Kannada-medium schools at the margins

The debate on Kannada-medium schools in border areas resurfaces with predictable regularity, often stated in the language of cultural loss, identity, and linguistic pride. The reiteration is a familiar and important one: education in the mother tongue is foundational. For the mother tongue to be accessible and available in school education, sustained efforts are needed to preserve and promote Kannada, especially in regions where Kannada-speaking communities live at the margins of state boundaries. Few would disagree with this in principle. Yet if the discussion stops at rhetoric alone, it risks becoming an empty gesture—one that romanticises language while ignoring the lived realities of schooling.

There is strong pedagogic and cognitive consensus that children learn best in their first language, particularly in the early years. Mother-tongue education enables conceptual clarity, emotional security, and a sense of belonging. In border regions, whether in Maharashtra, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, or Kerala, Kannada-medium schools also function as cultural anchors, maintaining linguistic continuity across generations. Historically, these concerns echo earlier language movements in Karnataka, most notably the Gokak agitation of the 1980s, as well as post-Independence debates following the linguistic reorganisation of states. At their core, these movements sought dignity for language and its speakers.

Yet history also shows us that language policy cannot survive on sentiment alone. What does it mean, in practice, to teach and learn in the mother tongue when schools function in dilapidated buildings with poor infrastructure, limited teaching materials, and chronic teacher shortages? In many Kannada-medium schools in border areas, classrooms are overcrowded or under-resourced, teacher vacancies remain unfilled, and multigrade teaching is the norm rather than the exception. Unsurprisingly, enrolment declines year after year—not because families reject Kannada, but because they fear what such schooling might cost their children. This fear is compounded by the perception of limited career opportunities. Parents, making pragmatic decisions under economic pressure, increasingly choose English-medium schools or schools in the regional majority language of the host state. English, in particular, is viewed as a gateway to higher education, employment, and mobility. When Kannada-medium schools are unable to offer comparable academic support or visible pathways beyond schooling, linguistic loyalty alone cannot hold families back. To frame such choices as cultural betrayal is to misunderstand the material conditions shaping them.

Teachers, however, often experience this shift not merely as a demographic change but as a moral and intellectual loss. In interviews conducted with schoolteachers, many of them deeply invested in language education—there is a recurring sense that language preservation is an act of responsibility, even guardianship. “The younger lot want this,” one senior teacher observed. “They don’t want to learn their mother tongues. They want to learn English.” What we will lose, she said, is something precious that we have guarded over time. She used the Kannada word jopaana—to protect, to keep safe—to describe that loss, a word whose meaning neither English nor AI can fully capture.

For these teachers, the concern is cognition. “If we don’t have enough young people who can think originally and critically,” she added, “we’ll end up with synthetic intelligence that will eventually do all the thinking for us.” The warning is striking, especially in an era where AI-generated language is increasingly fluent but often unmoored from lived cultural meaning. Mother-tongue education, in this view, is not simply about preservation of the past; it is about sustaining the conditions for original thought, ethical judgment, and intellectual depth.

At the same time, teachers in border areas face their own structural challenges. Recruitment exams and eligibility tests are often conducted only in the host state’s dominant language, placing Kannada-medium teachers at a disadvantage and worsening shortages. Asking teachers to protect a language without addressing these systemic barriers amounts to placing cultural responsibility on individuals while withholding institutional support.

The constitutional framework is clear: linguistic minorities have the right to conserve their language and to receive education in the mother tongue. But constitutional ideals must be translated into sustained funding, improved infrastructure, teacher support, and serious interstate cooperation. If Kannada-medium schools in border regions are to survive, they must be sites of educational confidence rather than quiet attrition.The question is not whether Kannada deserves preservation—it unquestionably does—but whether we are willing to do the harder work that preservation demands.

(The writer is an assistant professor at Azim Premji University)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.