If one is surprised by what went wrong with the education of children as most of them fail to recognise letters usually taught at elementary level despite climbing up the ladder of education in schools then the reasons for the weakness would surprise even more. As the State aspires to achieve great feat in education, the method and mode of delivery of education has turned out to be the greatest impediment in the way of the aspiration.
According to ASER-2014 about 34.4 per cent children of Class-V can recognise texts taught at Class-II. Jharkhand is way behind the national average of 48.1 per cent children of the category. “Students in the remote areas of Jharkhand fail to understand what is being taught to them in textbooks. It is like playing with the future of a child. We need to adopt strategies where the language of a child acts as the foundation for other languages. Jharkhand needs a Mother Tongue based Multilingual Education,” said former national coordinator of right-to-education (RTE) at NCPCR, Dhir Jhingran.
Jhingran, a 1986-batch IAS officer, has served in the ministry of Human Resource Development and also devoted almost 20-years to the education sector. He was presenting his paper at ‘Vision for Jharkhand-An Agenda for Development’ organised by Unicef at Ranchi. Notably, language based method of teaching has been advocated by several child right groups to improve learning ability of a child and is also perceived as the correct way of sharpening learning skills of those with mother tongue other than Hindi.
According to experts, Santahli speaking children of Dumka and Pakur, Ho speaking children of West Singhbhum, Mundari speaking children of Khunti and Kudukh speaking children of Gumla could learn very fast if the medium of education is their mother tongue. Experts opine that the process can be started on a pilot basis if it cannot be implement at the same time.
“We need to keep a child’s learning ability in the centre. We should pick an area where children do not understand Hindi very well, provide education in their language and then introduce other languages as they reach Class-V but we must keep their language as a subject. The learning ability of child gets easily translated in other languages,” maintained Jhingran.
Activists of the education sector emphasised on maintaining the objective of the education and keeping the process focused on developing comprehension in a child and maintaining a child’s language as the medium of education for first few years of a child’s educational career.