeling of inferiority, while speaking in
English, was finally gone.
During
high school days, my parents had insisted that I take optional
technical subjects. This meant that I had to give up learning
Sanskrit. My inability to understand even rudimentary Sanskrit has
proved to be, according to my experience, a big disadvantage for me.
Most of the Indian languages, except Tamil, are based on Sanskrit and
basic knowledge of Sanskrit not only helps understanding your own
mother tongue better but helps you to develop higher fluency and to
add a certain cultural richness in the language for that person.
Besides not helping improving my mother tongue, dropping Sanskrit as
a school subject, gave me a definitive disadvantage as far as scores
were concerned. Sanskrit was and is considered as a scoring subject
and your total marks percentage gets a boost with the marks scored in
Sanskrit. Since I had dropped Sanskrit, I had a natural disadvantage,
vis-a-vis my classmates, who could score more marks compared to my
technical subjects. All this meant that I was neirther proficient in
English as well as in my mother tongue Marathi. This deficiency
troubled me for number of years. I still sometimes feel lost for
proper words when expressing myself in either of these languages.
In the
second year of the college, I decided to opt for German as second
language because I knew that I would not be able to cope up with
additional English at this level and I had no knowledge of Sanskrit
at all. Learning German for one year was fun no doubt. I also managed
to get good grades. But learning a language for an year or two does
in no way help in making that person proficient in that language.
Within next 4 or 5 years, I completely forgot everything that I had
learned in the German class. Learning German, did not enrich my
language skills in any way at all and to that extent was a total
loss.
I have
narrated these experiences because I read that there is a certain
controversy that has come up recently. The students studying in
federal Government run secondary schools, have to learn besides their
mother tongue and English, a third language. For students with Hindi
as mother tongue, the choice is any other Indian language, Sanskrit
or German. For students with some other language as mother tongue,
the choice is Hindi, Sanskrit or German. The federal HRD ministry had
suggested to remove option of German as it was felt that this
learning is not of much relevance afterwords, in case of most of the
students.
The
news of this option was not received well by the schools as well as
parents for at least a couple of reasons. Firstly, some of the
students or their parents, from some regions of India, consider
learning Sanskrit or Hindi as an imposition of north Indian culture
on them. However, the most important reason seems to be that German
like Sanskrit is a scoring subject. If they take Hindi or any other
Indian language, they can never score that kind of marks.
It is
up to a student or their parents to decide, what third language they
should learn. As far as my experience goes, being proficient in
English as well as in your mother tongue and at least having a
rudimentary knowledge of Sanskrit is of far more relevance for a future in India
than learning some other language for an year and two and later
forgetting everything about it. But if you want to go for certain
status and high scores, which have no practical value, because
language scores do not help you in securing admissions for most of the advanced
courses, opt for other languages. Choice is yours!
25th
November 2014
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