Education Policy and cultural/social structure of India

The best part of being a part of good peer group involved in research is there is never a dull moment as you can often find sense in otherwise seemingly useless discussion. The latest debate that me and my mates Shounak da and Siddhartha have been engaged is the education policy.

It is known fact that we as a country harbour several cultural and religious beliefs which gives us a colourful interior but also leads to unending conflicts based on irrational thoughts and insecurities. Question is why should a particular community or a linguistic group feel threatened by the advent of another belief or certain new ideas. Certainly no culture or language is superior to other. This is most evident in case of language as it is nothing but a mode of getting your ideas through. Now what good is a language if it makes one go back to sign language for communication. Now let us analyse this b taking the example of a small group of people speaking language x. Suddenly a large group of people speaking language y arrive at the scene and start practicising y and their belief structure. Now what is the most logical response of these two groups, either they take to street to prove the superiority of their belief structure (which is nothing but a display of insecurity in my view) or they can amicably decide to create a market where people can at will acquire skills related to both x and y. This not only gives a fillip to communication but also ensures that the practitioners of new belief may actually swell from x to x plus delta and from y to y plus gamma (assuming some portions would be common to both) thus dispelling doubts and possibly increasing the probability of sustainence and longetivity of both the languages and belief structures.

Now how does education policy come in to picture in all this? Idea is simple, why can we not have all the Kendriya Vidyalyas and other central and state schools to offer each and every language to their students. That is apart from english and mother toungue they will need to learn another language from India and be proficient in that language. Even the private schools should be forced to follow this model. The students would need to display their proficiency by appearing in a language exam which will be necessary for them to obtain their passing certificates or say 10 th standard or even 12 th standard. In fact college education should have this eligibility built in their requirements. Above argument holds a lot more answers than just regional issues that I have discussed. The full potential of above argument can have strongly positive implications for the socio-political and economic fabric of our vast country.