One School Day, Three Languages: India's Formula — Epoche A2
An Indian child can pass through three languages before the afternoon bell, and this is not one clever school's invention. It is a national plan with a name: the three-language formula. The three places a language can sit The medium. The language the lessons are taught in — mathematics, science, history. Usually the state language; increasingly, English. The link language. Hindi, taught as a subject so that people from different states can speak to each other. The subject language. One studied on its own, for an hour: English, Sanskrit, or another Indian language. The same formula, two classrooms In a Delhi school the state language and the link language are both Hindi, so the third place goes to Sanskrit or another language, and English often carries the teaching. In Chennai the picture is different: Tamil Nadu has kept to two languages, Tamil and English, and has argued its case for decades. The formula is praised and argued about in the same breath. Praised, because a child leaves school able to move between a mother tongue, a national language and a world one. Argued about, because choosing which language a child must learn was never only about learning. A school need not teach in one language and treat the rest as foreign extras. Here they share the room, and the timetable is the argument.