Learning Through a Language: The Unresolved Question of Mother Tongue in a Multi-ethnic Society

Abstract

With the emergence of the concepts like democracy and equality, the idea of imparting mass education emerged. It advocated the principle of imparting a common curriculum to all through a standard language. Standardised language as a medium of education thus does not necessarily have democratic potential. In this article, I draw from an ethnographic study of a multi-ethnic government school in Assam to argue that (a) the idea of mother tongue as a taken-for-granted category in a culturally diverse and socio-economically unequal context needs to be questioned; (b) the gap between the social and cultural world of teachers and students is a major obstacle for learning; and (c) a centralised understanding of teacher’s training and assessment of student’s quality does little to improve learning.