Mother Tongue Education Breaks in Real India

Why I Oppose Mother Tongue Education (Even If the Science Says It Works)

There’s a line that gets repeated like scripture in Indian education debates: children learn best in their mother tongue. And the annoying part is—it’s not just a slogan. There’s real scientific evidence behind it. Early education in the language spoken at home reduces cognitive load, improves comprehension, and often leads to better learning outcomes.

So yes, I accept the premise: mother tongue instruction can produce better academic results, especially in the early years.

And I still oppose it.

Not because I’m ignorant of the research. But because India is not a clean laboratory experiment. It’s a political and linguistic minefield, and pretending otherwise is how you design policies that look humane on paper and fail violently in real life.

The “Mother Tongue” Idea Breaks the Moment You Get Specific

My mother tongue is Salem Kannada.

And if you’re already confused, good. That confusion is exactly the point.

It’s not standard Kannada. It’s not Tamil either. It’s a language reality that exists because people live at borders, intermarry, trade, migrate, adapt, and develop speech that doesn’t respect the clean boundaries of statehood or textbook grammar. If someone tries to pin it down with official labels, they’ll probably call it a dialect, a mix, a “variant,” or worse—pretend it doesn’t exist.

Now take the mother tongue education idea and apply it honestly:

• If I had been educated in Salem Kannada, what would that even look like?
• Where are the textbooks?
• Where are the trained teachers?
• What’s the standardized script and curriculum?
• What happens when I leave my district—do I carry my education with me or do I start over?

If the answer is “we’ll just use standard Kannada,” then it’s not mother tongue education. It’s Kannada-medium education.

If the answer is “we’ll just use Tamil,” same story.

And if neither Kannada nor Tamil is my mother tongue, then the entire moral and scientific argument collapses into a bureaucratic compromise. At that point, I might as well have studied in English—the language that actually offers mobility and access, not just a local stamp of authenticity.

This is the problem: “mother tongue” sounds like a single, stable thing. In India, it often isn’t.

Mother Tongue Education Can Trap You Inside Your Own Community

There’s another part that rarely gets said out loud: mother tongue education isn’t just about learning. It’s also about where you are allowed to belong.

If I’m educated in a hyper-local language, I may learn arithmetic faster in third grade. Great. But what’s the long-term price?

• Reduced mobility across states
• Reduced access to higher education material (which overwhelmingly exists in English)
• Reduced participation in national institutions and job markets
• A subtle but permanent social boundary: this is your world, stay inside it

People treat English like a class weapon—and often it is. But local-language-only education can also become a cage. Not the warm, cultural kind. The administrative kind. The kind that tells a child, politely, that their universe ends where their community ends.

That might be fine if the country is structured like Switzerland, with strong multilingual systems, high state capacity, and a culture of functional bilingualism. India is not that country.

India is a country where education already fails at scale. Adding linguistic fragmentation to a failing system doesn’t fix failure. It multiplies it.

India’s Biggest Problem Isn’t Learning Outcomes. It’s Linguistic Fragmentation.

India doesn’t just have multiple languages. It has language as identity, language as grievance, language as political weapon, language as street-level intimidation.

And it’s getting worse.

“Language goonery” isn’t some fringe phenomenon anymore. It pops up in different forms across states—signboard politics, harassment over what you speak, artificial cultural policing, and a constant insistence that the language equals the land equals the vote bank.

The country is already stressed on linguistic fault lines. And policies that push everyone deeper into their linguistic silos don’t reduce that stress. They harden it.

A society needs shared channels to function. Without them, even basic coordination becomes expensive, slow, and distrustful. You can see it in everyday governance: public servants who can’t communicate across regions, offices that don’t share a working language, and systems that become dependent on translators, intermediaries, and “someone who knows.”

Sometimes it’s not even about high-level administration. It’s basic stuff—people in public-facing roles who can’t read or write simple messages in a widely used link language. That’s not a romantic cultural loss. That’s state capacity collapsing in small, humiliating ways.

A country can survive mediocre learning outcomes. It struggles to survive a fractured communicative backbone.

Political Objectives and National Security Matter More Than Marginal Learning Gains

This is where I’ll sound harsh, but I mean it: in India, political objectives and national security should take precedence over learning outcomes.

Not because learning doesn’t matter. But because learning outcomes can be improved in many other more obvious ways, without worsening the country’s biggest structural weakness.

If the goal is better education, there are clearer levers:

• teacher training and accountability
• attendance and foundational literacy programs
• better assessments that don’t reward rote learning
• infrastructure that doesn’t collapse every monsoon
• classroom capacity and student-teacher ratios
• basic nutrition and health (which affect learning more than language debates admit)

These are boring fixes. They don’t give politicians a cultural banner to wave. They don’t provide the aesthetic satisfaction of “protecting identity.” But they actually improve learning.

Mother tongue policy, in contrast, is a high-emotion solution to a low-emotion problem. It’s a neat theory that becomes a messy reality the moment you scale it to India’s complexity.

And scaling is the whole issue. A policy isn’t good because it works in principle. A policy is good if it survives contact with the country.

English Isn’t Perfect. It’s Just the Least Bad Link Language We Have.

Let’s be clear: English is not “our” language in any cultural sense. It’s also not distributed equally—there’s privilege baked into who gets access to good English education.

But it has one massive advantage in India: it is relatively neutral across internal ethnic competition. It doesn’t belong to Tamil pride, Kannada pride, Hindi pride, Marathi pride, or Bengali pride. It sits above the internal wrestling match.

That neutrality matters.

In a country where language becomes a tool for domination, a link language that doesn’t hand one group symbolic power over another is useful. Maybe even necessary.

English also happens to be the language of higher education, technology, research, and global commerce. Like it or not, access to English is access to a wider world. Denying that to kids in the name of “better early learning outcomes” feels like winning the first kilometer and losing the entire marathon.

The Real Question: What Problem Are We Trying to Solve?

If the problem is “kids don’t understand what they’re taught,” then yes—teach in the language they understand.

But if the problem is “India is tearing itself into linguistic micro-nationalisms,” then doubling down on mother tongue education is pouring fuel on the fire and calling it cultural preservation.

A functioning country needs both roots and roads.

Mother tongue education is roots. English is a road.

India already has roots everywhere. What it lacks is a road that everyone can use without being told they’re betraying their identity.

Conclusion

Mother tongue education may improve learning outcomes in controlled settings, but India isn’t controlled—it’s contested. My mother tongue itself doesn’t fit neatly into official boxes, and policies built on neat boxes will always crush people on the edges. In a country already strained by linguistic fault lines, cohesion and state capacity matter more than marginal gains in early comprehension. English isn’t ideal, but it remains the most practical link language we have—and India needs links more than it needs another reason to fragment.