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Indian Express
3 days ago
- General
- Indian Express
CBSE mother tongue policy should be implemented through dialogue, not diktat
As of May, the Central Board of Secondary Education has released approximately 30 academic circulars and numerous examination, affiliation and miscellaneous documents. These include assessment guidelines, teacher training programmes, student enrichment activities, curriculum updates and policy implementation. Educators are now grappling with the latest, mandating the implementation of mother tongue-based instruction in the foundational and preparatory stages of schooling. From the Kothari Commission (1964 to 1966) to the National Policy of Education (1968), the Yashpal Committee (1993), National Curriculum Framework (2005, NCF) along with UNESCO, NCERT and numerous global developmental psychologists and even the National Education Policy (2020) have all highlighted the importance of mother tongue-based learning in foundational years (three-eight years). The NCF 2023 directed schools to make the process more structured and explicit, and align it with global best practices. Several studies show that children learn best when taught in their home language because it brings emotional security and concept retention. In fact, it has been argued that learning in an unfamiliar language disconnects the child from real-world experiences, reduces classroom participation and often delays understanding. In places where tribal languages or dialects have been set aside, this step can pave the way towards linguistic equity and educational justice. This is an aspirational policy, but the learning ecosystem is fragmented. In order to implement it in letter and spirit, all stakeholders will have to be involved. Schools can create a language policy after surveying the home languages of their students. With schools mapping language groups and deciding on bridge programmes by allocating resources and teachers accordingly, parents can make an informed choice. In heterogeneous schools, using the mother tongue is not about enforcing one language, it's about embracing linguistic plurality and making children visible. In order to respond through a balanced strategy, parents have to be informed that both the NEP and the NCF support additive bilingualism with strong foundations in the home language along with systematic learning of English. If the mother tongue is positioned as the foundation and English layered in contextually, it will become a bridge. Across socio-economic strata, Indian parents see English-medium education from the foundational years as the key to success. For some, mother-tongue instruction feels regressive. There will be an aspirational mismatch because the mindset behind English-medium education has been driven by media, advertising and peer pressure. Teachers will be left to mediate between parental anxiety and policy mandates, without support or community engagement. Teachers may themselves feel overwhelmed by the push towards mother tongue-based multilingual instruction, especially in heterogeneous English medium schools. Most teachers are trained to teach in English or Hindi, or their regional language and English, not in pedagogical strategies or multilingualism. Handling multiple languages without lesson plans can be difficult for them. Assessment also offers challenges in evaluating learning across languages, especially when tools are monolingual. Teachers are expected to manage language equity, curriculum delivery and concept clarity without training, material, or time. Support, not imposition, is the way forward, if we want multilingualism to become a strength, not a burden. A teacher may speak the mother tongue fluently but may not be able to explain concepts pedagogically in that language. He or she may lack academic vocabulary or age-appropriate phrases. They may not know how to create learning materials or assess learning in the language. Unless they are trained to teach the language, the instruction will not succeed. Parents, too, need to be made partners in this transition. It is important to give them a roadmap of how children will transition in reading and writing fluently in both their mother tongue and in English. A greater load has been added without reducing academic responsibilities. Planning for a multilingual class requires more time, in addition to the regular work that teachers do. If we want children to learn with joy and meaning, then their teachers must be supported with empathy, time and trust. The policy has to be a dialogue, not a diktat. Mother tongue-based education is a vital tool in addressing the global learning crisis. In order for it to succeed, the CBSE and state education departments must move beyond circulars and compliances to systemic support, or the gap between policy and practice will widen. Schools should be given a two-to-three-year transition window starting with oral exposure, creating classroom levels for language mapping, developing multilingual lesson plans, differentiated assessments, resource kits and teaching aids. Oral and non-verbal rubrics that measure conceptual understanding need to be created. Experienced multilingual resource persons should conduct workshops for teachers of foundational years because they need to be partners in reform. A common instructional language should be chosen, while the mother tongue can be taught through songs, stories, language activities, traditional games, audio libraries and AI-driven technologies. Urban schools, especially in metros, are an example of India's internal migration and cultural plurality. Classrooms include children who speak a variety of mother tongues — Malayalam, Bengali, Tamil. Marathi, Kannada and others — within the same learning space. This linguistic landscape calls for context-sensitive handling rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. The policy has great potential but without clarity in execution, it will become merely symbolic. The benefit of the mother tongue in the foundational years can only be realised with the help of supportive parents and trained teachers, who will design it not merely as a linguistic shift but a reimagining of childhood and learning. The writer is chairperson and executive director, Education, Innovations and Training, DLF Foundation Schools and Scholarship Programmes
