Importance of Language in Education

Category: Education
Written by: Atif Abdul-Rahman Shaikh (on February 18, 2008 - 07:23 PM)

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Today my best friend forwarded an interesting article by Shahzad Roy, the educationist (and pop singer).Shahazad Roy runs a young but wonderful NGO working on grass root education for the poorest strata of our society and his economic model to make this happen is well appreciated and what better to call it than Zindagi Trust (Life Trust). Here is a video song he made:

Shahzad points out a very pertinent point in our education, the role language plays in building analytical skills. Being a product of Pakistani's Federal Board, the devastating culture of relating a foreign language (English in our case) as being an indicator of intelligence had ever been pertinent and I have seen so many talented people lose out due to the language. It is a case well made by proponents of English that it is necessary to be in the 21st century since most of the progress stems out from research and publications in this language. Nevertheless, in primary education, English infact hampers the very cause education tried to solve. My dad 'escaped 'from Lyari (a poor desolate area in Karachi) through Urdu medium schooling (even that was mildly foreign since he is a Sindhi) but managed to graduate and post graduate in Physics in English and to much surprise a Bachelors with distinction. Earlier on in my age, I never heard of better pronounced English than his, and better physics been taught elsewhere, the reason has been the ability to learn a critical thought process from childhood. My generation and the ones which follow haven't been so lucky, since English as a primary language for education has been more pervasive throughout while the ability to think in English hadn't. As as Shahzad Roy suggests in his article that analytical thinking allows faster learning of foreign languages, atlest that was the case in my family too. It is very important to harness the localized knowledge, either it be langauge or cultural teachings, etc as these are the skills most inbuilt and hard wired into a child. This is what the famous Greg Mortenson, a philanthropist, an educationist working in Paksitan also thinks about.

When I arrived in Germany nearly three years ago, I was surprised by the pervasiveness German language has in everything. And yet countries like Japan and Germany who are at the front in technological excellence, all did it in their native languages, ofcourse so did Americans :-)

There has been numerous published work on the role language plays on education both from linguistics and sociology but there is also a growing research which believes that the fundamental requirement to develop an analytical thought process is the ability to visualize abstract concepts. Although developed from a much earlier age than schooling, there is a growing user base of using virtual reality based learning to develop analytical skills. Ofcourse still a luxury but not for long. Virtual Based training for children is picking up, here is an organization I was once affiliated with providing technical and vocational training using visualization. However, their focus was on adults. There has been a popular programming language which teaches kids about logic building using visual concepts called LOGO. Another interesting project is developed by Carnegie Mellon University for teaching students programming(analytical skills) in a 3d environment again harnessing the power of visualization, the Alice project as it is called is easy to learn for both students and teachers alike. It is a bit hard to imagine NGO's offering such tutorials to children now but this cannot be a distant future, inshallah!

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