Ethnic communities education in their mother language

ALTHOUGH children should have the right to learn in their mother language and other important languages, 40 percent of the global population doesn’t have access to education in their mother tongue. The scenario is highly prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia Pacific regions because they have the greatest linguistic diversities among the people as revealed in a policy paper of the Unesco’s Global Education Monitoring Report, released on the occasion of International Mother Language Day. The ethnic communities in Bangladesh are also not having proper access to education in their own languages.
In Bangladesh, there are around 30 lakh people, mainly indigenous whose mother tongues are not Bangla. Of them, some five lakh are children who have almost no access to education in their mother language. Although the National Education Policy 2010 called for steps to ensure education of the indigenous people in their mother tongues, the plan yet to be implemented and the delay is taking place mainly due to bureaucratic tangles. Ethnic children in Bangladesh are taught in a language other than their own and many fear that it has a negative effect on their learning leading to an alarming rate of dropout.
A survey carried out in 2012 quoted Mong Shanoo Chowdhury, a retired government college teacher in Rangamati saying as the dropout rate among the indigenous children in the three hill districts is too high, in many cases up to 65 percent and the main reason behind high dropout rate is that they cannot pursue learning in their mother language. In multi-ethnic societies, such narrowing of scope frequently become linked to wider issues of social and cultural inequality.
Bangladesh government should immediately take initiative to give ethnic people the opportunities for study in their own languages more or less up to class six as suggested by Unesco’s Global Education Monitoring Report.
In the new education policy, the government decided to print primary textbooks in five ethnic languages initially and deliver those to the indigenous children by the beginning of 2014. But it is yet to be done in 2016. International Mother Language Institute (IMLI), set up in Dhaka may play a cohesive role for the educational development of ethnic groups. The institute may take step to document all the languages spoken by the ethnic communities in Bangladesh. There might be efforts after that to develop writing system for languages that do not have any written scripts or formal linguistic methods. This will make our education system more rich and inclusive. We can’t discriminate against the rights of other cultures to study in their own mother tongues.