Ray Mckay with the teachers at Bengal Club. Picture by Aranya Sen

Bengalis were once proud of their command of writing English, if not speaking fluently the language of the Raj ruling class. Thanks to a concerted effort, English language had been till recently wiped out from the blackboards of primary schools in West Bengal.

After a deep slumber for almost 30 years, the state government has suddenly — coinciding with the time when it went on an overdrive to push industrialisation — woken up to the fact that without a rudimentary knowledge of English even the most talented students are bound to lag behind others equipped with better language skills.

Recently, the Bengal government initiated a move to train primary school English teachers, produce a teachers’ companion, a video of the training programmes and material for production of a class I text, all with the help of the British Council, Calcutta, and Ray Mckay, whom one of the participants of the workshops he conducted, described as a “teacher par excellence.”

According to Sujata Sen, director, British Council, East India, West Bengal is a “front runner” in teacher training, and that the Gujarat government has requested Mckay to take up a similar project there. Sen was delighted that Partha De, the minister in charge of the Bengal education department, took a personal interest in the project and would drop by at workshops.

The project was rounded up on Wednesday, when British Council organised a meet with the participants at Bengal Club, the site of which is replete with irony. The historian, Thomas Macaulay (1800-1886), used to live at this Russell Street address, where he would meet Edward Trevelyan (1807-1886). The two were the brains behind the introduction of English language education in India.

After its Rip Van Winkle-like awakening, the state government has increased the number of periods for English teaching, said Sulapani Bhattacharya, the president of the West Bengal Board of Primary Education. The mission was to empower teachers in all the districts.

Nandita Chatterjee, the principal secretary of the department of education, stressed the importance of teaching English correctly — even if the children learn little — and of continuing this process. She felt participation of parents was of utmost importance because families, particularly marginalised ones, need to support the process.

A point that was later taken up by a teacher from east Midnapore — himself a first-generation learner — who described the enthusiasm of parents from poverty-stricken families with their offspring in school.

Teacher trainer Ray Mckay, who lives in Scotland, has been visiting Calcutta since 1987, and has been involved in similar projects in Hong Kong, Utkal University, Tezpur in Assam, began his workshops in 2003, followed by a series in June and earlier this month.

Asked if it were possible to improve the quality of English teaching after a hiatus of almost three decades, McKay pronounced that “primary teachers do not have to be fluent in English. They have to kickstart the process”.

He explained that the methodology is “simple” and the stress was on being accurate rather than on being fluent, “based on a kind of thing that happens between parent and child”. He, however, hoped that this would be accompanied by a change in the textbook as “part and parcel of the process”.

But Sulapani Bhattacharya gave no assurance of that happening immediately.