All government-run schools in Andhra Pradesh will have English as the medium of instruction from class 1 to 8, Chief Minister Y S. Jagan Mohan Reddy announced on Wednesday.
The government will impart the necessary training to teachers to meet the changing needs, and as part of this exercise, nearly 70,000 teachers would be trained in District Institutes of Education and Training (DIETs).
Introducing English as medium of instruction is part of the sweeping reforms the state government is planning to introduce in the education sector.
During a review meeting on education, Reddy said vacant posts of teachers will be filled in January every year and the teacher-student ratio would be maintained at all times. Environment, climate change and road safety would also be included in the curriculum.
The Chief Minister asked the officials to prepare an action plan to ensure that every ‘mandal’ has one junior college and wherever possible high schools should be upgraded to junior colleges. In the same manner, every Assembly constituency should have one degree college, he said.
The state government has also decided to refurbish 44,512 schools under ‘Then and now’ programme and the first phase will cover 15, 410 schools. Every phase will cover Panchayatraj, Municipal, Tribal, Social, BC Welfare and other schools. The first phase should be completed by March 14, 2020 and there will also be a social audit, he said.
Reddy asked officials to involve parents in the education of children and quality of mid-day meal.
Brushing aside the talk that permissions are not being given to private colleges, Reddy said, if the institutions have the stipulated infrastructure there will not be any problem.
With due respect to Pawan Kalyan Garu and others. English lets me network to the world. It puts on my desktop not only the literature and philosophies of the world but also the literature of all the other subjects in the world for learning and appreciating. For example, the Arabs borrowed our math and translated it into Arabic and developed algebra. Then the English borrowed algebra, and we learnt our own math, though a little modified, hundreds of years later from English translations. The Greeks were highly acclaimed for their math and philosophy, and again we learnt these from English translations. For a nation which is indifferent to sharing knowledge and the negation of ignorance, English is our only gateway to literature of the world–I am using the word literature in its broad sense.
The native tongue influences the mother tongue. For example, my native tongue Tamil, in which I can both read and write, heavly influences my mother tongue, Telugu. Telugu as spoken in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka is heavly influenced by the respective native tongues. Your native tongue will influence any language, which includes English, that you gathered from LKG and have become proficient in after years of assiduous learning. In this scenario, how are you going to ensure the chasteness of the idiom of a language without coercion or without whipping up emotional adherence to the nuances and idiom? The fear of loss of chasteness and identity becomes the fertile soil–the son of the soil syndrome–for division and linguistic patriotism to take firm root and conflagrate into pernicious conflict with other communities and equally patriotic linguists.
In a nation like ours which is a bundle of motley languages and linguistic minorities with the swelling pride of avowed identification with a community or cult there is but a common national linguistic factor which is Hindi. However, Hindi is as limited as any other Indian language, in that, it is not a gateway to the literature of the world. Also, we cannot network with the world though we can efficiently and confidently network within India.
In China, Japan, Germany, France etc., it is one country one language, and there is consensus. Is there such a consensus in India, which is a motley of languages? In such a case, the heads will resort to coercion. We are wasting humongous human capital, money, energy and time in linguistic determinism when we should be giving all our energy towards scientific, technological, economic, agricultural, and educational endeavors. If most of our time is spent is learning and mastering languages, then where is the time for research and creativity in other fields. The sole purpose of language is to understand, appreciate, communicate, and use discoveries and creative output. Every time I need to understand a creative output must I learn a language or translate it into mine own? When am I going to create and who is my audience? My creativity must be available to every audience or must have the greatest reach and use. In Modern times English has this reach with minimum expenditure of energy and time.