Roly poly right, right, right. Roly poly left, left, left,” sings a class of five-year-olds at a government primary school in Sarojini Nagar on the outskirts of Lucknow, a city in India’s Hindi-speaking heartland. This English-medium school, one of seven that was inaugurated last year, is part of an effort by the government of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, to counter the rise of private schools. Private schools have been mushrooming in India — private-sector enrolment rose from around a quarter of pupils in 2010-11 to over a third in 2016-17 — and in Sarojini Nagar, there are 200 registered private schools and many more unregistered ones. One of their main attractions is that the great majority of them use (or claim to use) English as the language of instruction.

As a recruitment drive, the policy seems to be working. A school nearby saw its enrolment rise over 50 percent in six months when it switched the medium of instruction from Hindi to English last April. As an education policy, however, it is not ideal.

The language in which children are taught can be hugely contentious. Colonial history determines its political salience. Where colonial powers wiped out indigenous populations, as in America and Australia, it is hardly an issue: the colonial language has crushed indigenous ones, though a few of these are making a comeback. In places that were colonised unsuccessfully or not at all — such as Europe, Japan and China — indigenous languages rule. But controversy erupts in countries with a century or two of effective government by a colonial power — in South Asia and Africa, for instance — where the colonial language retains considerable sway.

In sub-Saharan Africa, only Tanzania, Ethiopia and Eritrea don’t use a colonial language at all during primary education. Others use either English or French. That is partly because of inertia. Developing curricula and printing books in local languages is expensive, and doing so in scientific subjects in which the terminology is in English is difficult. Keeping English or French is also, in some places, politically convenient. Where tribes compete for power, the colonial language can be less controversial than local ones. And then there is the self-interest of the elites, usually the only people who can speak the colonial language properly. “They have a huge return on their linguistic capital” when it is the official language, says Rajesh Ramachandran, of the Alfred Weber Institute for Economics in Heidelberg, Germany. The bias in favour of English is sometimes ferociously enforced: Rose Goodhart, a teacher in Ghana, has seen children beaten for speaking in their mother tongue.

It is not just inertia and coercion that work in favour of English. These days, it is also popular demand. English is the language of technology. In Africa and South Asia, most higher education is in English, so those who aspire to a college education must master the language. “In higher studies, like medicine and engineering, English is a must,” says Atul Kumar Srivastava, president of the Association of Private Schools of Uttar Pradesh, and headmaster of St. Basil’s School, Lucknow.

English-medium education is no longer the preserve of the elite. Sameena Asif, whose husband is a street hawker, sends her three children to a private school in Lahore, Pakistan. “They won’t get a degree or a job if they can’t speak English. I have a BA in Urdu, but it’s useless. I’m embarrassed that I was educated in Urdu,” says Sameena.
Many state governments in India, as in Uttar Pradesh, are establishing or expanding English-medium education. All primary schools are English-medium in Jammu & Kashmir; Andhra Pradesh announced last year that its elementary schools would convert to English; others are experimenting on a smaller scale. In Pakistan, the Punjab provincial government announced in 2009 that it would go English-medium.

Yet there are problems associated with much English-medium schooling. Visitors soon discover that except in elite establishments, interviews in most “English-medium” schools have to be conducted through an interpreter, in the local language, because neither teachers nor pupils speak much English. At the Lucknow primary school, the head teacher and two out of four teachers speak reasonably good English, but the other two very little. Since most of the pupils’ parents are illiterate, they are unlikely to be aware of that.

The complexity of the linguistic landscape in many countries argues not for abandoning mother-tongue teaching, but for developing layered curriculums that ease children into learning other languages. The Citizens Foundation, a charity that runs 1,500 schools in Pakistan, is doing that for inhabitants of the Thar desert, in a remote part of Sindh province. Their mother tongue is Dhatki. Sindhi, the provincial language, is quite similar to that. Urdu, the lingua franca of Pakistan, is necessary but less familiar. English is hardest of all, but as desirable to the Thari people as to anybody else. So the curriculum will start children off in Dhatki and gradually introduce them to the other languages they will need as citizens of Pakistan, and of the 21st century. English will be a subject, not a medium.

Such linguistically sensitive schooling demands more resources than most governments can afford. Instead, more pupils are likely to be taught in English, despite the drawbacks it entails. Their parents will make sacrifices to buy what they believe to be an advantage for their children. “If our children don’t speak English, they can’t excel in today’s world,” says Rukayat Tanvir, whose husband is a shopkeeper in Lahore, and who sends five children to an English-medium private school. “It gives me pleasure to hear my daughters speaking English even though I can’t understand what they are saying.”

(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist and Times Higher Education)