English as the currency of science's practice
K. VijayRaghavan, the secretary of India’s Department of Biotechnology, has written a good piece in Hindustan Times about how India must shed its “intellectual colonialism” to excel at science and tech – particularly by shedding its obsession with the English language. This, as you might notice, parallels a post I wrote recently about how English plays an overbearing role in our lives, and particularly in the lives of scientists, because it remains a language many Indians don’t have to access to get through their days. Having worked closely with the government in drafting and implementing many policies related to the conduct and funding of scientific research in the country, VijayRaghavan is able to take a more fine-grained look at what needs changing and whether that’s possible. Most hearteningly, he says it is – only if we had the will to change. As he writes:
Currently, the bulk of our college education in science and technology is notionally in English whereas the bulk of our high-school education is in the local language. Science courses in college are thus accessible largely to the urban population and even when this happens, education is effectively neither of quality in English nor communicated as translations of quality in the classroom. Starting with the Kendriya Vidyalayas and the Nayodya Vidyalayas as test-arenas, we can ensure the training of teachers so that students in high-school are simultaneously taught in both their native language and in English. This already happens informally, but it needs formalisation. The student should be free to take exams in either language or indeed use a free-flowing mix. This approach should be steadily ramped up and used in all our best educational institutions in college and then scaled to be used more widely. Public and private colleges, in STEM subjects for example, can lead and make bi-lingual professional education attractive and economically viable.
Apart from helping students become more knowledgeable about the world through a language of their choice (for the execution of which many logistical barriers spring to mind, not the least of which is finding teachers), it’s also important to fund academic journals that allow these students to express their research in their language of choice. Without this component, they will be forced to fallback to the use of English, which is bound to be counterproductive to the whole enterprise. This form of change will require material resources as well as a shift in perspective that could be harder to attain. Additionally, as VijayRaghavan mentions, there also need to be good quality translation services for research in one language to be expressed in another so that cross-disciplinary and/or cross-linguistic tie-ups are not hampered.
Featured image credit: skeeze/pixabay.
