Multilingual Education and India

Congratulations on International Literacy Day! This year the focus was on multilingual education and therefore deserves a blog post! Both Cameroon and India have a lot of linguistic diversity. UNESCO chose Cameroon to celebrate and here in India it will be good to take note of what the government said. As a national MLE consortium we also made a brief video to get the perspective of civil society organisations. International Literacy Day (ILD) has been observed  since 1967 on the 8th of September. This day highlights the importance of literacy as a fundamental human right and its role in empowering individuals and advancing societies. In 2024, the theme centres on "Multilingual Education," emphasising the significance of learning in one's mother tongue or multiple languages for inclusive and equitable quality education. This year's theme resonates strongly with the goal of fostering linguistic diversity and promoting literacy in marginalised communities, particularly

Dear  Multilingual Education friends, Is three years of mother tongue medium education long enough? There is a report ( “ The Kom Experimental Mother Tongue Education Pilot Project. Report for 2012 ,” by Stephen L. Walter and Kain Godfrey Chuo) on the Kom Pilot project in Cameron where children from 12 different schools were educated in their mother tongue, Kom, for three years and joined the main stream school grade 4 onwards. The research compares these students with their comparison group with English medium education while they are grade 3, 4, and 5. Here I quote some of their main findings and suggestions. The three year period of the intervention is n