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.

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.

We have located the learning window too high in the wall — the vast majority cannot reach it.

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.

This transition from reading for entertainment to reading for intellectual development is the crucial milestone in learning just as the one from tricycle to bicycle is of physical development. Lacking ability to extract ideas from reading yields entertainment without intellectual growth. The latter occurs when characters and plots can be dispensed with to directly access the storehouse of ideas contained in non-fiction — for example, in Mills, Hobbes, Marx or Ghalib. Without access to ideas, society ends up a collective of grown-up children.

The argument thus far is common sensical except, perhaps, for the assertion that reading needs to go beyond entertainment to the acquisition of ideas. Here we confront the BIG barrier — our window for learning is English which we have chosen as the medium of instruction.

Two critical implications follow: First, the window is shut for the 95 per cent who are not provided sufficient proficiency in the language to read semi-serious stories even for entertainment. Second, the majority of the remaining five per cent can only read for entertainment, not for ideas — they are still on the tricycle.

The latter claim may be surprising but follows because language proficiency alone is not enough to access ideas. When looking out of a window one needs familiarity with the landscape in which a story is embedded. Take Gulliver’s Travels — it is a very funny story but Swift intended it as an angry satire not entertainment. What was he angry about? The ideas central to his critique cannot be known without awareness of the intellectual controversies raging across Europe in the 18th century and how the old world was changing. Just knowing English does not furnish this context without which Gulliver’s Travels remains a funny story for children.

The point to grasp is that we have located the learning window too high in the wall — the vast majority cannot reach it and it is partially open even for the fortunate minority. We have created a society of grown-up children that is intellectually stagnant — no new ideas are being generated because no new ideas are being internalised.

There is a flip side as well. All new ideas generated externally are entering our society in English. They are not filtering down to the non-English proficient majority because they are not being translated into regional languages. And the minority is not engaging with them because it has no incentive to do so — it benefits from the status quo. Recall the Arab Golden Age when everything relevant was translated from Greek. Thus our society remains hostage to old ideas, which is really a sentence of death in the modern world.

Given this predicament, what is to be done? First, if we are adamant that the learning window remain English, we have to demand that it be lowered for greater access — it is only fair that everyone should have the opportunity of equal proficiency. This would be deemed impossible, an implicit admission that the elite wishes to retain its monopoly on language.

Second, we should demand the opening of new windows of learning — it is telling that asides from Sindh, we are not even teaching regional languages as subjects in schools let alone using them as mediums of instruction. No one will assert that ideas exist only in English — the literature of our languages is overflowing with them. In opening local windows, we would get around the contextual barrier illustrated by the example of Gulliver’s Travels. Third, we should demand a huge translation initiative to transfer global knowledge into local languages accessible to the majority.

These recommendations will invite the typical response that our languages are not good enough for education. Linguists will vouch that all languages have the capacity to rise to meet the demands placed on them. English, a great language, was not born great — it borrowed heavily from other languages, including Arabic, to be what it is today. Its use should not be at the expense of the wisdom contained in our local languages.

The bottom line is that we should demand an honest explanation for the choice of English for learning while denying proficiency in it to the vast majority. When God said ‘Let there be light,’ He surely meant it for all.

The writer is the co-author of Thinking with Ghalib.

Published in Dawn, August 16th, 2025