The academic performance of tribal children in Grade V reflects the difficulties:  The children read with a lot of effort, mostly word by word  Their oral skills in the second language were poor  They could not frame sentences correctly and had a very limited vocabulary  They were more comfortable speaking in their mother tongue  While they could partially comprehend text (of grade 2/3 level), they were unable to formulate an answer to simple questions in the standard language.  In most schools, the tribal language speaking children could not score a single mark in the reading comprehension test (Jhingran, p.50) Schooling in a second language so limits children's progress in the acquisition of knowledge and skills that few are able to proceed to higher studies or find employment. These children are thus set up for rejection and its consequence in low self esteem, a system failure that translates into experienced personal failure. There is also a gender discrimination issue in that girls are more likely than boys to be monolingual and therefore more disadvantaged (Benson, UNESCO 2005) For those who do manage to complete high school it is difficult to fit back into their own culture and society; schooling can alienate the children from their communities. One parent of a school child in Papua New Guinea expressed this graphically: “When our children go to school they go to an alien place. They leave their parents, they leave their gardens, they leave everything that is their way of life. They sit in a classroom and they learn things that have nothing to do with their own place. Later, because they have learned only other things, they reject their own.” (Dekpit & Kemmelfield 1985, 19-20) Further results of non-indigenous education include the loss of the heritage language and culture; loss of linguistic and cultural diversity and indigenous knowledge: Every language reflects a unique world view and culture mirroring the manner in which a speech community has resolved its problems in dealing with the world, and has formulated its think ing, its system of philosophy and understanding of the world around it. With the death of the language, an irreplaceable unit of our k nowledge and understanding of human thought and world view has been lost forever. (Wurm 1991, 17) poverty and demoralisation: For many ethnolinguistic minority groups...promises of incentives such as economic and social mobility are doled out as poor compensation for cultural subordination and language shift. In the process, paradoxically, the linguistic minority groups are driven to further poverty -- culturally and economically -- because their languages, as resource for educational achievement and, through it, for equal access to economic and other benefits in a competitive society, are rendered powerless. (Mohanty 1990, 54) and a weakened and divided nation: