The language of education

I was asked once to write my views on whether education should be in the mother tongue or English. So these are the thoughts that I penned down.

Education can be defined either in the conventional way – decided by people assumed to be in a position of higher authority over us – or one can draw their own interpretations of what is education all about. I understand education as anything and everything that a person might pick up, learn from and get inspired by, in the course of a lifetime. Education never stops, it transgresses the barriers of age.

So does it really matter if this education is in English, or French or even Sindhi, or Marathi? Yes, for the sake of effective communication one needs to learn the language of the person one may be dealing with. We as media aspirants are constantly told to learn Marathi for effective communication with people, in case we work in Mumbai or any other Maharashtra city. But education/ knowledge per say can be taken in, in any language, as long as it adds value to our lives and the lives of others around us.

While some may argue that English is the best language to learn in, given the age of globalisation and English being a universal language, spoken in most countries, the flip side of this argument would be that a person may end up gaining more knowledge and wisdom through education in their own mother tongue, which  might make it easier for them to grasp information and hence imbibe it.

Hence ultimately, according to me, it is what you gather and how effectively you use the knowledge to enrich your own lives and the world around you, that is important. Instead of stressing on the language of learning one should focus on the elements of knowledge….