Language and learning

THERE are many wonderful things that are extremely damaging when used unintelligently or malevolently — like nuclear energy. For us, the English language is one such thing — the damage it is causing is huge and crippling.

- BY ANJUM ALTAF

No one will disagree that language is the medium through which knowledge is transferred. Language is like a window — learning being a function of what is observed and what enters through it.

This can be grasped by focusing on the human learning experience. A newborn absorbs the tool of language by being exposed to sounds. By the age of one it is being told stories in the language it understands. Stories facilitate two advances in learning. First, introduction to a world of the imagination — to fairies, witches and monsters that don’t exist in real life. Second, to abstract concepts essential for the learning process — good fairies, evil witches and cruel monsters. Good, evil and cruel are part of the intangible set of thinking tools without which ideas cannot be fathomed.

By age five, the language window opens sufficiently for children to have autonomous access to the world beyond grandmother’s stories — fortunate ones can read on their own, most others can hear via electronic devices. The reading/listening is primarily for entertainment but even at this age stories are an indirect conduit for ideas via the facility to grasp abstractions —think of Aesop’s Fables where stories culminate in moral lessons couched in the antics of clever foxes, greedy crows, etc.

By 15, children should be capable of dealing directly with ideas. Serious literature is primarily about ideas while characters and plots act as carriers for them — think of any great novel like The Brothers Karamazov. To read such literature only for the story is to miss the point entirely.