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English edu can’t make people patriotic: Bhagwat


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Panaji: Education in English language is inadequate to impart humanitarian and patriotic values, RSS sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat said on Sunday in Goa, after unveiling a statue of RSS founder K B Hedgewar.

"English education can only train us enough to be able to earn our daily bread. These are the words of Swami Vivekananda. We do not need such schools but those that teach us to serve for the betterment of other human beings...Veer Savarkar had said that 'if I cannot spread the fragrance of my education for the betterment of our country, then my education would be useless'... Even donkeys can go around bearing the weight of books," Bhagwat said, speaking near the campus

of the Dr K B Hedgewar School, for which the statue of the former RSS chief was unveiled.

Bhagwat was speaking in the presence of chief minister and education minister Laxmikant Parsekar, with education officials in the audience, including Goa University vice-chancellor Satish Shetye, GU registrar V P Kamat and director of education G P Bhat.

"We need an education that can help rid the country of poverty, suffering and dearth of knowledge. It should inculcate in us patriotism and lay stress on Swadeshi ideals, only then an entire generation will be born which will work tirelessly for the betterment of the country. We still need such efforts in the country. It is everybody's responsibility," said Bhagwat

http://m.timesofindia.com/city/goa/English-edu-cant-make-people-patriotic-Bhagwat/articleshow/50068747.cms

In these depressing times that's some comic relief .Thanks Bhagwatji :isalute:

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But he is true though for most cases. We have people leaving India after getting good education be it doctors , engineers or other proffesions. No NRI talks good about India. Every one blames pollution ,politics or reservations. The educated elite in India returns awards and make statements about tolerance than many pressing issues.

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But he is true though for most cases. We have people leaving India after getting good education be it doctors , engineers or other proffesions. No NRI talks good about India. Every one blames pollution ,politics or reservations. The educated elite in India returns awards and make statements about tolerance than many pressing issues.

Not sure whether u live in India or not but that is pretty ignorant.

Not only the elite but large section of the middle class are educated in English medium schools .

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Not sure why this guy gets so much press?  He is not exactly a politician or celebrity. Honestly i never heard of this guy until recently . If you believe RSS as an extremely radical and dangerous group. , then it is all the more reason there should be less coverage of him. You don't give platform to them. 

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Not sure why this guy gets so much press?  He is not exactly a politician or celebrity. Honestly i never heard of this guy until recently . If you believe RSS as an extremely radical and dangerous group. , then it is all the more reason there should be less coverage of him. You don't give platform to them. 

He is the head of the organisation that BJP presents its report card too.

http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/et-commentary/rss-government-meet-an-endorsement-of-modi-government-but-carries-complex-message

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I understand the relationship. But his style of administration is his own nothing to do with RSS. I am pretty sure it is not the idea of Mohan Bhagwat that Modi meets with all countries to establish a better trade relationship. Apart from this "fake intolerance" there is nothing that one could tie Modi with RSS. May share some ideologies, beliefs. But don't think it influences Modi as much as the media projects . Attributing all the dumb things this guy say to Modi is a bit of a stretch. 

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^ouch...

but agree with BG that english education(as a unified language) has probably contributed more to uniting us than our age old tenets of culture.

not sure of Patriotism part though

Edited by diga
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MSM is ready to twist any statement from RSS/Right wing to scare the public. In recent times, when Assam governor said 'Bangladeshi immigrants are not welcome to India", When asked about Hindus fleeing BD over religious persecution, he said "Hindus all over the world are welcome to India". Next day, the headline was "Assam governor says India is for Hindus only!!", WTF!

Even tho, I dont agree with RSS chief, nowhere in the article had the headline "

English edu can’t make people patriotic: Bhagwat"

In small quotes, he has said:

"English education can only train us enough to be able to earn our daily bread. These are the words of Swami Vivekananda. We do not need such schools but those that teach us to serve for the betterment of other human beings...Veer Savarkar had said that 'if I cannot spread the fragrance of my education for the betterment of our country, then my education would be useless'... Even donkeys can go around bearing the weight of books," Bhagwat said, 

Wbat a twist of words in the headline!

Edited by coffee_rules
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One thing is there, many Indians lack content when they speak English. They should understand they would never be as fluent in English as they are in their mother tongue. They should never try to crack jokes, come across as funny, excited etc while speaking English. It looks lame. Should use English only when necesaary just as a transactional language.

