Bias against English-medium students in Gujarat

There is inherent bias against English-medium students in Gujarat’s education system. This has always been the case. First of all, answer sheets of English-medium students are checked by Gujarat-medium teachers who can never be expected to do justice to English-medium students. Such teachers have had always shown their biases towards Gujarati-medium students and as a result English-medium students had to content with low percentages. They never allowed English-medium students to top the merit list. Statistics of Board Exam results of Std. 10th and 12th are a testimony to this prejudice in the education system. The pass percentage of the English-medium students had always been higher than the Gujarati-medium students. Similarly much higher percentage of English-medium students scores distinction. These biases have even been reflected during Board Exams when Gujarati-medium Supervisors often treat English-medium students unfairly by taunting and making fun of them.

Such a prejudice of state’s education system has been there since long time and nobody ever cared to question this attitude. Even local media never reported these glaring facts. It is only this year that the Times of India brought out all this in news after the board results for std. 12th (science) were declared. Although this news was not surprising for me as I knew about such inherent biases against English-medium students all along. As an English-medium student, I have gone through all this. The only heartening fact is that now all these things are now in front of public and the biased attitude of state’s education system is uncovered for all to see.

But the chairman of GSHSEB, R.K Pathak had a strange explanation “The English-medium students are intelligent but do not strive hard enough, whereas Gujarati-medium students carry out in-depth study and work very hard.” To this I have only one thing to say that this man may be correct to some extent as most of the precious time of English-medium students is wasted in rectifying the errors in their textbooks and then making sense of all the rubbish thrown at them in the textbooks.