It is absolutely unbelievable but it is somehow true – we have hit the beginning of the end of our stay in Hyderabad. We had our last classes at 4 of our schools yesterday, and we have two more classes at Railway before we are officially done teaching. The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind as we have been working up to our culminating event, the TMS Final Showcase to be held at the Railway Girls High School on Monday, December 5th. The event will feature short presentations by students from each of our 5 schools followed by screenings of their work. And we are also excited to host the founders and leaders of Vinoothna Geetha Media, a local production company, as well as representatives from the America India Foundation, as our Chief Guests for the event. It is the first time TMS has put together a final celebration of this magnitude, and we are thrilled to see how excited the students are for the event! We look forward to reporting back with many photos and videos, taken by the students of course!

Before we completely finished our jobs as teachers here, I did want to share a few thoughts on a topic that has repeatedly come up in our classrooms, our conversations, and our blog posts – language. India has 22 official languages listed its Constitution, and many more dialects. And language, as our students tell us, is a huge representation of identity. The language that each person speaks is a statement of their regional and/or religious and/or ethnic identity. The official language of Andhra Pradesh is Telugu but Muslims in Andhra Pradesh speak mostly Urdu and then ethnic Tulu people in Andhra Pradesh speak Tulu while many highly educated people only speak English with a native fluency. And each state has its own list of distinct languages that match its own unique make up of identities. So naturally, this becomes a problem for education, particularly in big cities where all of these different identity groups with their distinct mother tongues live side by side in the same school districts. Schools must ask, in what language should we teach? The solution in most areas is that government schools teach in different mediums. In Hyderabad, most schools will have each grade split into Telugu Medium, Urdu Medium, and English Medium sections. So then it is the students and families that must ask, in what language should we learn? Many choose English. Families hope that if their kid is studying in English from a young age, they will become fluent. And this is in a sense the most concrete effort they can make towards a bigger future for their kid. For one, English, possibly more than Hindi, is transferrable throughout India and definitely around the world. Knowing English gives students access to the world in a way that most of our students’ parents do not have. Additionally, most schools only teach 11th and 12th grade in English and college is almost exclusively taught in English, so if you hope to study beyond 10th grade, you would be well-advised to start Kindergarten in English.

So what’s the problem? Well, we have been teaching 8th and 9th grade students, many of whom have supposedly been studying in English medium for many years, and they all hover within a range of non-fluency in English. It leaves us wondering how they learn in their other classes. In my classes at AIF, which I teach in Telugu, I have a mixture of Telugu and English Medium students. I have often noticed a far better command of subject matter and sometimes even a higher level of confidence expressing ideas among the Telugu Medium students. After all, school and learning are tough, so naturally the students who get to go through it in their mother tongue would have a leg up. The English medium students just don’t get it all the time because they don’t understand the language the teacher is speaking. So this means that to some degree, students are having to choose between a better education in a language that limits their opportunities, and a better command of English with a quality of education that limits their opportunities. How frustrating that must be! I absolutely think students should learn English and become good at it. But in the long term, I think it should become possible and mainstream for students to study and become experts in any subject in their local language – if a kid is born in Andhra Pradesh to a family that only speaks Telugu and can’t afford private school, wants to attend school and study really hard and become expert in a subject, start a business in Hyderabad that deals only in this area and become successful, shouldn’t that be a possibility? Shouldn’t they be able to live their lives and be great in Telugu if they want to? After all, they do live in a place where Telugu is the official language, and the only language they ever hear. The British are responsible for many higher education institutions in India, which is partly why there is a widespread tradition of learning in English. But rather than being content with thinking this is appropriate in the modern world, I wonder if regional governments now have a responsibility to make a change?