Why is English a *barrier* to India's development? A summary:
Today and the future is of technology. Technology development requires technical understanding, logic and thinking skills. World-over people learn and use technology in different languages. 1/
grpr.in/emm
Today and the future is of technology. Technology development requires technical understanding, logic and thinking skills. World-over people learn and use technology in different languages. 1/
grpr.in/emm
it is a scientific fact that children learn best via mother tongue education.
To grapple with technology, the ability to understand & think is far more important than what language someone uses.
Forcing English in India *impedes* the development of technical understanding. 2/
To grapple with technology, the ability to understand & think is far more important than what language someone uses.
Forcing English in India *impedes* the development of technical understanding. 2/
Research shows that in India, like the rest of the world, children who study in their mother tongues have better grasp of math and science than those who study in English-medium. Grasp of math and science is a key indicator of brain development. 3/
Thus India has prioritized English over understanding. This has allowed it to tap into only a small fraction of its talent pool. Unlike countries like China who are seriously investing in human resource development, English has seriously impeded development of 90%+ of Indians. 4/
So India acts like a country of the tenth of its size. Its economy is a tenth of what it should be. The infrastructure work of translation into multiple languages is far easier than the task of erasing a billion people's languages and making English people's first language. 5/
The countries world-over which have prioritized thinking and understanding in the children's mother tongues have advanced far more rapidly than those who haven't.
Also Indian languages are easy to cross-learn and share a common Sanskritic vocabulary. 6/
Also Indian languages are easy to cross-learn and share a common Sanskritic vocabulary. 6/
A child starts language acquisition from the womb. A child taught in that language easily grasps concepts. Pushing English to rural areas is literally crippling ability of children to think—the key skill for the knowledge economy. India is prioritizing English over thinking. 7/
As someone from the technical field, who has hired programmers and technical people world over, someone's grasp of English is the least important skill in a technical hire. If ability to think and reason has a weight of 90, ability to speak good English will get a weight of 2. 8/
India is optimizing the 2% rather than the 90%. This will leave India further and further behind. Moreover, with machine translation improving rapidly, English ability will be valued even less in the future. India is stuck in 19th/20th century ideas. 9/
World of tomorrow will be run by technologists. Few of these will speak English. They will have learnt in their own languages, and will communicate with other people using machine translation. English will decline. India is saving English globally. English is destroying India. //
But India kills the talent and passion of children who would be the technologists and inventors of the future. All avenues are closed if one doesn't know English.
And "teaching English" won't fix it—you'll change the mother tongue of 1.2 billion people?
And "teaching English" won't fix it—you'll change the mother tongue of 1.2 billion people?
Looking for people to do video reports on UP, Uttarakhand and Andhra Pradesh's new English-medium govt schools. Please go into classrooms and record how the teaching is going and how much the students are learning. Send me links.