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One thing is there, many Indians lack content when they speak English. They should understand they would never be as fluent in English as they are in their mother tongue. They should never try to crack jokes, come across as funny, excited etc while speaking English. It looks lame. Should use English only when necesaary just as a transactional language.

 

Indians are pretty good in writing compared to many americans i have run into. They may not be as fluent as someone whose mother tongue is English when it comes to talking. They won't have problem delivering wordy phrases. Where they miss the mark mostly is describing day to day activities :) That is where words elude them . Since world has become smaller thanks to internet, we have come a long way. For instance Ashwin who grew up in India, speaks very good English without stutter, without struggling to find a word, without using fillers. Americans use lot of fillers .

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Indians are pretty good in writing compared to many americans i have run into. They may not be as fluent as someone whose mother tongue is English when it comes to talking. They won't have problem delivering wordy phrases. Where they miss the mark mostly is describing day to day activities :) That is where words elude them . Since world has become smaller thanks to internet, we have come a long way. For instance Ashwin who grew up in India, speaks very good English without stutter, without struggling to find a word, without using fillers. Americans use lot of fillers 

Ashwin is a rare fluent English speaker. He has a manly voice while speaking English. Rajeev Masand is typical of many private school educated Indians. Listen to his girly, pretentious tone to understand what i mean. Masand atleast has content. There are people using phrases just for the sake of using and lack content. These people should first think in mother tongue, translate it to simple English and then speak.

 

Use of fillers is very advisable IMO. It suggests that the person is thinking while talking which also becomes evident by the meaningful content that he/she speaks.

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The Role Of Indigenous Languages In India’s Development

 

English needs India to perpetuate its advantage, rather than the other way around.

In a recent speech the Foreign Secretary of India, S. Jaishankar raised some provocative questions. He asked –

whether India should raise its level of ambitions. Are we content to react to events or should we be shaping them more, on occasion even driving them? Should we remain a balancing power or aspire to be a leading one?” He also went on to state forcefully that “the creation of a new lexicon and imagery can often be helpful in assimilating and implementing changes.” and “Diplomacy now helps to play a role in our national development. There has been a concerted effort to make full use of personal chemistry, narratives, culture, and our diaspora….

Whatever may be the intention of S. Jaishankar, the vision and goals he has enunciated seem to be totally unreachable considering the bad education system that spews out students who are merely regurgitating and mimicking western theories. The students who graduate from humanities and social studies departments have no deep knowledge of traditional Indian knowledge, Indian languages and neither are they capable of critiquing the west or anybody else using Indian approaches. The students graduating from such a slavish system can hardly be expected to challenge hegemonic theories that emanate from the west and offer Bharatiya alternatives.

An important aspect of breaking the colonized mind-set is to first break the stranglehold of English in the Indian education system. India rises as GDP of English speaking countries relatively shrink English dominates in the world currently only because the UK was succeeded by the English-language dominant US. The English speaking countries (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and tiny New Zealand) have reached their maximum economic influence and in the future their overall GDP as a proportion of World GDP is going to be reducing as the rest of Asia and Africa grow economically. The US is also slated to become a bilingual society with Spanish and English. India on the other hand, will be expanding and will have a greater share of world GDP in the coming decades.

The English language is dependent on India for its future growth and retaining its status as lingua-franca of the world. In practical terms, we already see that major online news-sources from the US & UK, have now started India focused sections and are covering Indian news more, because the growth they see is in harnessing the online readership from India and growing Indian economic influence in the world. After 2050, India will be competing with China for the top spot as per data, sourced from works of Angus Maddison, as well as IMF and PWC reports. However, India may challenge China for the top spot even earlier as this data does not take into consideration the recent slowdown in China and possible slower US growth. Shares of global middle class consumption, 2000-2050.

The current education policy of India with English being the “unofficial First language” in the three language formula was created with a 1960’s mind-set when Indian economy was in a very weak position and US/UK were dominant. It is because of this outdated and flawed policy that Indic languages are shrinking and losing influence against English.

The language policy must also be changed now to make sure Indic languages and scripts get primacy relative to English.

Historically, many of the best scientists have originated in non-English speaking countries in Europe and Asia like Germany, Russia, Japan and Korea. So there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that English is a must for scientific progress. Only a small deracinated and anglicized elite of India push the myth that English is a must to be good in science and math. In the coming decade, the main challenge to Indian Government will be to educate the young working age population and help them get jobs.

