English In Govt Schools

NCERT Director D P Saklani has lamented that parents remain fascinated by English-medium schools even though many don't have trained teachers, saying it is "no less than suicide" as government schools now provide quality education. In an interaction with PTI's editors at the agency's headquarters here, the chief of the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) said the practice of cramming content in English has led to knowledge loss among children and distanced them from their roots and culture. "Parents are obsessed with English-medium schools, they prefer to send their children to such schools even if there are no teachers or they are not trained enough. This is not less than suicide and this why the new (national) education policy has stressed upon teaching in mother tongue," he said. "Why should teaching be matrabhasha adharit (based on mother tongue)? Because till then we will not understand our own mother, our roots, how will we understand anything? And .

Former Chief Justice of India, Justice N.V. Ramana has said that one should never forget one's mother tongue, but at the same time learning a link language such as English is important

In April this year, the high court had set aside the order for government schools to convert the medium of instruction from Telugu to English

In a quiet classroom, class six students follow the cursor on their digitised textbook on a large projector facing them in a government school in Delhi. Deepa reads the text, slowly and with emphasis on every word. Whenever the class encounters a difficult word, she slows down. When the cursor is dragged to the word, she opens a visual dictionary on the screen, showing the students what it means. She also pauses to allow the students to read the text aloud after her. But Deepa is not a person - it's a "neutral" South Asian voice that education technology company English Helper (EH) uses across India as a digital teaching aid in government classrooms. Using a patented technology that converts text into voice, and with two human editors to oversee the process, EH can digitise a 100-page textbook in a week. < SUBHEAD >Swift scaling-up "Once the technology and the digital infrastructure are in place, we can scale up at speeds that traditional educational interventions can't dream ...