Private schools violates Tamil teaching

Updated on: Monday, June 08, 2009

Chennai: The law to make teaching Tamil mandatory in schools across the state is violated by some institutions, mainly private matriculation schools

Absence of a monitoring agency to implement the Act was the main reason for the lacunae, according to Purushottam, principal of Everwin Matriculation School in Kolathur.

The Tamil Learning Act, 2006 was aimed at making Tamil a compulsory language from Standard I to X in schools in a phased manner from 2006-07. The members from the linguistic minorities in the state had earlier filed a PIL opposing the Act.

According to the Act, students who were in Class I at the time of the implementation of the Act should be in Class IV now. But at present, there are some schools in the State where students are not exposed to the language at all.

S S Rajagopalan, educationist, said that there was no implementing body for enforcing the Act. Though the government finalised the act, there was no serious consideration to implement it. Schools still run sans Tamil, he noted.

Principal of Navabharat Matriculation School and Educationist, Prince Gajendra Babu said the problem persisted in about 10-15 per cent of schools. The idea mainly stemmed from the realisation that the mother tongue should be given priority over the regional language. Hence the need for a common school system where it was easy to implement the orders, he said.

Such schools were keen on maintaining cent per cent results, and for this they had introduced languages like French which were supposedly high scoring compared to Tamil, thereby enhancing the school results.

Rajagopalan said the sulky attitude towards the language was also reflected in the conditions of the Thai Tamizh schools. There were 60 such schools run by Tamil intellectuals, which survived on their own, with no proper grant from the government.

He said that unlike in Karnataka, where irrespective of the varied boards, students had to learn Kannada as the first language. In TN, different boards were exempted from the provisions of the Act.

Director of Matriculation Schools, P Mani denied information on schools violating the Act and maintained that inspectors of matriculation schools periodically visited all schools and ensured that all private matric schools also taught Tamil.

Kalvimalar

Private schools violates Tamil teaching

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