What is the medium of instruction in your city, state, province, or country?
Posted: Sun Apr 04, 2021 10:13 am
And is the medium of instruction different from the language of the locals? Are your textbooks in a local language, the national language, or a foreign language? Can you write school and university exams in your native, local, or national language? I'm asking this because of the medieval (linguistically) situation of schooling and university education in India.
Situation In India
Hindi dominates in terms of native speakers. Almost half of India (47.86 percent) speaks Hindi-Urdu as their first language. Another 13.58 percent Indians study Hindi as a second or third language. It means that 61.44 percent people in India can converse in Hindi. There is no practical reason for Hindi-speakers to study another Indian language. For me, that's not a big problem because Punjabi and Hindi are like Ukrainian and Russian. But for a Tamil speaker, Hindi can be difficult. So there is a genuine fear if Hindi becomes the sole official language of India, non-Hindi speakers will be discriminated against. Politicians on both sides of the divide are hopeless. I personally find that pro-Hindi politicians are idiots and anti-Hindi politicians are opportunists.
Pro-Hindi politicians are idiots because they want everyone to learn Hindi. But in their own states, they never teach any Indian language. The same logic that English-speakers seem to employ today. "If everyone is learning English, why should we waste time on French conjugation or Chinese characters?" However, unlike English, Hindi is a poor language. There is an absolute dearth of non-fiction literature in Hindi. You cannot use Hindi in India's supreme court. There is hardy any university or college where you can study medicine, engineering, or computer science in Hindi. And I heard somewhere that you cannot even open a bank account in India if you don't sign in English. In an extreme case a man was sentenced to death and the convicted person couldn't even read his death sentence because it was in English. This lack of practical use bundled together with the some institutional support from the Indian government creates a perfect bogeyman for our elites and many opportunist anti-Hindi politicians.
Nothing sums up my feelings towards our elites better than the opening of this Reddit post: "The vast majority of our Anglophone elite is so deracinated and disconnected from Indians outside their South Delhi, South Bombay, and Civil Lines gated communities, that they Orientalise and Other the rest of India, the way they've seen Western scholars and journalists do." In fact, our elites erupted in furor when the Indian government in 2019 suggested to conduct at least primary education in a child's mother tongue. Dozens of idiotic articles this one were written in favor of teaching in English in a country where around 90% of people don't speak any English. Forbes, which is a foreign publication in an anglophone country, published a more sympathetic article The Problem With The English Language In India.
Those elites don't understand that even if I put my national, regional, and linguistic pride aside and ignore sound pedagogy, I'll fail! It's logistically impossible to educate 1,400 million people in a foreign language. Those elites can travel to the US or the UK, but for the vast majority we don't have enough teachers. Instead what we have are English-medium schools where the teachers who don't speak English teach students who don't speak English through textbooks written in (often bad) English.
I'm not against the teaching English as a foreign language but I'm against teaching of science, history, mathematics in English in our society. I've seen the harm it does. Many of my brilliant classmates opted out of school because they couldn't cope with learning in English. I would have admired our anti-Hindi politicians if they had batted for Tamil, Telugu, or Bengali. But, no. The current situation of those languages is as bad as of Hindi. So I call them opportunists because they talk much about Hindi Imposition but do almost nothing to support their own languages.
Situation In India
Hindi dominates in terms of native speakers. Almost half of India (47.86 percent) speaks Hindi-Urdu as their first language. Another 13.58 percent Indians study Hindi as a second or third language. It means that 61.44 percent people in India can converse in Hindi. There is no practical reason for Hindi-speakers to study another Indian language. For me, that's not a big problem because Punjabi and Hindi are like Ukrainian and Russian. But for a Tamil speaker, Hindi can be difficult. So there is a genuine fear if Hindi becomes the sole official language of India, non-Hindi speakers will be discriminated against. Politicians on both sides of the divide are hopeless. I personally find that pro-Hindi politicians are idiots and anti-Hindi politicians are opportunists.
Pro-Hindi politicians are idiots because they want everyone to learn Hindi. But in their own states, they never teach any Indian language. The same logic that English-speakers seem to employ today. "If everyone is learning English, why should we waste time on French conjugation or Chinese characters?" However, unlike English, Hindi is a poor language. There is an absolute dearth of non-fiction literature in Hindi. You cannot use Hindi in India's supreme court. There is hardy any university or college where you can study medicine, engineering, or computer science in Hindi. And I heard somewhere that you cannot even open a bank account in India if you don't sign in English. In an extreme case a man was sentenced to death and the convicted person couldn't even read his death sentence because it was in English. This lack of practical use bundled together with the some institutional support from the Indian government creates a perfect bogeyman for our elites and many opportunist anti-Hindi politicians.
Nothing sums up my feelings towards our elites better than the opening of this Reddit post: "The vast majority of our Anglophone elite is so deracinated and disconnected from Indians outside their South Delhi, South Bombay, and Civil Lines gated communities, that they Orientalise and Other the rest of India, the way they've seen Western scholars and journalists do." In fact, our elites erupted in furor when the Indian government in 2019 suggested to conduct at least primary education in a child's mother tongue. Dozens of idiotic articles this one were written in favor of teaching in English in a country where around 90% of people don't speak any English. Forbes, which is a foreign publication in an anglophone country, published a more sympathetic article The Problem With The English Language In India.
Those elites don't understand that even if I put my national, regional, and linguistic pride aside and ignore sound pedagogy, I'll fail! It's logistically impossible to educate 1,400 million people in a foreign language. Those elites can travel to the US or the UK, but for the vast majority we don't have enough teachers. Instead what we have are English-medium schools where the teachers who don't speak English teach students who don't speak English through textbooks written in (often bad) English.
I'm not against the teaching English as a foreign language but I'm against teaching of science, history, mathematics in English in our society. I've seen the harm it does. Many of my brilliant classmates opted out of school because they couldn't cope with learning in English. I would have admired our anti-Hindi politicians if they had batted for Tamil, Telugu, or Bengali. But, no. The current situation of those languages is as bad as of Hindi. So I call them opportunists because they talk much about Hindi Imposition but do almost nothing to support their own languages.