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What is a School Language
The term “school language” refers to the language used to teach children, which is typically not the same as the mother tongue or home language. No country finds it simple to select a language for its educational system, especially those with a colonial past like India. Cultural variety, multilingual environments, the legal status of minority languages, and political interests, to mention a few extremely important issues, are typical influences on the decision.
Since Lord Macaulay’s notorious Minute was adopted by the British Parliament in 1834, English has been the official language of education, government, the courts, and communication between the sovereign and the populace in India for more than a century. Local languages took a back seat because English was the official language of the country. Politicians began to take seriously the issue of whether or not to keep English after India gained independence in 1947.
Gandhi wanted to get rid of it, but Nehru believed that it provided a doorway for Indians to the outside world. Due to the lack of agreement over the abolition of English, the 1956 Indian constitution allocated 15 years to the development of Hindi as the new national tongue.
But as far as we are aware, English continues to hold the highest status in India. Numerous language commissions and committees have made suggestions about India’s language policy since 1947.
The Kothari Commission, the most recent, recommended teaching local language, state language, and one foreign language at different stages of schooling.
Hindi has been promoted as a possible successor for English, but this hasn’t happened due to a number of reasons, prominent among them objections from southern states. However, as of right now, local languages are taught in elementary schools according to NCERT rules, two languages are taught in high schools, and English is used as the predominant language of instruction in higher education.
Despite the fact that the current language policy encourages the use of local languages as the primary instructional medium, this doesn’t seem to be the case for political reasons. For example, Jammu and Kashmir has three main regional tongues, Kashmiri, Dogri, and Bodhi, which are spoken in Kashmir, Jammu, and Ladakh, respectively, but none of them is employed as a medium of instruction. Instead, Urdu, an Indian language, has been chosen as both the State’s official language and the primary language of instruction in schools. In multilingual communities, using one language as the medium of teaching carries the risk of upsetting others who speak a different language. Learning is made simpler if the home language and the school language are the same.