Mint
28-05-2025
- Politics
- Mint
Implement educational reforms in honour of Dr Kasturirangan (1940-2025)
Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan passed away on 25 April 2025. Countless have contributed to building India, and his name will be among the top. But even the faintest of allusions to any such thing would have had him divert credit to his team, mentors, friends and the circumstances. Anybody but himself. So, I have wondered what tribute to pay him. I have found a solution. I am writing about a book that I gave him in October 2017 as we started work on what became the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020), whose committee he chaired. Let us go back 60 years. Also Read: India's consensus on school education makes space for optimism The Kothari Commission report in 1966 presented India with our first comprehensive blueprint for educational transformation, adopted as the National Policy on Education in 1968. J.P. Naik, the commission's member secretary, was its chief architect. His 1979 book Education Commission and After offers an assessment of that critical first decade of implementation, a period that revealed both the extraordinary promise of systemic reform and the sobering realities that derailed it. The Commission's vision was for a radical re-imagining of education as a great democratizing force. Its proposed Common School System was designed to dismantle the entrenched apartheid between elite private institutions and under-resourced government schools. The Commission understood that educational equity required more than just access. It needed the social mixing that comes when children from all backgrounds learn together in quality neighbourhood schools. But this vision collided with India's deeply stratified social order. State governments, those professing socialist commitment included, lacked the political courage to challenge powerful constituencies invested in maintaining educational segregation. The result was a system that paid rhetorical homage to equity while reinforcing inequities in practice. Also Read: India's education system must adapt better to the real world out there The financial timidity that undermined the Commission's proposals remains a damning indictment of the approach actually taken. Its recommendation to allocate 6% of GDP to education— arrived at through careful study of global benchmarks and India's developmental needs—was an actionable proposal. Yet, this target was never approached in the critical first decade, with expenditure hovering only around 2.8% in the early 1970s. Naik traces how this chronic underinvestment created cascading failures: teacher salaries were woefully inadequate, training schemes were starved of resources and infrastructure development lagged disastrously. Vocational education, envisioned as a bridge between schooling and employment, also faced neglect—with penetration of under 5% in India's secondary schools by the mid-1970s against a target of 50%. Teacher empowerment, another cornerstone of the Commission's framework, met a similarly dispiriting fate. While new teacher training institutions emerged, their impact was diluted by formalism and inconsistent standards. The National Council for Teacher Education, set up in 1973 as a watchdog, found its recommendations routinely ignored by state governments, and soon became dysfunctional. What should have been a professional renaissance became another exercise in box-ticking, with teacher autonomy and creativity becoming casualties of a rigid administrative mindset. Naik's analysis identifies several reasons for this implementation deficit. Also Read: Invest heavily in education: It's the cornerstone of a Viksit Bharat First, we lacked accountability mechanisms. The Commission's recommendations remained advisory rather than mandatory, allowing governments to cherry-pick convenient elements while ignoring challenging reforms. Second, there was little effort to resolve the inherent tension between central vision and state implementation. We needed genuine accommodation of local contexts while keeping the policy's spirit intact. The Commission had wisely advocated substantial local autonomy in educational matters. In practice, the system became mired in bureaucratic centralization at every level without much accountability. Perhaps most critically, Naik highlights the absence of any sustained public mobilization to demand these reforms. Unlike land reforms or linguistic movements that captured the popular imagination, educational reforms remained largely an elite concern. This meant successive governments treated education as a secondary priority, vulnerable to budgetary cuts and political expediency. The Commission's vision required building a broad social consensus around education as a public good, but it never materialized. If you are interested and invested in India, and not necessarily just in Indian education, Naik's book is worth reading for its clear-eyed view of our country. After our work was done on NEP 2020, one day Dr Rangan, as I called him, called me and said, 'You will write our 'Education Commission and After in 2030'." It was not a question. Rarely did he ask anything directly, so I said, 'Yes sir, I will." That could be a tribute to him, one that he will not be able to turn away from. But for that, we need to learn from J.P. Naik's experience and implement the NEP 2020, if not in full measure, at least very substantially. That would be the real tribute to him. The author is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.
