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MAY 13 -
In a bid to fight the dominance of private English medium schools, most community schools in Sindhupalchok decided to go English medium from this year. Their justification: Private schools are colonising the Nepali education system; and if the community schools are to survive, they must raise themselves at par with their private rivals. This slipshod move of forcing students into the unknown territory of English language, without preparation and homework, is likely to have a pernicious effect on their performance. Private school owners are cynical of this move. A private school owner confided to me, “All this is a strategy to take fees from the community school students. They will fail. You know how the teachers in those schools are; they only have certificates, they have no knowledge. Those who do not know English are going to teach in English medium.”
This malady of English is taking its toll in community schools across the country. Many schools in the Kathmandu Valley and elsewhere are trying to go English medium to ensure their survival among the private schools. While this could be taken as late wisdom of the community schools, many other issues come as concomitants with this. Having worked as a teacher in a community school, I want to pass a short analysis.
One of the ailments of community schools is poor English language proficiency. More than 50 percent of the students who fail the SLC exams fail in English while their counterparts from private schools fare excellently in English. So the distinction between private school and community school graduates is as good as the distinction between natives and foreigners in terms of English language proficiency. And because community schools do not impart education in English medium, even low-income parents educate their children in private schools which are available across the country from the plains to the Himalaya. Of late, the trend of plucking children from government schools and placing them in private ones is rising, which has resulted in significantly reducing the number of students in community schools. So, it seems, both the disease and the cure of community schools is proficiency in the English language.
Will community schools be able to impart education in English? It begs for some critical introspection. First, the teachers themselves have a very poor command of the English language. In terms of academic qualification, they may be holders of a bachelor’s or Master’s degree; in terms of experience, they may have served as headmasters for decades; but their English is hardly endurable. I remember the students of a community college in Sindhupalchok whom I taught two years ago in Bachelor of Education. They were mostly teachers in community schools of neighbouring villages. But they could not tell “b” from “d” and “l” from “i”, did not know the difference between a verb noun and an adjective, and did not know where to use small and capital letters. The late love of community schools to go English medium must take into account this reality too.
There is no legal restriction on changing the medium of instruction. The Education Act allows schools to adopt Nepali or English or both languages as the official medium of instruction. English was the medium of school education until the 1950s too. After the National Education Planning Commission recommended, through its report in 1956, removing English citing its association with the production of clerical manpower rather than instilling vocational values in people, the Nepali language policy first took over. This was a rather political move of dissociating the educational system from English influence because until the 1950s, Nepali educational practices were copied from the Indian education system which was modelled on the colonial education project.
And the new fervour of independence in India and democracy at home was set on redefining Nepali nationalism by trying to keep it unsullied by English influence. This anti-English language tendency got further cemented by the New Education System Plan 1971 orchestrated by the Panchayat veteran king Mahendra. The plan officially recognised the Nepali language as the medium of instruction. And until the mid 1980s, when king Birendra repackaged the educational ideology of the Panchayat system and encouraged private schools, Nepal did not have English medium schools except for a few mission schools that had been in operation since the early 1950s.
Most of the bureaucrats, teachers and political leaders of today have received Panchayat-era monolingual education. So we have in the top positions men who are educated but unable to communicate their knowledge with the world outside Nepal. Because of lack of English language efficiency, Nepali prime ministers and ministers fail to negotiate and put forward the national agenda at international fronts. Even if they do, they make a lot of mistakes and render their speeches almost incomprehensible. Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal addressed the 16th SAARC summit held in Thimpu. There were other heads of government too. All spoke excellent English, except Nepal. In fact, his English was most horrible. As he was reading his speech from a script, which had perhaps been drafted by his secretary, I got the impression that the speech writer should have transliterated every difficult to pronounce word in Nepali script. He pronounced a considerable number of words wrong, and made them sound like lexicons of an alien language.
I can remember a few. He pronounced context as contest, and region as reason. He had great difficulty in pronouncing words like daunting, world, able, government and consideration. He could not manage stress, pauses and intonation. He pronounced a word like they were two words. The whole of his speech went in the typical fashion of his screeching Nepali accent with which he usually addresses mass gatherings at home. There was no touch of Englishness. As I was watching him on television, I was completely befuddled not understanding much of what he was saying. I can imagine the utter confusion on the part of the foreign delegates present there.
No offence intended to Madhav Nepal. In fact, most Nepali politicians speak as horribly as him, and thousands of Nepalese share his plight. If he had been educated in an English medium school, he would not have made a fool of himself and thereby Nepal. If he had been competent in English, perhaps he would have been able to see eye to eye with the other delegates and communicate his agendas confidently. It is against this bitter reality that I think the decision of community schools to go English medium is necessary and right.
(The author is doing an MPhil at Tribhuvan University besides teaching at Kathmandu Don Bosco School and College)
mbpoudyal@yahoo.com
Posted on: 2010-05-14 08:30
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