Arbitrary and clueless experiments with school English have a long history in West Bengal. For more than two decades, the Left Front has played a sort of disastrous bagatelle with the exact stage in which English is introduced in the government schools. This has varied, quite randomly, from class I before 1981, to class VI from 1981 to ’86, then from class V until 1998, after which it was pushed down to class III. Now, after numerous reports from numerous committees, the government seems to be on the threshold of a new English policy for the new year. English will be taught from class I; but — and this is an important corollary — Bengali will be taught compulsorily as a third language to all non-Bengali students in the nearly 65,000 government schools. If this really happens, and if the policy is sincerely implemented, then it is hoped that the long and pervasive damage done to generations of students will be gradually redressed over the years. A massive infrastructure will have to be rehauled to ensure the quality of teaching. Here, the picture is not encouraging. A recent English-language expert, brought over from Britain to evaluate English teachers in the government schools, gave a rather grim picture of their inadequate linguistic skills, largely because of poor training. The government’s training programme will have to cater to about 1,60,000 teachers (many of them from the districts). The unwieldiness of this prospect is daunting, but one must start somewhere in order to stem the havoc.

Making Bengali compulsory as a third language for all non-Bengalis looks more the result of political pressure than linguistic or cultural wisdom. Depriving other vernacular speakers of the opportunity to take up their own vernacular in school, by forcing them to learn Bengali, cannot be right. Restricting choice is not what education is about. A Gujarati or Oriya, who hitherto had the choice of learning his language in school, may not feel terribly pleased about being forced to learn Bengali instead. Linguistic chauvinism, apart from being politically unsavoury, is also impractical. Bengali teachers in these schools will now have to bear the third-language load over and above their normal duties. This will create disaffected teachers and disgruntled non-Bengali students with bad Bengali. This might even affect the quality of Bengali-teaching given to the Bengali students. And none of this looks set to make people love, write and speak Bengali better. The government would do better to concentrate on the problem of English rather than coupling it with the political expediency of pushing Bengali as well.