Indian Schools are Trading Indias Linguistic Heritage for English Fluency
The Intrusive Mandate
The Indian living room has become the latest frontier for educational overreach. In a disturbing trend across urban centers, school administrations have begun issuing mandates that extend far beyond the classroom. Parents are being instructed by teachers to speak exclusively in English with their children at home. The justification offered is the improvement of pronunciation and conversational fluency. However, this is not a pedagogical recommendation; it is a direct assault on the linguistic heritage of the Indian household.
The Pedagogy of Exclusion
Forcing a child to abandon their mother tongue in their own home is a form of social engineering that treats native languages as a liability. This mindset ignores decades of cognitive research proving that a strong foundation in a first language actually makes acquiring a second language like English easier. By pressuring families to switch to English-only environments, schools are not just creating a generational divide between children and their grandparents; they are actively stunting the deep, conceptual thinking that only develops when a child is rooted in their primary culture.
Policy vs. School Bureaucracy
This rigid school bureaucracy is increasingly out of step with the National Education Policy 2020, which promotes multilingualism as a core strength. While the government pushes for the mother tongue as the medium of primary instruction, many private schools continue to operate with a colonial hangover, equating English with intelligence. The Home Minister recently reminded the nation that speaking the mother tongue at home is essential for cultural preservation. Schools must realize that English is a professional tool, not a replacement for a childs identity.
The Reality of AI and the Future
The argument that English is the only path to a global future is also being dismantled by technology. At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, the unveiling of indigenous large language models and the expansion of the Bhashini infrastructure demonstrated that linguistic variations are no longer a hurdle. We now have AI stacks capable of real-time translation and voice services across all 22 scheduled Indian languages. When a machine can bridge the gap between Hindi, Tamil, or Bengali in milliseconds, the obsession with forcing a child to speak only English at home becomes not just intrusive, but obsolete.
The Call to Action
Real-world breakthroughs in the 21st century will come from thinkers who are confident in their roots and capable of complex reasoning, not from those who have been trained to mimic a specific accent at the cost of their heritage. Schools must be held accountable for this linguistic policing. They are hired to educate children within school hours, not to dictate the cultural fabric of the Indian family. It is time to stop trading our linguistic legacy for a shallow version of fluency.