Indian Express
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
Opinion Fee caps in private schools: Not the cure we need
The Delhi cabinet has recently approved the Delhi School Education Transparency in Fixation and Regulation of Fees Bill, 2025, to provide guidelines to all aided and unaided private schools in Delhi on the capping of fees. The move came as a response to the protests by parents against fee hikes in Delhi Public School, Dwarka, where students were allegedly mistreated for failing to submit their school fees. This initiative by the Delhi government apparently looks like a welcome move to enhance the accessibility of students to private schools. However, it has many implications. The affordability of education has been a concern since Independence. The Kothari Commission recommended free and compulsory school education up to age 14. Similarly, the National Policy on Education, 1986, also focused on free and compulsory education, while the Programme of Action, 1992, addressed the issue of affordability and accessibility of education. The National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) emphasised transparency, accountability, and encouraged private philanthropic efforts in school education. The increasing acceptance of the presence of private players in school education is also visible from the shifting position in the policy documents over the last three decades. The latest Delhi Bill, applicable to 1,677 aided and unaided schools, however, intervenes in the domain of private schools to restrain any exorbitant hike in fees. This move may have adverse outcomes. In a mixed school system where both government and private players should compete freely, any arbitrary control on the functioning of the private sector would disturb the mechanism. Government and private schools function on different principles. The fee in private schools is based on the principles of supply and demand. Any arbitrary control by the government would not address the concern of equity. One must understand the logic of rising prices. Fees don't only just focus on profit; it is the source of teachers' salaries, quality infrastructure and other expenses. There is no doubt that private schools, particularly the unaided ones, are expensive. My analysis based on the national sample survey data on social consumption of education (2017-18) shows that the average household expenditure per student in an academic year is Rs 21,683 at the elementary level (I-VIII) and Rs 32,003 at secondary and higher secondary level (IX-XII) in Delhi. It is remarkably higher than the all-India average, which is Rs 6,319 and Rs 11,026 at elementary and secondary and higher secondary levels, respectively. This difference can be attributed to the dominance of elite schools in Delhi. Private unaided schools compete with the low-cost private and government schools over quality. The National Achievement Survey (2021) shows that at secondary and higher secondary levels, students in private schools perform better in languages, Mathematics, Social Sciences and the Sciences than the students of government schools. Any control on fees without taking into consideration the operational costs of private schools may push them to compromise on crucial quality indicators such as pupil-teacher ratio and infrastructure. On the other hand, government schools function on the principles of welfare. It is the last resort for those who cannot afford an expensive private school. Notably, the enrolment in government schools is much higher than private schools in Delhi. My analysis from the UDISE, 2023-24 data shows government schools comprise 57.1 per cent of the total enrolment, while the corresponding shares for government-aided private and unaided/self-financed schools are 3.1 per cent and 39.8 per cent, respectively. Between 2015-16 to 2021-22, the enrolment in private schools in Delhi has dropped from 43.1 per cent to 38.8 per cent, while the share of private schools among the total number of schools has remained roughly the same. The bulk of private schools are unaided. This reduction in enrolment in private schools might be attributed to the reforms in government schools. The average fee in government schools is also far lower than in private schools. The most pressing challenge for government schools and low-cost private schools is to impart quality education at a low cost. Improving the learning outcomes in these schools, along with better infrastructure, would be an important step in this direction. Facilitating access to online/digital resources may also contribute to improving the quality of education. Against this backdrop, the role of the government concerning the private sector should be that of facilitator. A free competition between the government and private schools over quality may be more beneficial than controlling the functioning of the private schools.
