31 July 2020
The New Education Policy has many facets that would take some time for experts to come up with views. I am not here to wade into any controversy, for I would like to think, no reasonable citizen or expert adviser to the Government in a democracy would sacrifice common sense and caution for pushing a political agenda in the matter of education. For some time, I have been trying to reply to microbloggers about their expansive suggestions on Education when this current policy was in consultation stage, that ideal would be to have actually no policy in education that does not harm any student group, rather than have a policy that could.
I think of only Japan and Germany as two countries whose educational systems could be worth following for the simple reason that these are countries that frequently throw up indigenous technologies in the entire arc of science, and also cultural spheres from literature to modern forms such as Cinema and Cartoon industry. If you can appreciate, it is like Olympic medals, where once China and India with more than half of humanity never figured on medal tallies, then China bloomed through her development programme and India is still trying to break in. I remember once, Indians thought that they were not racially inclined to athleticism, that was before the current generation of ‘do it all’ cricketers emerged, such that fielding is no longer an Indian weakness any more! What I am conveying here directly is that Indians can excel at something that has caught their imagination, where their ‘government’ is not involved and where there is a lot of money thrown in by financiers and corporate sponsors. That is how the arrival of talent today from hinterland, non traditional cricket bastions, for which the biggest example is Mr Mahendra Singh Dhoni, and if you wanted to linger and give credit to this legend, it is how he has overcome all manner of shortcomings in technique and talent through his temperament, which was another revelation for India when he first arrived on the scene.
Why Indians excelled in cricket for example is because, the medium of instruction is not as important as the instruction itself. That more mediums like visual form allow the young enthusiasts to first imitate and imagine themselves in shoes of established performers and still come up with an original action like Jasprit Bumrah has! So I would like to think that Indians of the future would find ways and means beyond the traditional classroom and beyond the traditional medium of interactive sessions to more enterprising ways, which this Pandemic has already opened possibilities to in a major way. So when people go online, the teachers and students themselves discover resources that the world wide web has which offer much greater insight, opening better learning possibilities and far superior outcomes that the one anchored to the limited skills of one teacher per subject and one text book does!
In this context alone, I am interested in the New Education Policy, for it will now enforce a system of instruction where the English language which is the de facto language of the internet, in which majority of the web content is available, is not introduced to children till class 5. If one looked at School as from standards 1 to 10, this is half of the formal length of schooling! It would again mean greater reliance on text book and teacher, if the learning were to happen in the vernacular or mother tongue, unless a whole new ecosystem was created that carried this through to graduation and post graduation. I have long argued that there is nothing stopping India from allowing higher technical education in mother tongues, especially since, India does allow now medical graduates who learnt their stuff in Russian, or Chinese to work in India after passing a standardisation test back home! I am sure, that these doctors are doing as good a professional job as other doctors who graduated from India’s medical education system. In any case, medicine is such a field that if in practice you are wanting, you will get weeded out. I am sure the same applies to Pure Sciences, to Allied Sciences, to STEM ecosystem of higher education, to history, art, culture and music.
I would like to think that the stranglehold that English has in higher education in India is an extensive ploy by existing and entrenched elites to retain their turf for their progeny, since English itself is a barrier for vast majority of India from her mofussil towns and provinces. Yet, it was this very English that allowed millions of Indians from these towns and regions to gain entry through specialised coaching, into the Soft Ware Industry, one of the biggest contributors to India’s successful growth and relative prosperity in the last three decades! How Indians learnt to speak in American accents, doing BPO jobs on unearthly shifts, is the saga of a non linear but connected sectoral growth from NIIT to Call Centre! India’s services sector growth more than compensated the carpet bombing suffered by her local manufacturing when China grew up as the Factory of the World! When even the rigid Spanish are now offering English speaking courses to cater for tourism/hospitality services, would India not lose her innate advantage of this three language system she already had in her education policy?
