When I was studying in a missionary school (1951-60), all teachers were hardworking and conscientious. During my ten years in St. Patrick's, I didn't need to take extra tuition after school hours, even though some of my classmates did. I was fluent in English (both writing and speaking), in pre-engineering exams I scored the highest in English. Later, I analyzed why some of my fellow students were not good at speaking and writing English. I found that they came from homes where no one read English books, magazines or newspapers. I was fortunate that my father was a lawyer and he used to buy books, magazines and newspapers (both English and Gujrati). I and my siblings read books by Edgar Wallace, Leslie Charteris, Earle Stanley Gardner and many others. Magazines like the Readers Digest, Time, Newsweek and The Saturday Evening Post were the norm. In fact, we even used to read Indian newspapers (which were freely available until 1965). Later, relatives from India would bring English newspapers for us to read.
Of course, as the years went by, the teaching of English has deteriorated. Even an internationally read newspaper like DAWN has sentences like "She killed his husband". But then, after the nationalization of schools by Bhutto, this was only to be expected.
Post a Comment