Aims of Education from an Indian Perspective- Vindication of The Mother Tongue As The Most Desirable Medium of Primary Education

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In ancient India when young learners received lessons in the Upanishads from their preceptors, education meant imparting the most valued knowledge of what was already there to be learnt unchanged. Later on also, when students were required to be taught the various systems of Hindu philosophy as well as the Hindu religious rites-cum-rituals, all that they were told to learn were meant to be learnt unchanged. For a long time since then, education remained merely a process of imparting the knowledge of all that were meant to be learnt unchanged. The bulk of such knowledge was constituted by Hindu Scriptures and all theories based on them. But with the advent of science and technology - both ushered in by British administrative rule over India gradually starting to operate in about the beginning of the nineteenth century, aim of education became much more comprehensive changing from the mere aim to impart knowledge assumed to have the value of permanence, to the aim to evaluate old knowledge of assumed permanence and to newly acquire the knowledge of hitherto unknown truths about Nature the knowledge which is capable of ever being amended, corrected and replaced by knowledge newly constructed through the continuous process of scientific investigation and technological experimentation.

When the child grows from infancy to become a boy or a girl, it learns its mother tongue easily from its immediate family or parental environment, and as a result of this learning its brainpower continuously develops. If a normal healthy human baby is allowed to grow physically taking nutritious food at regular intervals, but is not exposed to its natural mother tongue or to any tongue whatever, its brainpower will remain stunted at the level of the brainpower of a chimpanzee. This is so because continuous exposure to the mother tongue spoken by parents and other family members, helps the child get a developing brainpower which again helps the child learn more about its own mother tongue -the two processes, viz, learning the mother tongue and getting the brainpower developed accordingly being complementary to each other.

Since the child is born with its mother tongue and grows cultivating it, and since the child's cultivating its mother tongue contributes to the development of its brainpower, it is never the case that the child's particular mother tongue is simply accidental to it, and can be easily replaced by any suitable foreign tongue without any detrimental effect on the development of its brainpower. On the contrary, depriving the child of its natural joy of using its mother tongue and forcibly imposing, much to its dismay, a foreign tongue amounts to uprooting the mother tongue and its ambient culture from the child's inborn system of learning, and irreparably damaging the prospect of its brainpower developing to its optimum level. That the brainpower gets impaired for all the proficiency that the child attains in a foreign tongue, say English or French, which it is imposed upon, does not come to their guardians' notice for the simple reason that thoroughgoing foreign-medium or English-medium instructed children are generally found to fare well, when fully grown up, in their professional careers and lucrative business activities. But however successful these children may be in their later lives professionally and commercially by virtue of their proficiency in English or any other foreign tongue they are made to learn at their pre-primary level, sudden withdrawal of the mother tongue from that level on the child's early learning system is bound to adversely affect its mental-cum-brain development. A foreign tongue can never take the place of the mother tongue, and its introduction at the nursery level, setting aside the mother tongue, is bound to have a deleterious effect on the child's mental-cum- brain development. For all this undesirable effect on the development of its brainpower, the child, when grown up, will have little difficulty in being successful professionally. On the contrary, his satisfactory command over spoken and written English is expected to enable him to shine professionally and commercially.