GULF-GOANS e-NEWSLETTER (since 1994)® www.yahoogroups.com/group/gulf-goans/ www.goa-world.com http://www.goa-world.com/goa/credit%5Ccredit.htm Tumcam Maie-mogacho ieukar. Enjoy Life - This is not a rehearsal! Konkani uloi, boroi, vach ani samball - sodankal. Hich Goenchi osmitai ani amchem khalxelponn. Goenchi amchi Konkani bhas! Ekvottachem saddon Goenkaranchem. QUEM QUER ANDA E QUEM NAO QUER MANDA! Stay tuned to Gulf Goans e-Newsletter - everyday someone, somewhere learns a little..... English: A must for secondary curriculum Let’s educate our children for posterity and not perpetuate the past, says FR ROMUALD DE SOUZA, SJ In the last few days, the local newspapers have published several articles and letters against continuing with the mother tongue as the medium of instruction in Stds I to IV, as well as against extending it to Std V as recently proposed. The Parents-Teachers Associations (PTAs) of a number of schools, in a sense of frustration resulting from their experience with this formula over a period of 20 years, have strongly opted for change and are petitioning the government to reconsider the ruling imposed on schools some 20 years ago, apparently on the strength of a UNESCO statement that a child learns more easily if taught in her mother tongue. Imposing the mother tongue as the medium of instruction and supporting it with financial grants may have been a progressive step at that time. Today, in the fast changing and globalising world, finding and keeping employment is a matter of high competition. Since the government, the parents, and our young people are looking to ICT (Information and Communication Technology) as a major area of employment, and since mastery over language to the point of being able to express oneself creatively is essential to compete and succeed in the ICT business, I find it hard to understand why the government wants to continue with a policy that puts our students to disadvantage in global competition. That our present language policy results in very real difficulties for students and teachers can only be known from the frustration experienced by teachers in secondary schools, and from the difficulties faced by the students themselves. Why is it that not more than one third of the students who enter Std I are actually able to complete secondary education? Granted that a fair proportion of them, willingly or unwillingly, take up technical courses and the government is loath to class them as dropouts, yet the fact remains that over two-thirds of our population have not completed their secondary education. Where does this place Goa on the world’s knowledge economy map? This question may not be that urgent as long as the tourist industry, even with its undesirable concomitant problems, continues to flourish, and the state continues to receive remittances from Goans resident and working abroad (NRGs). It would be fair to recognise that the ‘good life’ enjoyed in Goa is sustained by the toil of many who did not have an equal educational opportunity as those who could afford private schooling or coaching classes. The government should take into account a couple of points before arriving at a decision. The often quoted argument in favour of the mother tongue as the medium of instruction is that children learn more effectively when they are taught in their mother tongue. There are a whole lot of research papers whose findings are contrary to this belief. The question we need to ask is, “What are the children supposed to be learning in the early years of primary schooling?” To prepare them for the higher standards, the child should, in the early years of schooling, acquire the fundamental skills they will need to successfully pursue further studies. The emphasis should be on learning skills and not ‘knowledge’. The basic skills the child should master in the early years of primary schooling are literacy and numeracy. The objective is to enable the child to read, write, compute, and communicate with facility, as they progress in school. They have to learn that the letters are symbols representing sounds, that when several letters are put together they make words. To read efficiently and with speed as they progress, the child must be able to recognise words by their shape; that is, to learn to read with their eyes and mind, and not just with lips. The text used for learning to read is not important, at least not in the early years of schooling. It might be stories or fables or any written matter that the child finds interesting. As skills, neither the acquiring of literacy nor of numeracy is made easy or difficult by any particular language, whether the mother tongue or any other. As Jean Piaget, the world famous Swiss researcher in child development and an eminent educationist has pointed out, in its early years the child tries to get acquainted with the tangible world of things, and is not yet mentally ready to deal with symbols. Yet, our system of early education imparted in the mother tongue uses the Devanagari script. The child has to learn both the symbols and the sounds that go with them. If simultaneously English is taught in the Roman script, the child has to associate two very distinct symbols for almost similar sounds. Only some lucky children are able to escape the resulting confusion caused in young minds. The medium of early formal instruction can be either a facilitator or a barrier to later educational development. If the language in secondary school is going to be English, the child will obviously have the advantage if it starts with English from Std I. If the mother tongue and English are taught side by side, attention should be given to what the teachers of the secondary schools say. After using the mother tongue as the medium of instruction over several years, the teachers’ experience is that “children continue to leave primary schools with basic skills that do not equip them for the more demanding secondary curriculum.” Let us educate our children for their future and not to perpetuate our past. (The writer is a Jesuit priest and an eminent educationist, and was the Founder Director of the Goa Institute of Management (GIM). Earlier, he was Director of XLRI, Jamshedpur, and founder of the Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar. He is presently the Director of the Marian Institute of Healthcare Management. In 2010, he was awarded the Padma Shri for his contribution to education.) As published in OPINIONS in Herald / 28-03-2011 LAST GASP: "Addechem udok narlant ghalear godd zata?" (Can artificial water turn sweet if dipped in a coconut?) TAG’s Second Popular Tiatr Festival www.navhindtimes.in FOCC Kuwait supports MAS project in India http://www.focckwt.org/mas.pdf
