Friday, August 28, 2015

Early childhood report overlooks language

The Law Commission of India has just published a good report called "Early Childhood Development and Legal Entitlements" (PDF). In a brief 73 pages it offers a useful overview of the concept and importance of early childhood care; the international conventions, treaties and declarations on the subject; the (Indian) constitutional context; and the various national policies and schemes dealing with health and nutrition, as well as care and education. The report concludes with a list of recommendations to strengthen the "statutory backing" for the various provisions already in existence.

The recommendations include making mandatory free preschool education (rather than optional as it currently is under the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RtE)). But the report is silent on what this might mean for children of Indigenous peoples and linguistic minorities (ILM -- incidentally, ilm is the Urdu word for knowledge and learning). As things stand, when a ILM child enters primary school, hardly anywhere in the country does she receive education in the mother tongue. The report's silence on the issue of medium of instruction indicates that for ILM children preschool education too will be in a non-mother tongue.

This flies in the face of the report's declaration that, "There should be a reference to quality of education in the Rules. Education for children under six must mean quality education and care to prepare them for elementary school and anything less than that should not be called education" (p. 61). Brave words! Similarly, the report also enjoins the state to provide training of preschool teachers "to ensure quality standards and a proper implementation of the best methods of promoting play and learning" (p 72). Let us hope that these admonitions to provide quality education through play and learning translate into a mother-tongue-medium education for our children.