The NEP 2019 should envision a system that provides high quality education for all, to sustainably transform India.
There are a number of things to commend in the 2019 NEP (National Education Policy). Highlights include the emphasis on inclusion, creativity, customisation through technology, teachers’ training and the focus on nourishing local languages through initiatives such as the institute for translation and interpretation. However, pitting English against our mother tongues as adversaries in a zero sum game is troubling. So is the lack of attention to entrepreneurial education which is crucial for remaking current realities into new futures.
THE ELITE CLASS…
As someone who writes and teaches in English, I wonder if I am part of the economic elite that imposes an alien tongue through the “control” of jobs. More on that later. First let me describe how I got to where I am.
I grew up lower middle class in the 1960s and 1970s. Education was the doorway to everything worth achieving for my family and for every family in my neighbourhood. Thanks to my parents’ determination to keep me and my three siblings busy both in and out of school, I ended up studying Sanskrit for seven years, completing a Kovid degree parallel to my SSC. I studied in Tamil-medium until the sixth grade at which point my school was turned into English medium. I grew to love languages. The bold brash sensuality of Tamil, the crisp vivid precision of Sanskrit, the heart-melting beauty yet rationality of Urdu. Each twining its sounds into my psyche, shaping my lived experiences in my classrooms and around the world, enabling me to enjoy the rasa of countless languages: Dobro jutro! Terimakasih! Molweni! Obrigado! Oyasuminasai!
Fact is, English opened the door not merely to jobs (in those days, girls were not raised with jobs in mind), but to the world, and in a way to the universe. I suspect that is true of the Danes and the Japanese and all other non-native English speakers who choose to learn English. Simply because English has become the linguistic currency of the world, not to mention the internet and space travel. Yet over the years, I have also sought to cherish the living vitality of our languages, whether in music, movies and novels, or even commercials on TV. I have provided unsolicited advice to friends about talking to their kids in their native tongues and have advocated ad nauseam for the three-language formula (and then some) on the basis of its cognitive and neuro developmental benefits.
But the confrontational tone of the NEP toward English made me carefully reconsider my love of English. Thanks to my maternal grandfather, who left me the books and my paternal uncle, who gifted me a dictionary, I taught myself English through the 17 large volumes of Times of India books with titles such as Great Men of India, 50 Famous Detectives of Fiction and the Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw. One thing that shocked me about the language was its inherent irreverence. Maybe because I learned English through Shaw, this irreverence soon became the most exhilarating freeing experience of my youth. No need to worry about hierarchies: when to use aap, tum and tu. And the endless gender conjugations. Who cares? In English it felt like everyone was treated the same. A simple “he” or “she” could cover anyone, whether old or young, master or servant, teacher or student. Of course, later on I learned that English had its own ways, subtler ways, to create distance and hierarchy. But at 12, the irreverence was intoxicating. Combined with the debating techniques and argumentation architecture I learned from my outstanding Sanskrit teacher, who also loved English while insisting I speak in Sanskrit, disciplined irreverence became a rasa of its own in my development.
If we are to develop true self-reliance and Tagore’s land “Where the mind is without fear,” we cannot shut ourselves off from the world. We cannot let the world be “broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls”. Nor can we afford to see this as a zero sum game where the “economic elite”, who “control” jobs, are somehow throttling our languages. To understand this, we need to understand where jobs come from.
…AND THE JOBS THEY CONTROL
It is true that through most of human history, most people have had little or no say in the jobs they had to do to survive. Historians estimate that more than 95% of humanity had no freedom or social mobility until around the 18th century. If this number surprises you, just consider the fact that 50% of humanity is women and even today in many countries, women are excluded from several job categories, if not outright discouraged from trying for any at all. Add to that peasants, indentured servants and slaves—the number does add up. But with the spread of the “scientific method”—namely the idea that anyone and everyone can learn to understand the universe through evidence and reason, a slew of powerful concepts such as democracy, free markets and human rights combined with new technologies began freeing up human time and labour. The result, as Hans Rosling shows in Factfulness, is increased life expectancy, increasing per capita income and the rise of the middle class. Increasing proportions of human beings are no longer destined to die in the stations/classes/castes they are born into.
We are at the cusp of an even greater leap forward with the development of the “entrepreneurial method” that can be and should be taught to everyone, not just to potential entrepreneurs. In the interests of full disclosure, I have been directly involved in developing the method, along with hundreds of collaborators around the world. And the work we are doing is beginning to show that the rich and powerful among us, whether in government, public or private sector, are not really the ones we need to wait on to create jobs that we hope will pay us a living wage.
Entrepreneurship is the ultimate back-up option, whether you are an illiterate woman in a rural area or a middle manager in an MNC. Moreover, it can be taught and learned to become a “live” option throughout your career, whether you are a professional, an artist, a run-of-the-mill worker wearing a blue or white collar, or a stay-at-home parent. Most importantly, entrepreneurship teaches you a bias for action so you can tackle problems in innovative ways, builds resilience to deal with uncertainty and failure, and constructs evidence-based optimism and considered judgement about working and dealing with other people. Not just to compete with them for marks and jobs, but to co-create new futures with them as productive yet independent collaborators. Both India-embracing and world-facing languages are key to this endeavour.
Given that we cannot all learn all languages and some of us simply cannot be fluent in more than one, it would be short sighted to short change English. Yet, those of us who do feel comfortable with English really do need to invest more—time, energy, emotion and real taxpayer money—in going out of our way to nurture our native languages, preferably more than one per person.
To accomplish this, we cannot be India-centred. We need to be India-propelled. And world enhancing. Therefore, the vision I would like to see for the new NEP is: The NEP 2019 envisions an education system that provides high quality education for all to sustainably transform India into an equitable society of engaged citizens capable of contributing to the advancement of knowledge and human development.
The author is Paul M. Hammaker Professor of Business Administration, University of Virginia, Darden School.