Right to education (in one’s mother language)

To promote multilingualism, to protect endangered languages, and to preserve linguistic diversity, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) declared 21st February as the "International Mother Language Day" back in 1999. Bangladesh is home to 1% linguistic minorities, about 1.7 million ethnic minorities have their own mother languages, and some of these languages are in a vulnerable situation due to a lack of institutional support from the state. However, the government has passed the Small Ethnic Groups Cultural Institutes Act of 2010 to protect linguistic diversity through cultural centres. Unfortunately, no such legislation has been passed to recognise the formal education of the ethnic minority students in their mother languages. However, in 2010's National Education Policy (NEP), the government took an admirable step by introducing Mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE).

Mother language-based education as a significant right, appears in several international human rights instruments. For instance, the Convention on the Rights of the Children recognises the right of all children to use their own language even if the same is not shared by most people in the country they live in. The Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention 1957 (ILO Convention 107), article 23(1) entrenches the right of ethnic groups to be taught to read and write in their mother language or, where this is not practicable, in the language most commonly used by the group to which they belong. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007 firmly recognises education in own language as an intrinsic element of the right to education for the indigenous peoples.

In our domestic context, the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord 1997 envisioned formal education in the mother tongue for ethnic minorities at the primary level. One of the objectives of the National Education Policy 2010 of Bangladesh is to facilitate learning in mother languages for all indigenous and ethnic minority students. Above all, articles 17, 23, and 26 of the Constitution of Bangladesh ensure free and compulsory education for all, mandating the state to take progressive measures to conserve the cultural traditions and heritage of the ethnic minorities, and to protect the fundamental rights of all citizens. Ethnic language cannot be deemed separable from the culture and heritage of the ethnic minorities and to conserve their culture essentially means to conserve their languages. Also, the right to receive education in the mother language is an essential facet of the right to education in general, particularly in the context of ethnic minority students.

Through the Fourth Primary Education Development Program, the government has successfully published five ethnic minorities textbooks at the primary level which aligns with UNESCO's main theme of 'upholding the preservation and dignity of all languages of the world and to ensure that every language-speaker gets the opportunity to express oneself and gain knowledge in their own language to promote awareness about cultural and linguistic diversity and multilingualism.' But, what about the other linguistic minority students? Also, to facilitate effective learning programs, there must be a broad-based institutional framework to implement the 2010 education policy and to recruit and train teachers accordingly. Without a framework, the implementation process of the education policy will cripple the government's strategy for multilingual education. In particular, an Act of parliament may guide the policymakers and other stakeholders to achieve the goal of mother tongue based-multilingual education across all levels of education for the linguistic minorities of the country.

The linguistic minorities need formal education in their mother languages to fulfil their true potential and the government must take necessary steps to ensure this right across all levels of education. The absence of a legal framework, lack of trained teachers, infrastructures as well as training institutes, and the overall scheme of recruiting teachers have already slowed down the process of implementing the education policy. This process must be reversed. Indeed, by implementing mother tongue-based education, we can truly uphold the spirit of the international mother language day. 

The writer works at Law Desk, The Daily Star.