could
find the teachers who had studied upto II or III standard teaching
at the primary level. Earlier almost all the teachers in this
district were speakers and a few from outside the State. This new
recruitment policy also had its impact on the education of the
school children. Now the recruitment of teachers from outside the
State has been totally discontinued. Presently 95 per cent of the
teachers at the primary level, 80 per cent at the middle school
level and 60 per cent of the teachers at the high school level are
Nagas. The fluency in English of the teachers at all levels is also
quite low. This short-coming is handled partly by resorting in the
classroom to Naga Pidgin for explaining concepts and themes.
The cumulative effect of all these on Naga children is that they
fail to have even an elementary comprehension of English when they
reach Class IV, wherefrom English is the sole medium of instruction.
Owing to their failure to grasp elementary concepts in different
subjects, year after year, Naga children fail at the X
(matriculation) public examination in subjects like science,
mathematics, etc. And the failure of the Naga children in
examination is attributed to their lacking in intelligence, whereas
the real cause of the failure of the Naga children in science and
mathematics is the total lack of meaningful communication between
the teachers and the taught wooing to the use of a completely alien
language. Neither the teachers nor the students have any fluency in
English to use it as a medium of instruction. It would be just
another myth to imagine that some day a qualitative improvement in
the primary level could be effected to a degree that would enable
the Naga children to change over to the English medium at Class V
smoothly. (cf. Sreedhar 1978/83). Further it is claimed by
educational psychologists that the mastery of the mother tongue is a
pre-condition to the learning of any second language particularly a
foreign language like English. Therefore, it is not desirable to
force a child learn English or, for that matter, any second language
before it has acquired the necessary degree of proficiency in its
own mother tongue. While adversely commenting on the use of English
as the medium of instruction, in Nagaland, Haimendorf (1976 :249)
states that ‘the pupils’ level of comprehension of English was
low and this accounted for their relative poor performance. For
several years, none of the pupils had passed in the matriculation
and I wondered whether there wer in Nagaland sufficient outlets for
young people with the type of education which gave them ambition
beyond those of ordinary cultivators without equipping them for
harsh competition in the outside world’.
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the academic compulsion and necessity of teaching through the mother
tongue at least at the primary level, it is an El Dorado for a small
hill State like Nagaland with hardly any internal resources to
impart education through 13-14 languages. On the other hand, without
compromising the academic necessity of teaching through the mother
tongue at the primary level, it would be possible to impart
effective and efficient instruction through a access and ability to
use two different languages, both the langauges every child,
particularly from minor linguistic groups in Nagaland, is exposed to
the Naga Pidgin from the early childhood, academically Naga Pidgin
can be treated as the alternate mother tongue and instruction
through the Naga Pidgin could be made as effective and efficient as
through the ancestral langauge of the child. Once this academic
position is conceded, the children belonging to the minor tribal
communities having a population of less than 30,000 speakers could
be taught through the medium of the Naga Pidgin at the
primary level. This realistic approach has three major advantages.
These are : (i) both academically and economically it would be
feasible to produce good quality langauge and subject textbooks in a
limited number of languages, as only five linguistic groups in
Nagaland have more than 30,000 speakers. These groups are-Ao, Angami,
Sema, Lotha, and Konyak. (ii) Since language and subject textbooks
in a single language can be used by the children of a large number
of minor linguistic groups, human resource-wise, it would be much
easier to have original writings without resorting to lack of
subject specialists in most of the minor linguistic groups. (iii)
The third and the most important advantage is that the children of
through their respective mother tongues either because their
languages are not recognized for the purpose of education or owing
to the absence of textbooks in all the recognized languages, would
get an opportunity to learn through an alternative mother tongue,
rather than through a foreign language.
The discussion in the preceding paragraphs gives us a graphic
picture of the multilingual characteristic feature of Nagaland
having just over half a million people speaking as many as 30
distinct languages. It also showed the stresses and strains on the
State Government in its effort to impart primary education through
the medium of 13 recognized languages. Despite its best efforts, the
State is not in a position to offer primary education through the
mother tongue medium even to the children of all the recognized
linguistic groups. An earlier study (Sreedhar, 1979) has shown
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