Some ideas on education in Karnataka

At the outset this, has nothing to do with the civic life of bangalore as such, but as much as bangalore is tied to the rest of the state at the hip, and as much as the output of our schools is crucial to its economy, culture and in shaping its citizenry it may be worthwhile to discuss this issue here.

A fundamental assumption is that school education should be universal and must be a fundamental right that is enjoyed equally equally by all, especially with respect to quality. Towards that there was a discussion between a few folks at churumuri. please read through that link and related responses to that post.

i am posting the post that started the discussion there to start a discussion here, but observations by churumurigas including rameshgowda, and girish are very very crucial.

#1. towards universal education, why cant we have: kannada, social studies, including civics in kannada. english, science and maths in english. for all students irrespective of their backgrounds and location?

#1a. this would help students to be bi-directionally globally connected to the fast changing world of the sciences. english is the de-facto language in the peer reviewed world of science. for example, so many papers in the sciences from non-english speaking countries are rejected because of lack of clarity in communication. quite a few of these papers are so poorly written that it is impossible for others to look beyond the language, and assess the quality of research. i.e. many times papers are rejected, even when international reviewers sense that they carry important information, because they cannot be sure the authors mean what the reviewers think the authors mean. this is limited world of academics, where you can find people idealistic enough to read a paper a 10 times. you can imagine the impact of this in the much more pervasive world of practical engineering/sciences where people have actually invested their fortunes. on the otherhand, it took modern scientists to “discover” that there is a species of freshwater cat fish now called glyptothorax kudremukensis. perhaps the locals have known of this fish since ages as kemmeenu and they could have told more about it if it were not for the language barrier? similar is the case with mount “everest” aka sagarmaata/chomolungma.

#1b. studying social studies and civics in kannada would help children think about their immediate surroundings, their history and their role as citizens in kannada. hopefully, with kannada as the medium for social sciences and civics, the schooling syllabus will also be more local in content and more relevant. growing up we learnt all about the map of india, but knew nothing about the map of how our town. genghis khan, napolean and akbar we learnt about but nothing about abbakka, benki nawab and kempe gowda, who i now learn, via internet, was a pioneer in rainwater harvesting. the constitution of india and magna carta we learnt about but not who or what a mayor, a corporator or a panchayati head is. had to learn out of school that gaNasabha’s were probably the earliest forms of representative governance. it is left to word of mouth learning post graduation to know how local governance works. what the byelaws and traffic rules are, what is meant by a revenue site or an agri land. what use is a education in civics without knowledge of these everyday essential facts?

#1c. if the issue of medium is amicably resolved, perhaps attention can then be focussed on the more critical issues of pedagogy - issues like how to move from rote learning and testing regurgitative ability to testing for understandability and application.

#1d. developing facility in both kannada and english will also facilitate cross-over and cross-pollination. it will enable kannadigas who are scientists to easily help preserve and sustain naaTi science. at the same time it will enable kannadiga scientists to contribute to popular scientific content in kannada directly. similarly, it will enable students of the arts direct access to ideas from the west.

kannada can only be saved if kannadigas are confident and directly enabled and see no contradiction in being a kannadiga and a citizen of this modern world.

---------------------- perhaps we can consolidate and translate that discussion and any discussions we might have here into kannada, and try to get it into some kannada papers. any volunteers?