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Comment by thrwer34234 | Hacker News Reader

Vietnam is actually very attractive, since it also has a FTA with India. It's in the middle of the Asian Tigers and China, and is also not subject to the colonial 'english-only' education system that is ravaging India and causing large-scale unemployment.

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If it wasn't English, then what language should it be?

If it was Hindi, you would be oppressing the other ~40% of the country that aren't native Hindi speakers and you would be depriving them of the opportunities that English language skills offer to them.

I'm sorry, how exactly is the education system in India causing large-scale unemployment? Citations needed.

I was interested to learn more about this too and found this article: https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/india/494396/indias-obse...

Like most articles on the topic, it misses the point. The education system in India is broken indeed; broken to the point that the _language of instruction is more or less irrelevant_. The problems lie elsewhere. I'd love to expand further, but (a) this would deviate from the topic of the thread, and (b) would take much more time and space. Another time, another place, perhaps.

> _language of instruction is more or less irrelevant_.

Since it is 'irrelevant', perhaps the colonial state can stop sapping our taxes to fund 'english-only' universities, and instead educate and 'skill' the 90 % (instead of teaching them broken english). It's insane that being pro-British empire is a stance that is even morally justified in a nation of 1 billion.

It's not at all surprising that India's socio-economic indicators are worse even compared to Africa. How would it not be, when the state sucks the blood of the non-elite basically to create an endless supply of white-collar labour for English-speaking nations.

The language of instruction is irrelevant because there are deeper issues to fix. The issues you mention ("pro-British") are irrelevant too, they are not the problem. But I'm going to stop here and not engage with you further.

Also check out,

http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/

Rather than a 'caste-system', the bigger factor in determining economic success in India is linguistic ability. Even the supreme-courts in India won't hear anything in a language other than English. It's quite insane TBH.

Perhaps it's mad but then there are a fair number of languages in used there[0] "The 2001 Census recorded 30 languages which were spoken by more than a million native speakers and 122 which were spoken by more than 10,000 people". Perhaps having a widespread lingua franca[1] is a lesser madness after all.

But I'm a brit, maybe an indian would care to opine.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India

[1] yes, I know

As a North East person of India who went for higher studies in Central India, so many of us dropped out of college cause the teachers use Hindi which is not used by us. It's a really hard problem to solve cause the level of English education is still bad and many teachers don't even speak proper English but use another language and you get some people who don't understand the language at all. The colleges and schools are still advertised as English medium though so it was a real shocker for me.

It also has a FTA with the EU.

"and is also not subject to the colonial 'english-only' education system that is ravaging India and causing large-scale unemployment."

Why should this be a problem?

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