Medium of Education: English or Vernacular?

With ever-increasing prevalence of English in day-to-day transactions in business, ‘working knowledge of English’ has now become an integral part of many of the job advertisements in India. A candidate is required to be well-versed with English in written communications in addition to being good enough in oral communication. And, needless to say, there are many other jobs which are filled purely on the basis of your command over English. Most of BPO sector jobs are one of those. In short, there’s little doubt that having a good command over English would definitely make a candidate more employable.
 
With this increasing requirement of English as a basic eligibility for jobs, there’s a rise in English medium schools too, both in metro cities and in smaller cities and towns. While the quality of education is relatively better in schools in bigger cities, the same is not always the case when it comes to English-medium schools set up in smaller cities and towns. The quality of teachers and similar factors make a huge difference in the way a student gets acquainted with English as a way of communication. Anyway, here we are not going to discuss about the education a student gets in school. Rather, let us discuss the overall environment an English-medium school-going student gets.
 
Let’s look at the different situations from a student’s perspective. A student whose parents are well-educated and are well-versed in English would get a lot of inputs and learning from them at home too not only in studies but in day-to-day conversation skills too. Similarly, if the student stays in metros or in other bigger cities of the countries, he would also have a group of classmates where he would get enough exposure to enhance their English speaking abilities along with help in studies. Additionally, bigger cities expose the student to English in many other ways too.
 
Unfortunately, that’s not the case with every student studying in an English medium school in the country. Let’s take the case of a student from a relatively smaller city. A student studies in an English medium school. But, his parents often aren’t from a background where they could get good command over English. And hence, they are simply not able to help the student much with his studies and homework, let alone interacting with them in English i.e. how to read, write in and comprehend different aspects of the English language. Moreover, the student doesn’t normally have a lot of friends who can help him get command over the English language. A student doesn’t get an environment, outside his school and the coaching class in some cases, where he can learn and improve English language skills. Due to all these reasons, the student doesn’t get enough command over English where he can read and comprehend the study books quickly and easily. The student spends substantial amount of time in reading and understanding the words and sentences than reading the real message behind them. Yes! The student may not actually fail in the exams. But, he has definitely missed a lot when it comes to acquiring knowledge at school and at home by reading study books. Subsequently, by the time he finishes his schooling and goes for higher education, he has already lagged behind their more-privileged urban counterparts in terms of overall development and knowledge gaining, a situation which may have been avoided easily if the child studied in vernacular medium assuming that all other factors remain the same.
 
 
Note: This article was originally posted at FaaduGyan blog here by me.