UN Chronicle | Basic Education: Potentials of Literacy: A Multilingual Perspective

Basic Education
Potentials of Literacy: A Multilingual Perspective
By Lachman M. Khubchandani

Article

Photo: Mohammad Rahim.
Courtesy of the Afghan Media resource Center and Williams College.

In the Indian tradition, both oral and literate cultures have played a vital role. Literacy is not an all-or-none phenomenon. Indian heritage rejects the supremacy of one culture over the other, but the contemporary society has succumbed to what Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges called the cult of the book. Nowadays it is writing, not speech, which most educated people regard as basic and, indeed, as a necessity. Nevertheless, "necessities are not always good in themselves: out of their context, some, like wooden legs, are advantageous only to "men already maimed".1 Different societies at different times have been engaged in varied literacy practices. Among traditional societies, in the East and the West, the written text was conceived basically as an aid to spoken performance. In the Indian tradition, oral transmission of the Vedas and other Sanskrit literature has been practised from ancient times to the present. The feats displaying skills of both mindfulness and memory (through regular ritual chanting of mantras and by citing entire texts with varied concordances) have been part of learned, yet oral, traditions since ancient times.

The developing world, by and large, is committed to launching mass programmes for the eradication of illiteracy to enable the masses to play an active role in social and cultural change. Under the spell of contemporary thinking in education, there is a greater awareness to make adult education relevant to the environment and the learner's needs, and to diversify in regard to curriculum, teaching and learning methods and materials. Stress is laid on learning, rather than on teaching, and on harnessing the mass media.

Many modern education experts, uncritically accepting Western theories of education of the early twentieth century, regard it as axiomatic that the best medium for teaching a child is his/her mother tongue.2 These claims did not take into account the plural character of Indian society, which reveals apparent ambiguities in defining the concept of mother tongue itself. In linguistic and educational accounts, the terms mother tongue and native speech are often used indistinguishably. Native speech can be distinguished as "the first speech acquired in infancy, through which the child gets socialized—it can be individually identifiable". Mother tongue is mainly "categorized by one's allegiance to a particular tradition, and it is societally identifiable".3 Educational planners in the contemporary South Asian context have committed themselves to education for all without seriously questioning the elitist framework of education inherited from the colonial set-up. With such multilingual population and a federal polity, one finds a wide variation in different states as far as the medium, content, duration and nomenclature of educational stages are concerned.

The ideology of language in school is interwoven with that of education in society. The politicization of the language issue in India during its struggle for independence dominated the medium controversy, pushing into the background the ideological issues concerning the content of education. The demand for vernacularization by the native elite, such as Gokhale, Tagore, Gandhi and others in the early twentieth century, was associated with the cultural and national resurgence, and eventually with the growth of democracy promoting equality of opportunity through education.

Many educators have expressed that the present school system in India is too centralized, elite-dominated and urban-oriented. The new cultural curriculum and pedagogy must take into account the life-views and living styles of the communities to which the schoolchildren belong and adapt the content of learning to their needs and aspirations. In school lore, the educational disadvantage of rural and poor children is often thought to have its origins in the language deprivation the child suffers at home during the pre-school years and afterwards. Rural "non-standard" varieties are rated grammatically as "incorrect" and "bad", conceptually as "deficient" and sociologically as "deprived".

The Constitution of India provides to states full freedom to choose their official language(s). It also allows linguistic minority groups to receive education in their mother tongue and set up institutions of their choice for this purpose. As a result there is inevitable flexibility in the weightiness assigned to different languages in the total educational programmes in the framing of language curricula, in selecting textbooks and so on.

Since 1980, the domain of "education" in policy-making has been brought under the Concurrent List of the Constitution, allowing both the Union and state governments to initiate legislation on educational policies. This provision empowers the Union government to promote national policies through seeking mutual accommodation among individual states, coordinating institutions of higher education and research as well as vocational and technical training, persuasion of language-elites, and offering the incentives of resources at its command for specific programmes.

