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Comments by AYESHA KIDWAI, JNUThe Draft National Education Policy 2019 (henceforth, DNEP) seeks to provide a policy framework for the “transformation and reinvigoration of the education system” in a manner that takes “into account the diversity of the Indian people, their traditions, cultures, and languages”. However beyond lip-service to these lofty ideals, very little framework or policy is actually contained in this document, particularly when the promotion and development of Indian languages and their use in education is concerned. This largely stems from fundamental misconceptions about the innate human endowment for language and cognition, an elite lack of awareness of the state of India’s languages and the resources (particularly pedagogical) at their command, and an overarching agenda of reproducing the hierarchical stratification between languages, in particular the contradiction between Sanskrit and the roughly 1651 mother tongues (1961 Census) that are presumably spoken in India today.That the writers of the DNEP have neither engaged in any in-depth study of any of the issues surrounding Indian languages nor consulted any educationists or linguists is quite evident. The fact that the documents uses the keyword ‘language’ every two-three pages and is full of grandiose formulations about the ‘superiority’ and ‘perfection’ of all Indian languages is no consolation therefore, and certainly will not contribute to any amelioration of the crisis that afflicts Indian linguistic diversityThe NDEP is deeply taken up with the thesis that children are innately endowed to acquire languages from the ages of 0-8, presumably because of a permeation of the highly influential theories of language acquisition owing to principally Noam Chomsky. However, because the understanding of Chomsky’s landmark contentions is extremely limited and superficial, the only message that is drawn is that children learn languages most quickly in the period of 0-8 years. As a consequence, various proposals in the DNEP impose obligatory multilingual curricular education from the age of 3 onwards, in which young children will be taught “alphabets, numbers, basic communication in the local language/mother tongue and other languages” with the objective of “instilling excellent multilingual skills in children as early as is possible and developmentally appropriate.”In Chomsky’s formulation, language acquisition is the result of unconscious use of the principles and parameters of the structural properties of spoken human language specified by the innate Faculty of Language. The innate endowment is domain-specific — it is particular to language and independent of other cognitive abilities — and is specific to a knowledge of human languages. The child’s acquisition of languages does not require either introspection, correction, or instruction, it involves a process (subparts of which may be ordered) that goes on for quite a bit — perhaps until the age of 8. During this critical period, it is claimed that the child is primed to acquire the structural properties of as many languages as there are in her environment — if the child is in a multilingual environment— say of Tamil, Spiti Bhoti, and English, the child will have no problem learning the structure of all three simultaneously.Proponents of mother tongue education, which includes the Constitution of India by the way, have argued for the mother tongues/home languages of a child to be the best vehicle of delivery of early education, because by the time the child comes to school, she would have proceeded a fair way down the path of language acquisition. Mother tongue education, it is claimed, would lessen the cognitive load on the child, specially in the areas of literacy in alphabets and numeracy, because these latter two involve the development of skills that are non-linguistic in nature. Learning grapheme—sound correspondences that scripts require is simply easier if you know the word already. The same logic goes for other aspects of early education, such as word-learning (a life-long activity), narrative construction, learning cultural norms like politeness, voice modulation, — learning these in a language that the child doesn’t know is just more difficult.Unfortunately, the DNEP’s superficial understanding conflates all these aspects of language. While the child is primed to learn many spoken languages at an early age, provided that she is exposed to them, and early education in education and primary school can provide that exposure, the felicity in spoken languages does not extend to tasks that involve other cognitive abilities such as grapheme abstraction, working and long-term memory (which develop much more slowly). In other words, just because the child can speak one or three language by the time she is 4 or 5, doesn’t mean that she can write it, or knows all the words in it. In the case of our Tamil-Spiti Bhoti-English speaking child, the cognitive load of learning three different scripts (even if at the very basic level of familiarity with script) all starting at the Anganwadi-level can hardly be justified, is certainly not equivalent to learning rhymes in all of them.To make matters worse, the DNEP’s pitch is not for mother tongue/home language education at all, as the few times it is mentioned it is always optional with a term called “local language”, which remains undefined. What is the local language of our Tamil-Spiti Bhoti-English child if she lives in Delhi? Hindi? This hypothetical situation may seem an unfair critique, but this extreme situation is actually what characterises most of the linguistic situations in India. A Marathi speaking child can be in Kannada-Tulu speaking country, an Awadhi-speaker can be in Bhojpuri-Urdu land, a Nepali speaker in Gaddi-Kangri territory. Moreover, the problem will only be exacerbated if the DNEP proposals of school clusters and pooling are to be implemented.Even if these issues were to be somehow addressed, as the DNEP suggests, through teachers being “encouraged to use a bilingual approach”, there are two yawning potholes in this fanciful roadmap. The first is the near-complete absence of any systematic graded pedagogical material in most of the languages of India. Even the most widely spoken Indian languages outside the 8th schedule do not have alphabet books and school textbooks developed in them. Gondi, which is spoken by 29,84,453 speakers across Andhra and Chattisgarh, on last count has just three textbooks developed in it by the state, and Adi, the most numerously spoken language in Arunachal Pradesh, has just only got a few. Most other mother tongues do not have even this luxury because they are yet to be written down, as there has been no uniform policy to give each language a script, and to promote its use.But even beyond this, if the objective is to really make the child’s language a subject of school education, the DNEP should take cognisance of the fact that development of even an alphabet book in it presupposes linguistic research as to which of a language’s sounds should be orthographically represented. The DNEP professes to be all about the development of excellent textbooks but has not one word of recognition about the serious challenges, if school textbooks are to move beyond rote translations of ‘A is for apple, B is for ball...’ How is the school supposed to then ensure that “When possible, the medium of instruction - at least until Grade 5 but preferably till at least Grade 8 - will be the home language/mother tongue/local language.” But how? The DNEP mentions the National Translation Mission, making the assumption that one textbook will form the template for another, but at the same time wants instruction to “heavily incorporate Indian and local traditions”! To develop such a set of pedagogical aids for instruction in the hole language, the first step necessarily has to be a description of each language in itself (and not as departures from some Schedule 8 language as the norm.The DNEP’s second major failure in conceptualisation is the assumption that anganwadi workers and teachers, have access to all the languages of the child. Even if a teacher is from the same area as a Gaddi child in Palampur, she is unlikely to speak Gaddi if she isn't from the community, and is certainly not trained to undertake any instruction in the language or to be able to freely translate between the two languages. But even if this problem were to be addressed by the institutionalised volunteerism that the DNEP fantasises to be the bedrock of the the new school education policy, what will the anganwadi worker/teacher do with the Nepali-speaking child (the offspring of the migrant construction worker doing roadwork in the area) who is also in the classroom? How can “the language of transaction between teachers and students ...remain the home language”?The problem will present itself all across this very diverse country of ours, but the colossal lack of awareness of Indian realities and a complete absence of even the most elementary background stocktaking of achievements and challenges makes the DNEP a text written by elites wringing their hands at the sorry state of Indian languages, and barking instructions at underperforming anganwadi workers, school teachers, education departments and state governments. At the policy level, institutionalising the description of Indian languages by linguists and the creation of textbook missions, with adequate resources and community participation, and then professionally training teachers to use them is the only policy that makes sense at this point, and has to be done painstakingly for every grade of school education and into university education at the very least.The DNEP makes no such policy commitments because it continues in the same chest-thumping register that serves to cover up the fact is that the Indian people and its education system has no idea of how many distinct mother tongues/home languages there are. Without the formulation of a national language policy and roadmap to preserve, promote and develop all these mother tongues at both the level of the Centre and the States, the DNEP. If no curricula and textbooks can be produced by 2023 — and there cannot be because there is no demand or commitment of any financial resources to this mammoth exercise — will parents want to enrol their children in schools in which they will have to take board examinations starting at age 8?It would be a fatal error however to read the DNEP persistent ignorance as naivete alone. While statements like “Indian languages are very scientifically structured, and do not have unphonetic, complicated spellings of words and numerous grammatical exceptions” may well stem from utter ignorance of the nature of language—all languages are scientifically structured and scripts are only conventionalised representations of speech (and really is it too much to expect a national committee to do some basic Wikipedia-level reading before moving cursor to text?) — yet the insincerity of the exegesis on languages is revealed by the actual policy recommendations about language education the DNEP makes.? Grades 1-5: The child is to be educated in home language/local language/Schedule 8 language plus two others. Hindi-speaking states must continue with Hindi-English plus one other language of India (which may include Sanskrit, which is to “be offered at all levels of school and higher education as one of the optional languages on par with all Schedule 8 languages”).? Grades 6-8: Children can change 1 of the 3 languages they are studying at this point. A fourth classical language will be added for two years, with the proviso if the child has already taken up Sanskrit as part of the three language formula, she may take an additional modern or classical Indian language.The fact that Sanskrit is the only classical language to be included in the three-language formula should give us pause, not the least because by the 2011 Census, there are just 24,821 persons who claimed to be speakers of this language (out of which 112 persons actually gave some other language name). What makes this one classical language so pre-eminent in a document that ostensibly seeks to establish the equal importance of all Indian languages? And why does a child in a state like Himachal Pradesh officially listed as Hindi-speaking have to take Hindi and English from class 6 onwards, even though she could have studied Spiti Bhoti, Kangri, and English before? Why can she not add Tibetan as the classical language— why does it have to be Sankrit? The short answer to all these questions is that the ideological investment in Hindi and Sanskrit must be preserved at all costs. The long answer of course is that all the lip service to other Indian languages notwithstanding, the DNEP seeks only to reproduce the traditional language hierarchies that have led to the ruin of our education system and school as the primary locus of language endangerment. Other Indian languages are being let in, but with only the limited functional role of a transitional resource, not to be developed and propagated. Even in this limited role however, the induction of these ‘other Indian languages’ as well as issues in providing a multilingual pedagogy get no specific mention in the changes needed in B.Ed. and other teacher training programmes.The same disinterest in the Non-Scheduled languages is seen in the short chapter (Chapter 22) on the promotion of Indian languages. While there is some recognition that capacity must be built in Indian languages (a welcome step), the problem that the vast majority of Indian languages outside the 8th schedule have not entered the university system is not even remotely addressed. The fact that most mother tongues have not received even the most rudimentary of linguistic descriptions is not acknowledged. Rather than recommending that the government must commit adequate resources to ensure quality language descriptions, that can be used by educationists, linguists, communities to generate resources, the only novel institution recommended is a National Institute for Pali, Persian and Prakrit — i.e. classical languages.In conclusion, the DNEP only gets one thing right when it comes to language in education — that it is a major problem. However, even as the government has come to a recognition of it only recently, educationists, linguists, and activists involved with school and higher education have launched several initiatives over several decades to try and remedy the state’s wilful ignorance of the crisis. In the wake of this belated recognition that mother tongues/home languages are important, the only measure of sincerity the DNEP Committee ought to have shown was to seek out their experience and expertise. It has failed to do so for now, and the only remedy that it can make is to do so now. In particular, chapters about, and roadmaps for, to the development of a language policy that creates an ecology in which all languages can thrive, the development of teaching and learning materials, and multilingual pedagogy need to be added. ................
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