THIS is apropos of the letter ‘Education in mother tongue’ (May 6) by Syeda Uzma Shah Shirazai. The writer mentioned the language as the only basis of prosperity by ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Persian civilisations. Most of the times our debate about education in mother tongue is limited on the example of the world’s top five economic powers or history’s top five emperors.

Dozens of local languages are spoken in Pakistan (perhaps hundreds in the subcontinent) and the definition of ‘mother languages’ does not equally apply to this region, as it is applied in China, Japan or Germany, etc. A child from a small village, where Urdu is not the mother language, will think the same way in Urdu as he would do in English or any other foreign language.

In our economically and academically weak country where no university-level reference or textbook is available in our ‘mother tongue’, we should not spend too much time and efforts to find the drawbacks of learning English and other foreign languages. Neither should we stress too much on inventing the wheel again, to write down the same books which have been used for so many years in industrialised and educated world.

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan spent most of his life debating with religious scholars of the 19th century the importance of ‘knowledge’ itself and not of just keeping the language alive. However, even after over a hundred years of his death we still consider English to be the only reason of our economic and academic turndown.  We most of the times label our egoistic social and religious past as the only known fact but forget that the development pace hundreds of years back was far slower than the current ever-changing world of science and technology.

IRFAN HUSSAIN London