Amid sharp controversies concerning the role of different languages in education, a broad consensus was arrived at in the three-language formula around the sixties, which provided a basis of policy for a minimum requirement of languages in school education. For a nation such as India, where no single language caters to all the needs of an ordinary literate citizen, pan-Indian languages like Hindi—and for some time to come English—occupy a significant functional position in national life.

In multilingual societies, the ideal claim and the real function of a language might be at variance. One notices a wide gap between the language policies professed and actual practice in a classroom. It is not unusual in many institutions to find anomalous patterns of communication, where the teacher and the taught interact in one language, classes are conducted in another, textbooks are written in a third, and answers are given in a fourth language or style. Pluri-lingual cultural heritage transmits from one generation to another some prominent values of interaction: the ways of interpreting, sharing experiences, and thinking, known collectively as the "communication ethos".3 Such plural-speech communities tend to organize their repertoires through diglossic patterning, grass-roots folk multilingualism—distinct from elegant bilingualism or trilingualism learned through conscious effort—and other such processes of language contact. It leads to a great deal of code-switching, pidiginization and hybridization of two or more contact languages.

The heterogeneity of communication patterns in many regions of the subcontinent, the unequal cultivation of different languages for use as a medium of instruction, the demands of elegant versions of mother tongue for formal purposes, the non-availability of personnel with adequate command over the textbook language, and the switching-over to another medium in the multi-tier media system without adequate preparation are some of the difficulties faced by the learners who are initiated into education through the mother-tongue medium. These ground realities have led to the re-examination of the supremacy of the mother-tongue medium stretched over to the entire education career.

In various regions in South Asia, different socialization processes identify the characteristics of a speech stratum—local speech, subregional varieties, supra-regional varieties, lingua franca, "highbrow" dictions-associating them with a variety of interactions on the cline: close in-group->wider in-group->inter-group->mobility->mass communication->urban contact->formal (model for prestige).

In heterogeneous plural environments, a child acquires language from everyday life situations, where speech behaviour is guided by various implicit pressures based on close-group, regional, supra-regional and out-group identities. A child learns his language not from grammar books but from the behaviour of adults and peers through his innate capacities.

Today, many education programmes are geared to facilitate the scope of communication with the prevailing socialization values in a community. Against the background of a multiple-choice medium policy continued after independence, many newly-cultivated languages (mostly of tribal populations and other minorities) are initiated as preparatory medium at the primary stage. Many states have introduced a bilingual education policy, where a developing language in a region is used as a partial medium, together with English, Hindi or the regional languages as the major medium. At the tertiary stage, English continues to dominate the scene as a developed medium, and Hindi and regional languages as emerging media.

The types of media are very much diversified in character. Though many states prefer to promote the "exclusive" use of regional languages as the medium of instruction, in practice many students experience a shift in medium at one or another stage, depending upon context, domain and channel:
Passive and active media: Students listen to lectures in one language and write answers in another.

Formal and informal media: Formal teaching in the classroom is conducted in one language, but informal explanations are provided in another.

Multi-tier media: Elementary education is initiated through the mother tongue as a "preparatory" medium, but when students move upward in the education ladder, they have to shift to a more "cultivated" medium.

Literacy programmes in several pluri-lingual situations are organized through a contact language. For example, literacy in the Kashmir valley is imparted through Urdu, in Arunachal Pradesh through Hindi, and among tribal communities through the respective regional languages—Telugu, Oriya, Bengali, Marathi, Hindi and so forth. In such diversified speech areas, education programmes need to be geared to facilitate the scope of communication with the prevailing socialization values in a community extending from one's native speech to "associate" native speech—a second language—and when necessary to a totally unfamiliar (foreign) language.

In recent years, many political and academic agencies have lent their support to the claims of imparting education, through either a single dominant language in the region or some sort of compartmentalized or selective bilingual media, in order to keep pace with the socio-economic demands of rapid modernization.

Bilingual and bicultural education requires, apart from positive attitudes to speech variation, a degree of planning, a proficiency in the language of classroom and the languages of learners, and a high level of skill in teaching. The validity of these assumptions for a complex plural society needs to be assessed, and the different roles of mother tongue and non-native languages as media of instruction also need to be elaborated.

