An English class: Great demand An English class: Great demand

Thirty-eight years after the demise of the British Raj, English retains a curious fascination for a majority of the middle class in West Bengal.

The compulsory teaching of English has long been abolished in almost every state in the country, but nowhere has such a decision provoked as much controversy and opposition as it has here: a fact that the ruling Left Front is discovering to its great dismay.

Just how important the language still is in West Bengal was brought home rather dramatically recently when the second largest constituent of the Left Front, the Forward Bloc, publicly declared that the Front's educational reforms, particularly the decisions to scrap English and the system of examinations in the primary school stage, were among the foremost reasons for its poor showing in the Lok Sabha elections last December.

And it is not just the Forward Bloc that has gauged the pro-English trend of popular opinion. The Marxist opponent of the Left Front, the Socialist Units Centre of India (SUCI), has used the language issue to rally large sections of the urban and rural middle class against the Front ever since 1980 when the changes were first introduced.

Of late, some Congress(I) leaders have also started voicing their opposition to the abolition of English. The literate classes in the state, despite their almost jingoistic devotion to the cultural heritage of the Bengali language, fear that by abolishing English at the primary stages the Government is in effect ensuring a lifetime of mediocrity and restricted opportunities for their children.

Most palpably worried are the urbanites for whom the institutes of technology, medicine and management outside the state are a paradise that can be reached only by treading the straight and narrow path of an education in English.

To the SUCI, however, the CPI(M)'s intentions are more diabolical. "Just like the British who did not want English to be taught to the broad masses since it would spread liberal ideas, the CPI(M) wants to keep the masses uneducated so that they can be manipulated and prevented from questioning the system," says SUCI women's leader Sumitra Mukherjee.

But even the CPI(M) professes the importance of the language. Chief Minister Jyoti Basu declared at the 150th anniversary of St Xavier's Calcutta, his old school: "English is indispensable."

"The issue is not whether English should be taught or not," protests Primary Education Minister Mohammed Abdul Bari. He says the real question seems to be whether the absence of English teaching at the primary level will prevent a child from gaining proficiency in the language at a later stage.

"The Left Front merely endorsed the view put forward by every central committee on education that only the mother tongue should be taught at the primary school stage," Bari adds.

But the result was the production of many graduates who were incapable of constructing even a single English sentence correctly. The malaise, CPI(M) leaders like Bhabesh Maitra argued, could only be cured if the traditional methods of teaching by rote and the monotony of the "C A T spells cat" system were replaced by the scientific method of teaching by association.

But reorienting English teachers in all the 10,191 Madhyamik (class six to 10) schools has proved impossible even with the help of the All Bengal Teachers Association (ABTA). Beni Madhab Bhattacharjee, an English teacher in Calcutta's Ballygunje government high school feels that "the new method can help a student pick up the language fast but in the absence of supplementary reading and conversation practice and other forms of exposure to the language children fall back to learning mechanically."

Not surprisingly, the Marxist educationists who assumed that a child could gain sufficient proficiency in English within a span of just five years (between class six and 10) without having any previous encounter with the language have come in for considerable criticism.

John Mason, principal of Calcutta's St. James' school, for one, is of the opinion that "four or even six years of learning English do not provide sufficient grounding for switching over from Bengali medium to English medium instruction at the college level".

And judging from the sharp decline in student admissions to government-run schools in urban areas in recent years, most middle class urbanites seem to share Mason's views.

"Private primary schools where English is taught have proliferated in recent years in Calcutta," says Sukumar Chakraborty, secretary to the state committee of the Forward Bloc's Prathomik Shikshak Samiti.

Chakraborty explains that in comparison to the increase in the number of primary schools from 40,941 to 51,800 in the last seven years, the number of high schools has only increased from 8,544 to 10,191, leading to a terrific competition for admission and increasing the premiums paid for admission to private schools. The worst hit by the educational reforms, ironically, are the rural masses whom the changes are supposed to have benefitted.

"Due to the absence of examinations or any other form of evaluation, there is no compulsion on the teacher to ensure that he does his job properly," says the Forward Bloc's Ashok Ghosh.

In the villages of the interior, teachers at times do not bother to attend school for long stretches, or do not come in time, leave alone teaching by a method imperfectly understood by them.

The Left Front might be doing the right thing in initiating a programme to bring about literacy to the greatest numbers but in the process it has lowered the level of the education system to that of the lowest common denominator.

To the sizeable middle class in the state, the Left Front has only succeeded in creating a shortage of essential English education, just like other shortages of power, milk and civic amenities.