9 hours ago
CBSE schools face hurdle to enforce mother tongue as primary medium
Mangaluru: CBSE's recent circular to introduce mother tongue as the primary medium of instruction for kindergarten to grade five has sparked a debate and confusion in coastal districts, where children speak multiple languages.
While pedagogically sound for early learning, implementation raises serious questions, according to educational institutions. The hurdles in implementation include recruiting language teachers for each mother tongue and classroom.
"Ideally, teaching in the child's mother tongue makes sense. But is it practical?" questions Mathew C Ninan, director of Little Rock Indian School, Brahmavar. "First of all, we will have several mother tongues in a school.
Some of them may be only a dialect with no script. Then there is the mention of regional language. Which is to be chosen? There is room for confusion here itself. Schools may struggle to support multiple languages, making such an initiative potentially unfeasible," said Ninan.
The second challenge is the teacher's proficiency with a particular language. "Teachers should be conversant in that language. Teaching materials should be available in every language.
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NCERT has to prepare the materials. Will that happen? Finally, materials will be available only in Hindi," pointed out Ninan. This move will result in edging out English systematically and will affect the employability of children, he noted.
Another head of a CBSE school questioned whether such policies are feasible or possible, especially in a place like Mangaluru. "Among our native speakers themselves, there are Kannada, Tulu, Konkani spoken by Christians and GSB.
We also have Beary, Malayalam, and Tamil speakers. Apart from it, there are transfer cases, which again add more languages. In total, our institution has 13 language from it, there are transfer cases, which again add more languages.
In total, our institution has 13 language speakers. How can we cater to all in terms of the recruitment of teachers for every language and classroom? There are strict riders from the state govt on the increase in the fee," shared a head of a CBSE school.
Fr Johnson L Sequeira, principal of Lourdes Central School, said that they have not implemented it yet and are studying the implications. "We have local students speaking various mother tongues, children from various parts of the country who come here due to their parents' transferable jobs. We have a few children from northeastern states," he said.
