Defining Mother Tongue Education in Plurilingual Contexts

Education planners in the contemporary South Asian context have, by and large, committed themselves to education for all without seriously questioning the elitist framework of education inherited from the colonial set up; it does not take into account the complexity of speech variation across dialects in flux (and in plurilingual societies, often across languages) at the grassroots level. Examining the linguistic-cultural landscape of South Asia, this article critically addresses pragmatic issues concerning the scope of the 'mother tongue medium' stretched over the entire education career. The study takes afresh look at the phenomenon of education in a multilingual world, and discusses an alternate paradigm making education relevant to the communication ethos as prevailing in plurilingual societies. Taking its cue from Gandhian thinking on Basic Education, it lays stress on integrating education with work experience and also bearing in mind the specific needs of different cultures. The study brings into focus the complementary roles played by standard languages backed bytradition and contact languages shaped by the environment (such as the lingua francasHindustani, and Angrezi in the post-colonial context). In this endeavour, the State can actas an honest facilitating agent to provide an infrastructure where individual groups can exercise the choice of a particular medium, of phasing the shift and/or combining the mediums of instruction.