The easiest and fastest way to educate the Indian people would be through creation of simple and good quality educational material in Indian languages. Considering that there is hardly any good educational material in Indian languages, developing one in Indian languages leveraging multimedia technologies is a much more doable project than trying to make hundreds of millions of Indians even minimally competent in a foreign language like English. Unfortunately, the Indian education system has embarked on this quixotic quest, which is bound to fail. If India continues on this misguided path, there will be a huge underclass of ignorant Pidgin-English speakers who belong neither to the ghar nor to the ghat.

This will be a recipe for a disaster and the so-called demographic dividend will become a demographic noose if India ends up with a class of young inarticulate, Pidgin-English blabbering, incompetent society. Instead of providing confidence and skills, the current education system is geared to ruin a person’s ability to learn and prosper by throwing students into a foreign language pit from which they cannot recover. India’s Geopolitical interest lies in promoting an Indic cultural sphere. Just like a multi-polar world is in India’s interest, a multi-lingual world is also in India’s long-term geopolitical interest.

If India chooses English over its own languages, to project its world-view overseas, then India will remain an impersonator of the Anglophone group and never be an original, so it is not in India’s long term interest to have English as the dominant language. Ensuring the use of multiple languages in the world plays to Indian people’s strength in multiple language-learning, diasporic relations, establishing trade and one-to-one relationships with leaders as well as deep people to people contacts.

These advantageous factors would help India gain competitive advantage over other nations like China and USA. In the coming years as India grows, the Gulf countries will become more dependent on India as the market for their energy exports. Similarly, Africa from the west and ASEAN from the east, will be looking to India for leadership, to provide an alternative to a rising Chinese narrative as well as grow into the space left by the relative reduction of American share of world GDP.

This means that even as India leads economically, India will also have to take the opportunity to promote its worldview to the people in those countries rather than having a framework set by an Anglophone group. India will also find support from numerous European countries like France and Germany to make sure that the world reduces the use of English. Big states in India like UP, Maharashtra etc. would be larger economies than the economy of England. However, the colonized Indian mind-set does not yet have the confidence to imagine Indian languages dominating over English.

By the 2030’s, Indians would also be either the largest or second largest high-tech workforce in the world and without an intellectual leadership and framework from the political science and humanities departments, India will be reduced to be a mere supplier of cheap tech-labour and limited to working within an Anglo-Eurocentric framework. We need Indian political science and humanities graduates to know Sanskrit and be good in at least a couple of Indian languages to develop the framework for the intellectual exposition of India to the rest of the world. Indian languages should hang together or they will hang separately When foreign forces captured larger parts of India, they did so by initially capturing trading routes and ports from individual princely states.

They were then able to establish and dominate larger areas because Indians did not have a united response. Similarly, today we have various linguistic states fighting individualized battle against English, which they are bound to lose, unless all Indian languages come together to stem the growth of English in Indian society. Over the past many millennia, Indian languages, even as they belong to different linguistic families, have developed a common vocabulary and a common cultural context. Some languages may have less and some more, but nonetheless all Indian languages have an overwhelming common vocabulary.

A Hindi speaker would be more familiar with significant amount of words in Malayalam or Telugu if it was written in Devanagari script. The common Pan-Indian vocabulary is mainly derived from the Samskritam framework. Samskritam is demonized and opposed mainly because it can serve as a unifier and helps promote a united Indic framework against Eurocentrism.

Along with the existing three language formula, there is a need to evolve the Devanagari script as a common script that can be learnt by all Indians in school. Just like there are standards for local content in media, safety, and fuel consumption, we need a Bhasha and Lipi standard for use of Indic languages in media, marketing and business transactions across business verticals. Tax incentives must be provided to companies that adhere to the “Bhasha and Lipi Standard”.

Our Bharatiya languages need support and ‘tax breaks’ to re-establish themselves. Just like how we have reservation to help empower various jaatis that suffered discrimination, we need to provide “tax credits” and support our Bharatiya languages to re-establish themselves. Practical Steps to reduce the importance of English in daily life. In addition to establishing a “Bhasha standard” as mentioned earlier, the “three language” standard also must be implemented in full. Even though there is a nominal ‘three language’ formula in schools, the actual implementation is extremely bad.

