and perhaps suggests that postcolonial education and most minority education has failed to learn from earlier experience: “It has never been part of the policy of the Government to substitute the … [line missing on photocopy] … commercial value which a knowledge of English commands, and the fact that the final examinations of the high schools are conducted in English, because the secondary schools to be subjected to a certain pressure to introduce prematurely both the teaching of English and its use as a medium of instruction; while for the same reasons the study of the vernacular in these schools is liable to be thrust into the background. This tendency however requires to be corrected in the interest of sound education. As a general rule the child should not be allowed to learn English as a language until he has made some progress in the primary stages of instruction and has received a thorough grounding in his mother-tongue. It is equally important that when the teaching of English has begun, it should not be prematurely employed as the medium of instruction in other subjects. Much of the practice, too prevalent in Indian schools, of committing to memory ill-understood phrases and extracts from text-books or notes, may be traced to the scholars’ having received instruction through the medium of English before their knowledge of the language was sufficient for them to understand what they were taught. The line of division between the use of the vernacular and of English as a medium of instruction should, broadly speaking, be drawn at a minimum age of 13. No scholar in a secondary school should, even then, be allowed to abandon the study of his vernacular, which should be kept up until the end of the school course. If the educated classes neglect cultivation of their own languages, these will surely sink to the level of mere colloquial dialects possessing no literature worthy of the name, and no progress will be possible in giving effect to the principle, affirmed in the Despatch of 1854, that European knowledge should gradually be brought, by means of Indian vernaculars, within the reach of all classes of the people (as cited in Nurullah and Naik 1951 by Evans 2002, 277-278”, quoted on p. 42 in Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (2009). MLE for Global Justice: Issues, Approaches, Opportunities. In Mohanty, Ajit, Panda, Minati, Phillipson, Robert, SkutnabbKangas, Tove (eds). Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local). New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 36-59. : 42,. Evans, Stephen (2002). Macaulay’s Minute revisited: Colonial language policy in nineteenth-century India. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 23/4, 260-281; Nurullah, S. and J.P.Naik, J. P. (1951). A history of education in India. Bombay: Macmillan. 4 ITM = Indigenous/Tribal/Minority/Minoritised. 5 See my Big Bibliography, over 7,000 entries, 442 pages, downloadable at http://www.toveskutnabb-kangas.org/en/Tove-Skutnabb-Kangas-Bibliography.html 6 Alexander, Neville (2006). Introduction. In Intergovernmental Conference on Language Policies in Africa. Harare, Zimbabwe, 17-21 March 1997. Final Report. Paris: UNESCO, Intangible Heritage Section, 9-16. The Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures from 2000) (http://www.outreach.psu.edu/programs/allodds/declaration.html) is one example of the impressive African declarations of intent. Even more optimistic plans are contained in The Language Plan of Action for Africa (http://www.acalan.org/eng/textesreferenciels/pala.php), one of the results from ACALAN’s (The African Academy of Languages, www.acalan.org) conference in Bamako, Mali, January 2009. Similar pronouncements exist on other continents but are less impressive. 7 On Economics Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s concept “capability” and its application for Indigenous and minority education, see Mohanty, Ajit K. & Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (2013). MLE as an economic equaliser in India and Nepal: mother tongue based multilingual education fights poverty through capability development and identity support. In Henrard,