“In India also, for century, education imparted through the medium of a foreign language has unduly dominated its academic life and it has now produced a class of men who are unconsciously so denationalised that any far reaching proposal for the recognition of the Indian languages as the vehicle of teaching and examination up to the highest University stage is either ridiculed as impossible or branded as reactionary. But I plead earnestly for the acceptance of this fundamental principle not on account of any blind adherence to things that I claim as my own but out of a firm conviction that the fullest development of the mind of a learner is possible only by this natural approach and also that by this process alone can there be a great revival of the glory and richness of the Indian languages.”

—  Syama Prasad Mookerjee

Speech delivered at Agra University Convocation on 23rd November 1940.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "In India also, for century, education imparted through the medium of a foreign language has unduly dominated its academ…" by Syama Prasad Mookerjee?
Syama Prasad Mookerjee photo
Syama Prasad Mookerjee16
Indian politician 1901–1953

Related quotes

Monier Monier-Williams photo

“By Sanskrit is meant the learned language of India - the language of its cultured inhabitants, the language of its religion, its literature and science - not by any means a dead language, but one still spoken and written by educated men by all parts of the country, from Kashmir to Cape Comorin, from Bombay to Calcutta and Madras.”

Monier Monier-Williams (1819–1899) Linguist and dictionary compiler

Sir Monier Monier-Williams in: Sanskrit-English dictionary https://books.google.co.in/books?id=j2j7AgAAQBAJ&pg=PR20, Рипол Рипол Классик, p. 20.

Hu Shih photo

“The original dispute was one of poetic diction… From an interest in the minor problem of poetic diction I was led to see that the problem was really one of a suitable medium for all branches of Chinese literature. The question now became: In what language shall the New China produce its future literature? My answer was: The classical language, so long dead, can never be the medium of a living literature of a living nation; the future literature of China must be written in the living language of the people. "No dead language can produce a living literature." And the living language I proposed as the only possible medium of the future literature of China, was the pei-hau, the vulgar tongue of the vast majority of the population, the language which, in the last 500 years, had produced the numerous novels read and loved by the people, though despised by the men of letters. I wanted this much despised vulgar tongue of the people and the novels to be elevated to the position of the national language of China, to the position enjoyed by all the modern national languages in Europe.”

Hu Shih (1891–1962) Chinese philosopher, essayist and diplomat

The Chinese Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), p. 50

Swami Vivekananda photo

“Each work has to pass through these stages—ridicule, opposition, and then acceptance. Those who think ahead of their time are sure to be misunderstood.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

“A true scholarship would examine, and then either accept or reject, with good reason, any new theory which challenges a generally accepted theory admitted to be full of sharp anomalies. However, this has not been the attitude of world scholarship towards our earlier book. The general attitude has been as follows: there is a school of crank scholarship in India which is out to prove, by hook or by crook, that India was the original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages; and the writers of this school deserve to be firmly put in their place. And the best method of doing this is by tarring all scholars who support, or even appear to support, an Indian homeland theory, with one brush; and then pointing out particularly untenable propositions made by one or the other of the scholars so branded together, to prove that all the scholars so named belong to one single school of irrational scholarship.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

Shrikant Talageri, The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis, 2000.
The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis (2000), Chapter 9 : Michael Witzel - An Examination of Western Vedic Scholarship

Seymour Papert photo

“A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain metaphors, images, and ways of thinking. The language used strongly colors the computer culture. It would seem to follow that educators interested in using computers and sensitive to cultural influences would pay particular attention to the choice of language. But nothing of the sort has happened. On the contrary, educators… have accepted certain programming languages in much the same way as they accepted the QWERTY keyboard. An informative example is the way in which the programming language BASIC has established itself as the obvious language to use in teaching children how to program computers… Today, and in fact for several years now, the cost of computer memory has fallen to the point where any remaining economic advantages of using BASIC are insignificant. Yet in most high schools, the language remains almost synonymous with programming, despite the existence of other computer languages that are demonstrably easier to learn and are richer in the intellectual benefits that can come from learning them. The situation is paradoxical. The computer revolution has scarcely begun, but is already breeding its own conservatism.”

Seymour Papert book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

Source: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980), Chapter 1, Computers and Computer Cultures

Christopher Morley photo

“Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it”

Christopher Morley (1890–1957) American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet

R. H. Tawney photo

“Defined by its purpose, its [education's] main aim is not to impart the specialized technique of any particular trade or profession, but to develop the faculties which, because they are the attribute of man, are not peculiar to any particular class or profession of men, and to build up the interests which, while they may become the basis of specialization at a later stage, have a value extending beyond their utility for any particular vocation, because they are the condition of a rational and responsible life in society.”

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) English philosopher

Secondary Education For All (1922)

Frances Kellor photo

“Americanization today is little more than an impulse, and its context, as popularly conceived, is both narrow and superficial. As French has been the language of diplomacy in the past, so English is to be the language of the reconstruction of the world. English is the language of 90,000,000 people living in America. The English language is a highway of loyalty; it is a medium of exchange; it is the open door to opportunity; it is a means of common defense. It is an implement of Americanization, but it is not necessarily Americanization. The American who thinks that America is united and safe when all men speak one language has only to look at Austria and to study the Jugo-Slav and Czecho-Slovak nationalistic movements. The imposition of a language is not the creation of nationalism. A common language is essential to a common understanding, and by all means let America open such a line of communication. The traffic that goes over this line is, however, the vital thing, and what that shall be and how it is to be prepared are matters to which but little thought has been given. Even those who urge the abolition of all other languages are indefinite about the restriction. Shall a man after he has learned English be allowed to get news in a foreign language paper and to worship in his native tongue; and if not, what becomes of the liberty which he is urged to learn English in order to appreciate? Are foreign languages to be encouraged as an expression of culture and to be denied as a means of economic and political expression? The English language campaigns in America have failed because they have not secured the support of the foreign-born. Men must have reasons for learning new languages, and America has never presented the case conclusively or satisfactorily. Furthermore, wherever the case has been presented, it has not been done with the proper facilities and under favorable conditions. The working day must not be so long that men cannot study.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

“Panini’s grammar is the earliest scientific grammar in the world, the earliest extant grammar of any language, and one of the greatest ever written. It was the discovery of Sanskrit by the West, at the end of the 18th century, and the study of Indian methods of analyzing language that revolutionized our study of language and grammar, and gave rise to our science of comparative philology … The study of language in India was much more objective and scientific than in Greece or Rome. The interest was in empirical investigation of language, rather than philosophical and syntactical. Indian study of language was as objective as the dissection of a body by an anatomist.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

—Walter Eugene Clark ,.Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

Stephen Hawking photo

“Mathematics is more than a tool and language for science. It is also an end in itself, and as such, it has, over the centuries, affected our worldview in its own right.”

Stephen Hawking book God Created the Integers

Preface
God Created the Integers (2007)

Related topics