Under the spell of contemporary radical thinking, there is a greater awareness to make education relevant to the environment and learner's needs, and to diversify in regard to curriculum, teaching and learning methods and materials. Many multilingual institutions with multilingual teachers continue to cater to the needs of diverse populations throughout the country. Many minority institutions impart education through minority languages, and/or through pan-Indian languages like English and Hindi, depending upon the availability of textbooks, teachers and the trends of languages maintenance in the community.

The grass-roots approach emphasizes making education more meaningful, useful and productive to work experience. Sensitivity to speech variation and a grasp over the communication ethos prevailing in the society is, no doubt, enhanced by doing verbal events in natural settings. An elaboration of Gandhi's thinking concerning "basic education" could provide a useful focus in this regard.4 He laid stress on integrating education with experience, and language acquisition with communicability, as advanced in his approach to Hindustani. People's participation in the independence struggle on a massive scale provided an impetus to the Hindustani/Hindi movement as an expression of national identity.5 A network of rastrabhasa and charkha classes for adults, spread widely in many parts of the country, played a significant part in promoting literacy. The Hindustani movement programme provided a viable basis for meeting the demands of universal literacy with minimum financial inputs. Such educational pursuits have not been recognized as education proper in the professional sense.

But at the operational level, one is not surprised to find the bureaucratic machinery not mastering enough courage to accept a departure from conventional thinking and thus commissioning its resources for preparing materials in "standard regional or subregional languages/dialects" as an interim measure. In this endeavour, diverse approaches of transmitting literacy skills on a universal basis have emerged on the scene:

Conventional educators profess strict adherence to the standard language prevailing in the region.

Liberal educators recommend a bi-dialectal approach of a gradual phasing over time, from home dialect to the standard speech, thus initiating literacy through a non-standard "home" variety of learners as a transitory feature, which facilitates in switching over to the standard language at a later stage.

Some educators plead for a dichotomous approach by accommodating diversity of dialects/speech varieties at the spoken level, but insisting on the uniformity of standard language at the written level-acquiring literacy skills.

Those supporting a grass-roots approach for the universalization of education endorse a pluralistic model of literacy by which variation in speech is regarded as an asset to communication. It promotes the cultivation of positive values for the diversity of speech varieties/dialects prevailing in a group/individual, in response to the demands of the situation, identity and communication task.

In this scheme, literacy in the standard variety is promoted for economic-oriented situations and communication tasks; at the same time, learners are educated to diffuse the pejorative attributes to non-standard varieties which prevail in society and are often maintained or even enforced in a conventional learning situation.

Centrality of highbrow literature in formal education has also been a significant factor in widening the gap between the speech behaviour of literates. Written culture, fortified with vast literature and extensive documentation has remained isolated from the oral tradition, which is endowed with the rich cultural milieu of traditional societies.

In light of this, we need to look into how to tackle varying demands in the spoken and written genre of the same language. It is necessary to adopt a pragmatic approach to linguistic usage in education and take into account the mechanisms of language standardization in plural societies. A new order needs to be built on the resources inherent in a wide range of speech settings which provide a characteristic profile of segmented communities in the country.

Notes

1 Coomaraswamy, Anand K. "The Bugbear of Literacy". In: Am I My Brother's Keeper? New York: John Day & Co., 1946.

2 UNESCO. The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education. Monographs on Fundamental Education. Paris: UNESCO, 1953.

3 Khubchandani, Lachman M. Plural Languages, Plural Cultures: Communication, Identity and Sociopolitical Change in Contemporary India. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983.

4 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand. "The Present System of Education" (1916). The Problem of Education (Collected Works). Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1962.

5 Hussain, Zakir. Convention on the Cultural Unity of India. Bombay: T. A. Parekh Endowment, 1950.

Biography

Lachman M. Khubchandani, linguist and social scientist, is consultant to the Centre for the Development of Advance Computing and Founding Director of the Centre for Communication Studies in Pune, India. An expert for UNESCO on its "Village India" and multilingual education projects, Dr. Khubchandani has written widely on sociolinguistics, culture and communication.

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