We Indians have a strong love for the English medium school brand and we are ready to pay a significant premium for them. I have nothing against English medium schools. In fact, I think it is the need of the hour and we all need to be fluent in this language. However, I do have something against every school freely using the tag of “English Medium” and looting the parents for this.
Through this article, I want to go deeper in this “English Medium” tag before selecting a school. English medium school can be of 3 types
Complete English medium school
These are the English “Medium” in true sense of the word as English is used as a medium to teach all subjects other than languages across all classes starting with class-I. Without going in to pros and cons of this, I would say, only very few schools truly follow this approach.
Progressively English medium schools
Some schools use local language .e.g. Hindi as medium of instruction in early classes, say up to standard-IV. This way the student can easily understand and grasp the concept in his mother tongue. But after standard-IV they progressively start converting one subject at a time to English e.g. History and Civics in English in standard-V and Science in standard-VI and so on. By the time the student is preparing for his/her board exams, he will be studying everything in English medium.
English medium for the tag schools
You will see your kids reading subject books in English. You will see them submitting their homework in English but what happens in class is a different story. The teacher might be using Hindi or other language to teach in the class, even though the books are in English. The reason could that students are unable to understand the subject in English or teacher is not fluent enough to teach in English. But this is NOT an English Medium school because the medium of instruction is not really English.
So the next time you go school hunting for your little one and are on the lookout for an English Medium school, find out which of the 3 categories does it really fall in to and why should you choose an English medium school, if at all.