What does English have to do with poverty? India has had a relationship with English that has cycled from love, hate, to begrudging acceptance, and back to pragmatism. When India was colonized by the British, leaders such as Nehru and Gandhi saw English as the language of the colonizers and tried as much as they could to promote Hindi as a national language. Of course, this did not work.
India has the largest number of official languages at 22. Depending on how you count dialects you could get as high as 1500! At some practical level, they had to accept English because Hindi came with a sometimes religious and northern association which did not work in the culturally proud South. Recently, because of the spectacular increase in growth and the liberalization of the economy after 1990, Indians have rediscovered their need for English.
Since education remains under state control, state politics influence education policy and legislation. To get elected, state leaders promote regional culture in schools. The state’s national language is legislated as the medium of instruction. So for example in Karnataka, Kannada is the language of instruction. In government primary schools, which is where most of the poor go, English is only taught as a second language. When it is taught, the curriculum and effectiveness is far from where it should be (Nikelani 2008).
As many of you know, Bangalore is one of the cities that is home to the information technology (IT) and business process outsourcing (BPO) sector. This sector has grown rapidly since 1990s and is responsible for much of India’s spectacular rise. The required calling cards to enter these sectors are English, computer literacy, and in some cases engineering and other technical fields. For the most part, any person in India that does not know English or have computer skills is left out of the formal sectors of IT and BPO. Graduates of public primary schools end up working in the informal sector as drivers, cooks, petty traders, and so on.
As the Director of Mithra Foundation told us, state policies on language instruction exacerbate the cycle of poverty. Because the poor do not have access to English in public schools, even if they go to school, they remain in poverty. They only have access to informal jobs. This is why Mithra teaches slum children in English.
Mithra students of various ages, the oldest in the 8th Standard. See more pictures on Flickr here! You can also listen to a recording of Mithra School kindergartens reciting nursery rhymes in English and Kannada here — select the file called “Mithra Children”)
Mithra buses in about 40-50 students each from one of 6 slums to their suburban school. Children from grades 1-10 are provided a full State-approved curriculum in addition to English, computer classes and a ethics/human rights curriculum. The language of instruction for most of the classes is English. Most of the parents of these children work in the informal sector as maids.
The Mithra Foundation’s emphasis on making English the medium of instruction is an attempt to break the cycle of poverty. Nice!
