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Published : 17 Jan 2018

A Persisting Confusion in Modern Education

Risks and limitations of vernacular & foreign language

Avik Gangopadhyay

 

Man is a zoologically distinctive informavore creature, who acquires, share and apply knowledge of how the world works to outsmart plants, animals and each other.

Language is an adaptation for sharing information, rather a remarkable psychological faculty, by which man conveys thoughts to one another by means of a highly structured signal. Principally, language works both as a dictionary of memorized symbols, that is, words, and a set of generative rules organized into several subsystems, that is,grammar. The machinery of language appears to be designed to encode and decode propositional information for the purpose of sharing it with others. Language is universally complex and develops reliably throughout the species, partly independently of general intelligence.

More than a decade has passed by but a comprehensive plan of improvisation is yet to take off, predominantly in the third-world and developing countries: whether vernacular or a privileged language is to be the vehicle of getting initiated into the world of education. Both have strong practical merits and demerits. Children learn better in their mother tongue: research has shown that children’s first language is the optimal language for literacy (UNESCO, 2008). Children are more likely to enrol and succeed in school if the language of instruction is the same as the child's mother tongue, there is a better chance for the child to 'fit in' and continue with education. Students who are taught in the same language spoken at home and the community for the first 8 years of their lives, develop better language abilities in other languages and even do better in other areas of study, leading some scientists to hypothesise that it might have to do with overall brain development.

The Sapir-Whorf principle holds that an individual's language has a profound impact on his cognitive processes. Basically, not only does thought affect language, but language affects thought. If our children are not educated in their mother tongue, thousands of years of thought processes might end abruptly. There are certain concepts, cultural constructs and even philosophical beliefs that can only be expressed in a child's mother tongue.

Research has also shown that parents are more likely to participate in their children’s learning: parents will feel they can actually make a difference in their child's education if they are freely able to communicate too with their teachers and be able to help at home. Even children tend to develop better thinking skills. In spite of growing evidence and parent demand, many educational systems around the world insist on exclusive use of one or sometimes several privileged languages. This means excluding other languages and with them the children who speak them. Advancing research on mother tongue-based multilingual education also show that children whose primary language is not the language of instruction in school are more likely to drop out of school or fail in early grades. Emphasis on non-vernacular often makes hard to grasp all that is at stake: parents not enrolling their children in school at all, children not able to engage successfully in learning tasks, teachers feeling overwhelmed by children’s inability to participate, early experiences of school failure, and so on.

Some children do succeed, perhaps through a language transition program that helps them to acquire the language of instruction. But there is the risk of negative effects whereby children fail to become linguistically competent members of their families and communities and lose the ability to connect with their cultural heritage. Increasingly, it leads to an inability to communicate about more than mundane matters with parents and grandparents, and a rapid depletion of the world’s repository of languages and dialects and the cultural knowledge that are carried through them.

There are three sides in the evolutionary psychology of language: those who believe in language as an adaptation, those who believe it is a by-product of another adaptation, and those who believe it is an expatiation. Neuro-scientists and psychologists argue that language as a mental faculty shares many likenesses with the complex organs of the body which suggests that, like these organs, language has evolved as an adaptation, since this is the only known mechanism by which such complex organs can develop. The complexity of the mechanisms, the faculty of language and the ability to learn language provides a comparative resource between the psychological evolved traits and the physical evolved traits.

Pinker and Noam Chomsky, a cognitive scientist and a linguist, argue that children can learn any human language with no explicit instruction. They suggest that language, including most of grammar, is basically innate and that it only needs to be activated by interaction. But Pinker and Bloom argue that the organic nature of language strongly suggests that it has an adaptational origin. Chomsky spearheaded the debate on the faculty of language as a cognitive by-product. As a linguist, rather than an evolutionary biologist, his theoretical emphasis has on the infinite capacity of speech and speaking: there are a fixed number of words, but there is an infinite combination of the words. The jolt that one encounters pursuing the mother tongue based education has been the painful shift in higher education. The students will have a painful shift at high school or college when they are required to learn engineering, medical, accounting, IT or new-age concepts in English. Students, who are otherwise very smart, had to keep translating all the concepts from mother tongue to English.

English is said to be a global language and has, in fact, contributed substantially to the growth of an economy. Therefore, an English education can have significant impact on students’ employment prospects, when they grow up. If they learn in English from the beginning, they are unlikely to struggle to learn the language at a later stage. Then, there is the practical problem of making textbooks with high- quality content in all the regional languages as quality of translation is neither uniform nor used as a dependable linguistic strategy in teaching-learning methodology. The cognitive ability to learn a new language is higher in formative years of a person. Most polyglots are people who had been influenced by multiple languages at a young age. In one's entire childhood, if one is exposed to a single language, it creates a bad environment to learn new language. In that case a linking language is said to bring about a sense of integration to a far greater extent than teaching students in regional languages.

Mother tongue based education promotes the mother tongue at the cost of the bridge languages that would enable the students to connect with the rest of the world. If the institution doesn't expose them to English, they will find it very hard in mastering the language, as their parents and surroundings don't. In such a highly fluid world as we are into, people need to be conversant with English. Today, apart from the Asian countries, the Europeans too have already started to encounter the disadvantage in this respect.

Avoiding any extremities we should have a coalescence of English and mother tongue, where the parents teach the kids in mother tongue and schools substantively emphasise teaching English, with some sort of a bridge facilitated by both of them.

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