For example, the ICSE system, gets away with teaching only two languages and does not even consider the third language for computing results. An important immediate practical step would be to make sure that at the school level, the two Indian languages are given larger share of overall marks than English. This will be a great first step for the Indian language students versus the small English speaking elite that hog all the resources today. Additionally, many competitive exams like IAS and Bank entrance exams should have a larger Indic language component when compared to English.

It is shocking that competitive bank exams hardly have any Indian language component, where a common Indic language financial vocabulary can be developed to unite all of India. Steps like these would result in a great push and promotion of Indian languages and beat back English significantly. The colonial legacy that advantages English must be removed. An impediment to re-establishing primacy of Indic languages is the colonized mind-set of a small anglicized elite and lack of vision in the political leadership.

This small colonized Indian elite cannot even comprehend that India is set to dominate and be a big player economically and culturally on the world stage in the coming. In some ways, the vast Indian middle class is like a Hanuman who does not know its own strength and has to be reminded of the greatness of its own languages and culture.

The large Indian middle class must know that increased usage of English language within India will forever doom India into a copycat status and is an impediment to achieving India’s greatness. There must be an effort to bring together the various linguistic states to come up with common standards to ward off English, else each of India’s great languages will suffer immeasurably. To even achieve a little of what the Foreign Secretary has enunciated, a beginning must be made in re-establishing Bharatiya languages and creating a class of Indians who have a Bharatiya mind-set and do not depend on Europeans and Americans for “theories” that can be regurgitated on Indians.

http://swarajyamag.com/ideas/the-role-of-indigenous-languages-in-indias-development/

 

 

 

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^ He had to write that in English. That is the problem.  India is a unique country where no one language apart from Hindi could be a common language which whole India can participate and make it better. Even Hindi is a secondary language in many states.  So it is upto each state to develop their own language. As far as i can tell Tamil is a beautiful literary language. As a scientific language it never took off. It applies to many languages. Reason is we are focusing on creating unique words for each corresponding English word without borrowing from other language. English did not grow that way. They borrowed from many many languages to grow rapidly.  Rightnow English works well as a common language for us. 

 

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 ^ He had to write that in English. That is the problem.

Irrelevant. He is addressing the people who have (or potential) the power and the tools to address the problem since the "backward" India(n) is not a player in the present climate of economic apartheid. For that Indian, escaping that apartheid is possible only by exacerbating the problem. System can be fixed only from the inside. 

India is a unique country where no one language apart from Hindi could be a common language which whole India can participate and make it better. Even Hindi is a secondary language in many states.  So it is upto each state to develop their own language. As far as i can tell Tamil is a beautiful literary language. As a scientific language it never took off. It applies to many languages. Reason is we are focusing on creating unique words for each corresponding English word without borrowing from other language. English did not grow that way. They borrowed from many many languages to grow rapidly.  Rightnow English works well as a common language for us. 

People need to read Edward Said's Orientalism to understand the importance of breaking the existing edifice particularly for residents of former colonies. Unfortunately, no equivalent work has followed Said's seminal book. Many (including Indians) have tried to expound on what a post colonial world looks but they all end up straitjacketing themselves. Don't know about Africans, but the pathetic Indian lot ends up reducing the problem to evil upper caste vs dalit and long live Karl Marx. So much work needs to be done. 

In any future scenario, where India is flourishing, English will not be the primary language. 

Short google search and here is a short paper on linguistic differentiation in Ecuador (Spanish vs local) 

https://studentorgs.utexas.edu/salsa/proceedings/2003/andronis.pdf

It doesn't take many leaps to conclude that if everything good and modern is without and everything bad and backward is within, then, for that community, progress and social harmony (although progress and harmony are antithesis but you get what I'm trying to say by harmony - something where the class divide isn't as in your face as it is now in India) can come from complete dissociation from/rejection of anything and everything indigenous. 

Edited by surajmal
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We do have atlernatives for English. French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Russia. Sadly none of it is from India. I will put that down to the number of languages in India. Entire country has to pitch in. India is a place where we don't even understand each other if we are from different parts of the country.  Theoritically anything is possible.  Who will run with it. Tamilnadu will flat out reject Hindi as main language. Many states will not give up their own language. Kerala will not give up status of Malayalam. Not many status will abandon their own region language to promote a common language. I keep reading about reviving sanskrit  for years. So far they are only theories. India has tons and tons of problems to address. Language is the last problem they have rightnow. Scholars should work on that. 

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