The biggest burden of Language actually is how our cultures are evolved and preserved. Few Indians realise that wisdom of the founding fathers when they offered Linguistic States to Independent India, because culturally for example, Malayalam or Tamil or Telugu, or Kannada or Odiya or Kashmiri or Punjabi are beyond spoken languages! If one looks at perhaps the oldest of them all, Tamil, you see Tamil spoken in South Asia and South East Asia by medieval era settlers and later day indentured labour exports to these places, and the connection that Tamil offers to the diaspora across nationalities, religions and regions is something one can directly experience in Canada, USA , Germany or UK. The same to a large extent is true of Malayalam and other languages of India, even of languages not on India’s official list like Konkani, Tulu, Sindhi, Kodagu, Mewari and I can add to this list till I come to some of the languages on the endangered list of which there are 191 listed by UNESCO starting with A’tong and ending with Zeme!
So in a way, the move of the government to offer learning in native languages or mother tongues is really commendable, the big shortfall is going to be that this instruction stops in Class 6 where you revert to English, which will actually become a stalling barrier as many will be unable to cross this hurdle at this late a stage. Already Indian educational surveys have thrown up startling learning outcomes in Math and sciences in high school students schooling in government schools and even private ones. What India needs is a generation of innovators, people who can not just service the world, by offering new products, concepts, ideas, and machines to the 21st Century. If you see examples from the past, like Mathematical genius Shakuntala Devi, Srinivas Ramanujam, English was not their forte, though English opened their genius to the world. If Mathematics was such a field that was locally rewarding and fulfilling, would they need to go abroad to win their spurs? I doubt if Gurudev Tagore would have had a similar legendary trail blasting life if his Gitanjali did not win the Literature Nobel! The biggest problem within India is how innovation and ideas have such a poor market, with hardly any one interested or listening, whereas our cultural heritage across languages shows evidence of an India that was curious and open about ideas, concepts and constructs, rewarding people who were of insight, learning and creative genius.
Macaulay’s educational system produced in India a designed effect according to my great grandfather. His pet theory was Macaulay was shocked to see how intelligent and creative Indians were, that he went back and devised a system that converted creative genius into clerkship! However, the assertion may be a good way of colonial bashing, but as the ITES and IT industry have shown, Indians do not really value technology and need a Western society driven or Global demand for technological services and hence we look forward to ‘safety net of clerkship and coolie roles’ ones that do not involve risk or expending our mental energies, extracting little of our intellectual or financial capital! The biggest evidence is how India produces more engineering graduates each year than the whole of Asia and we still don’t do any path breaking engineering. How most of our engineer graduates are herded into non engineering jobs, how they move from engineering college campuses to business management campuses and how an improbable combination for high paying jobs is not IIT and Research, leading to tenured chairs, but IIT and IIM! So we come full circle back to the cricket analogy!
We need higher technical education in a language in which we think. Invariably Indians, like most humans will think in their mother tongue. The inability of Indians to innovate and to lead in innovation either in India or abroad proportional to their presence is because of this crucial handicap, this thought barrier, where lack of exposure to higher concepts in their thinking language makes them only good at repetitive or follow up tasks rather than be path finders and founders of new horizons themselves. I may be wrong, but the reason Korea, Japan, Germany, Baltic States and Israel are hubs of innovation outside of China and the USA is because of their reach through native tongues to STEM fields.
Our Demographic Dividend would come only by innovation by experimentation and by making Indians generate ideas, harnessing a naturally endowed neural circuitry that is readily given to imagination and argumentation! What it needs is the code, the language to connect thought to expression, to create new science and forge new technologies. Of course, this is one part of Indian educational gap, the other is ‘hand skill’ which is a big reason for poor quality of machining and manufacture, something which can be covered not fully even by assembly line manufacturing and robotics! This gap often leads to lost in translation of many a good idea into reality! That too would get attention the day we stop haggling with artisans and craftspeople!
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