GOA’S EDUCATION By Valmiki Faleiro A hornet’s nest has been stirred again. With good reason. Secretary of the Archdiocesan Board of Education, Fr. Paul Sangam, proposed a bi-lingual medium of instruction in government-aided primary schools … that would give parents/students a choice on the language of instruction. Our squint-eyed fringe pseudo nationalists opposed. One would wonder why, when the move would liberate people from restrictive confines, and make the shift to English medium easier at Std.V. The short-lived PDF government of the early 1990s enforced the policy of funding primary schools that impart education only in Marathi or Konknni. The idea no doubt stemmed from the unstated object of “re-nationalizing” the ‘denationalized’ Goan Catholic, perceived to speak English and follow a Western lifestyle. (It’s another matter that myopic proponents failed to see affluent youngsters from Hindu orthodox sections of urban India, including Goa, lead a far more Westernized lifestyle.) Public protests did not dent our homegrown culture vultures. The ‘Medium of Instruction’ policy is not just grossly parochial in this fast-shrinking world. It is retrograde. It is also of questionable legal validity, as it takes away an essential freedom of choice. Forcing a language down people’s throats is awfully reminiscent of that dark era in the mid-16th to mid-18th Centuries, when Goa’s colonial government decided how people should eat, dress and in which language they should speak! What provision in free India’s Constitution vests powers in the state to take away the freedom to choose the language one’s child should be taught in? Experts opine that a child learns best in its mother tongue. Good. Problem here is that Konknni in the Devanagri script is NOT the mother tongue of the bulk of Goan Catholics, who at best may write and read it in Roman script. A random survey will demonstrate this home truth. Prof. SM Borges may theorize ‘ad infinitum’ to the contrary. My friends, Prof. Miguel Mascarenhas and John Carlos Aguiar who’re not only proficient in Devanagri but equally at home with chaste Marathi as they are with Konknni and English, are exceptions. Sad fact remains that most Goan Catholics in Goa seem to have an inexplicable mental block towards the Devanagri script. Parents find it as difficult to take up lessons and homework, say in Maths or Science, in Devanagri Konknni, which they can hardly read and much less understand, as the children find digesting it. The situation just might have been different if instruction was in Romi Konknni. Lofty and laudable may be the ultimate goal of standardizing Konknni in a common script. It, however, will remain only a distant dream at least in the foreseeable future. Forget Goans being unable to agree on a common script. Can one honestly say when the bulk of Konknni speaking peoples on India’s west coast (who are several times in number to Goa Konknnis) will give up Kannada and Malayalam scripts for Devanagri – when Hindi, written in that script, has been resisted by the entire of South India? Devanagri Konknni as a pan-Indian standard remains an impossible dream for now. Then why drag that long-term hope into jeopardizing the here-and-now basic education of thousands of future citizens of Goa? Because of the script issue, the policy of primary education in the mother tongue works entirely against Catholic parents anxious to provide the best education to their children. I fear we’re past the script row. An increasing number of barely literate Goan Hindu parents think that English is the language of the future. Despite prohibitive costs of English-medium education in unaided primary schools, they sacrifice to enroll their wards into such schools. Then again, whether owing to it or not, after the Medium of Instruction policy was enforced, Goa’s school dropout rate has sharply increased to almost half the entry enrolments. Did this alarming trend bother any of the rapid-fire governments since then? India Inc. itself has come to realise the virtues of English education, learning from China’s bitter experience. The reason why China, despite her vastly superior numbers of technically qualified personnel, lags behind India in IT/ITES is their lack of English language skills. After miserable decades of insulation from the outside world, in a failed economic model of Marxist communism, China is now desperately trying to close that gap: English language teachers in China are today the best paid in Asia, after Japan. Even India’s union government, while encouraging Hindi for better national integration, has not, foolishly like Goa, discouraged the learning of English. Several of India’s states, in the heartland of true nationalism, unlike Goa’s pseudo variant, had the wisdom to differentiate between one’s culture and the economic and job realities of present times. (To continue.) (ENDS) The Valmiki Faleiro weekly column at: http://www.goanet.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=330 ============================================================================== The above article appeared in the March 30, 2008 edition of the Herald, Goa
