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A very insightful article I found about the effects the lopsided implementation of an education system is having on India. Unless we sort out this major problem first, there is no way we can even dream of great power status. But I've realised that dreaming of superpower status is folly when such a huge number of my fellow Indians are suffering so much due to structural problems in Indian society and a complete lack of institutions to hold it up.
The dominance of Angreziyat in our education
She points out how adopting English as the national language has been a huge and unmitigated disaster, due to the fact that only a very small elite knows this language, and by conducting the business of the state in a language accessible only to the few, how we cut off the vast, vast majority of the subjects of the state from everything a state is supposed to provide, including even the justice mechanism.
It also leads to alienation - the people educated only in English, and in whose schools people are actually punished for speaking in their mother tongue (most English-medium schools, to enhance their prestige, make it a punishable offence for students to speak in any language other than English), are unable to identify with the wider society in which they are living, and lose all sense of empathy and compassion with the people who look up to them as an elite.
Now, I still haven't completely got over my anti-Indian and anti-Hindi (and anti-Marathi) prejudices which the system tried to instil throughout my education, but because I never really bought into them in the first place, and because my family has a rich tradition of literary activity in our languages, the process is very easy for me. For millions of others, however, it is not, because they know only that English which is taught, usually in a very distorted form, and because learning their own languages brings no rewards, they dump their own traditions completely, ending up with no tradition or literary exposure whatsoever, and a consequent stunting of the ability to think and analyse from both the imported and their own traditional point of view. It is a monumental loss of culture.
The pernicious effects of colonialism linger on.........
The dominance of Angreziyat in our education
She points out how adopting English as the national language has been a huge and unmitigated disaster, due to the fact that only a very small elite knows this language, and by conducting the business of the state in a language accessible only to the few, how we cut off the vast, vast majority of the subjects of the state from everything a state is supposed to provide, including even the justice mechanism.
It also leads to alienation - the people educated only in English, and in whose schools people are actually punished for speaking in their mother tongue (most English-medium schools, to enhance their prestige, make it a punishable offence for students to speak in any language other than English), are unable to identify with the wider society in which they are living, and lose all sense of empathy and compassion with the people who look up to them as an elite.
Now, I still haven't completely got over my anti-Indian and anti-Hindi (and anti-Marathi) prejudices which the system tried to instil throughout my education, but because I never really bought into them in the first place, and because my family has a rich tradition of literary activity in our languages, the process is very easy for me. For millions of others, however, it is not, because they know only that English which is taught, usually in a very distorted form, and because learning their own languages brings no rewards, they dump their own traditions completely, ending up with no tradition or literary exposure whatsoever, and a consequent stunting of the ability to think and analyse from both the imported and their own traditional point of view. It is a monumental loss of culture.
The pernicious effects of colonialism linger on.........
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