THE POOR ALSO CRAVE AN ENGLISH EDUCATION
Dipankar Gupta
The author writes that Mulayam Singh Yadav’s animosity towards English is not just hypocritical, but cruel too and eventually would deprive the poor from sharing the fruits of any progress in India.
Mulayam Singh Yadav’s animosity towards English is not just hypocritical, but cruel too. By advocating this step he is kicking millions of poor villagers in the stomach. His hypocrisy is transparent: according to a news report, his elder son has a degree from an Australian university and the younger is studying management in UK. But there is something deeper and more devious that escapes attention. By rubbishing English, Mulayam is taking away that one tool kit rural millions have for escaping eternal poverty.
Mulayam Singh Yadav’s animosity towards English is not just hypocritical, but cruel too. By advocating this step he is kicking millions of poor villagers in the stomach. His hypocrisy is transparent: according to a news report, his elder son has a degree from an Australian university and the younger is studying management in UK. But there is something deeper and more devious that escapes attention. By rubbishing English, Mulayam is taking away that one tool kit rural millions have for escaping eternal poverty.
Attacks against English language education are based on the falsehood that it is only the rich who send their children to private schools. A study conducted by the University of Maryland that covered 36,700 children proved conclusively that at least 20 per cent of rural families in India send their little ones to private schools. Why? Because they hope that at the end of the day they would read English better and do their sums quicker.
The same study found that 66 per cent of students in private educational establishments could read a simple sentence with ease, but the proportion was only 49 when it came to government schools, where it is all Hindi, or a regional language. Interestingly, only in Kerala and Maharashtra children perform equally irrespective of the kind of school they go to. Interestingly again, neither Kerala nor Maharashtra ever raised the anti- English bogey. In fact, the Shiv Sena chief, Bal Thackeray, insisted that Marathis should make sure that their children learn English in order to combat the hated South Indians in the Mumbai job market.
A second falsehood must also be laid to rest. It is not as if only rich parents send their children to private schools. Once again, rural India will correct this perception. I have come across three families in east UP who are officially Below the Poverty Line (BPL), but whose children go to private schools. These private schools are not spiffy affairs. The poor kids who go there may have spindly legs and concave chests, but they wear a uniform with a string tie to signify their private school status.
This emulation of prosperous private schools is quite pathetic at one level, but it also expresses burning ambition. Some village schools charge only about Rs. 50 per month and are located in three run down rooms. But they teach English and Mathematics, and their teachers turn up even though their wages are a fraction of what government school masters get. Why do these poor families send their children to private schools? Simple. They have stars in their eyes and hope that their young will one day lead a life after poverty. They want their children to learn English so that they can aspire to a regular job, perhaps even a white collar
one.
Though many of them are illiterates themselves, they don’t want their kids to share the same fate. So up, scrub and off they go every morning dragging their thin legs and satchels to a private school. So if Mulayam were to scrap English he would hurt the rural poor more than anybody else. In this sense, Mulayam is a petty autocrat of the kind found in traditional India. In the old days, village oligarchs disapproved of the poor who nursed educational ambitions. They feared that this was just the beginning, for they would then demand a better deal out of life as well.
This would alter power relations and shake the foundations of a closed and unchanging economy. When the poor seek English education it is not because they want to rattle off Shakespeare or Milton. For them English is little other than a useful technical skill. The reason why Mulayam Singh Yadav cannot be Ram Manohar Lohia is because times have changed. In (Ram Manohar) Lohia’s days, English language carried with it a cultural baggage which drew attention to our colonial past. English meant not just grammar and syntax, but also the accent with which it was spoken. English signified a certain lifestyle where knives, forks and sherry glasses were essential fixtures on the dining table. An English educated person was a WOG, or a Westernized Oriental Gentleman.
English education today is not about being a cultivated WOG. Without English one’s career in a technologically driven world wouldn’t budge from the village doorstep. English is now shorn of much of its cultural swagger and comes through as an acquisition much like mathematics or physics. When poor villagers send their children to private schools they are not thinking of Wordsworth, nor also of Anglicized table manners, or of artful turns on the dance floor. They only want their kids to leave the village and wriggle out of its all encompassing drudgery.
What is wrong with such an ambition? Even in elite private schools today, there isn’t as much emphasis in producing WOGS as there was in Lohia’s time. Many senior executives in transnational companies have no WOG pretensions either. A large number of them have come to the top because they are technically qualified though they would be ill at ease with a knife and fork. What matters most on today’s road to success is how well one can work a computer and stay abreast with knowledge developments worldwide. For this it is essential to learn English and be proficient in it.
Being a WOG is no longer a necessary, or even desirable, qualification. That may have been true in Lohia’s time, but not now. Mulayam Singh is clearly out of step. The urban English educated elite will only point out his hypocrisy, but his most ardent critics, his most hated enemies, his most unrelenting opponents will be the rural poor. They will not trumpet their antipathy to Mulayam, but will silently walk away from him. Sometimes perhaps to no avail, for governments are all powerful.
Several schools in Karnataka were permanently shut by the state government for teaching English. This, in spite of the fact that poor families who sent their children there strongly protested against this move. There is, however, a certain rationality, if one could use the term, behind Mulayam’s opposition to English.
If villagers get educated en masse, and find jobs by virtue of their qualifications and skills, then the politics of reservation will ring hollow from within. It is no coincidence that the passion with which reservationists articulate their program is directly related to their disinterest in improving educational standards in schools at all levels. This is precisely what has driven 40 per cent of all school going children in the country to opt for private tuition, over and above whatever education they formally receive. If English is inaccessible to the rural poor, then the better off among the OBCs (Other backward castes) will constitute an exclusive group. The poorer members of their castes will not make the grade for how many of them can afford even those rural private schools.
This would allow the elite few to stand tall on the hunched shoulders of the many. These prosperous OBCs can now look into IIT and IIM campuses, aspire for jobs in Infosys, and not expect any competition. As long as their poor caste brethren can be boxed into inferior schools, their future is secure. They have a readymade rationale to milk the system in perpetuity. Mulayam is therefore not just a hypocrite. He is a deliberate enemy of the poor.
(The writer teaches sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University.)
(Mail Today, April 23, 09, from SACW April 26)