When kids don’t fully comprehend what is being said to them, a certain kind of silence descends upon the classroom. Not the quiet of focus. A child sitting in a room that technically contains them, but hardly so, is more akin to the quiet of distance. That silence was a recurring theme for researchers who spent three years touring Pakistani schools, recording conversations, listening in on classes, and interviewing students long after they had completed their formal education. And in the end, they came to a precise and subtly devastating conclusion.
The study looked at how language policy in multilingual societies affects who actually receives an education—not on paper, but in lived, material terms. It was based on the kind of slow, qualitative fieldwork that seldom makes headlines. The conclusions go far beyond Pakistan. They bring up issues that English-only countries, including some of the richest on the planet, have mainly refrained from addressing.
Even though its effects are difficult to articulate, the fundamental issue is not. A school system is not merely making a pedagogical decision when it chooses one dominant language, particularly a colonial or post-colonial one, as the sole means of instruction and upward mobility. It’s building a hierarchy. Children who come from homes where that language is read aloud, heard on television, and spoken at home are already halfway there. The others show up with something that the organization won’t accept and can’t use.
Based on Sen’s capability approach, the researchers discovered that once linguistic capital had already been distributed unevenly, spatial integration—housing middle-class and working-class children in the same building—meant nearly nothing. The exclusionary architecture could remain in place even if a school were completely desegregated. Three desks separate the Urdu and English speakers. One of them has already moved on.
This finding’s obvious implication of intent may be the reason why policymakers find it so unsettling. These systems weren’t created carelessly. In a nation with dozens of spoken languages, the decision to elevate English, French, or any other prestige language always involved deciding who would be at the center and who would remain on the periphery. The study refers to this created area as “the imagined monolingual center” before methodically demonstrating its nonexistence. The center is not real. Institutions that pretend to be monolingual cannot truly serve multilingual societies. Nothing is made simpler by the pretense. It simply concentrates the expense on those who are least able to bear it.
In 2009, Punjab, the most populous province in Pakistan, attempted what appeared to be a solution: requiring English to be taught in government schools in order to align the system with prestigious private establishments. It had discreetly dropped the policy by 2013. The pupils had not studied English. The topics they had previously grasped had slipped from their grasp. They started memorizing without understanding, which is not learning at all. A gap that was truly a chasm could not be filled by the teachers, many of whom did not speak English well. It’s difficult to avoid seeing this as a parable that has the same conclusion in several languages and nations.
The study also revealed something that is often overlooked in policy discussions: exclusion in these circumstances isn’t just cognitive. It’s social. It has to do with psychology. Children absorb the idea that their mother tongue is inadequate, that their home is somehow inferior, and that the version of themselves they bring to school every morning falls short. It is more difficult to quantify that harm than test results. It usually lasts longer.
Seeing nations with multilingual populations increase their use of English-only education gives the impression that the evidence has been there for a while and that something else is impeding the change. The idea that linguistic diversity is administratively inconvenient, perhaps. Perhaps the challenge of dismantling systems that have reliably benefited the powerful. For whatever reason, children who had no say in the language their parents spoke bear the true cost.
Efficiency is not the main issue facing English-only educational systems. It concerns whether the organizations that are supposed to provide opportunities are actually doing so or if they are doing so while discreetly closing the door.
