What Are We Actually Teaching When We Teach Language?

Language defines our spaces as we define our language. What does that look like in practice?

image generated by Gemini based on Irasutoya’s royalty free illustrations, edited in Canva.

The teacher asks you what the incomprehensible scrawl on the board means.

You’ve seen it before, in a textbook. You have some vague recollection of what it might sound like, but ultimately it means nothing to you. There are no associations, no context. You’re cognitively empty.

To your horror, the teacher picks you to speak out in class and respond with the meaning of the word in your native language. In the deafening silence, your classmates await your answer. You lose all sense of linguistic coherence. You’re not even sure if you really know the language that you have spoken since you were out of the womb, let alone a second language through which you’re supposed to showcase the mastery of your mother tongue.

While you get existential sweats, standing at your cold wooden desk, littered with black remnants of a once pristine eraser and the ambiguously legible letters in your still crisp workbook, you think that perhaps you’re not meant for language studies. Perhaps the fact that your culture is determinedly monolithic means that the people of your country are not good at language studies.

Perhaps, you’re better suited for mathematics. Between two anxiety-laden blinks, you recall the terrible score you got in the previous math test. If you’re not the Math type, nor the language type, what type are you? Perhaps you’re simply just not the academic type.

A grim weight settles on your chest.

The teacher lets out a little sigh- a micro signal of a deep disappointment- and tells you to look at the footnotes on the bottom of the page. The translation is written directly in the sidelines of the book you barely register on a cognitive level. You give her a sheepish grin and repeat the word you see in the language which is your own, yet which you struggle to understand. How does the strange foreign word that sounds nothing like it looks, carry the same meaning as your native tongue? How does that translate across contexts? You don’t understand, and you don’t know what you don’t understand. You can’t even string together the words to ask a question.

The teacher turns around and resumes the lesson. The moment slips through the cracks of your cognition, into the space where your identity rests and the foreign word is forgotten.

Learning together, yet still learning alone,

In the historical East Asian dramas I watch, inadvertently there are depictions of young minds being molded by wiser teachers, imparting knowledge on how a scholar must conduct himself, how he must be a good son, husband and father. How he must be a good king and how he must lead the nation, and in turn how the nation and his subjects must learn to be good subjects, mothers, daughters, sisters, children, neighbors. They sit in rows, facing the person who will channel the elusive knowledge that is afforded to only a privileged few.

It is a brief, if glamorized, genealogical glimpse into the current educational space, into common East Asian values and how they have come to be where they are now. In many of these scenes, scholars are required to recite poetry, write a heartfelt treatise or synthesize the importance of piety, social order and righteousness into their daily praxis. They throw shade at each other through intense dialectical and epistemological arguments, the final competency assessment evaluating whose argument is more righteous.

I eat it up, knowing that some centuries later, many elements of this methodology remain the same, while having shed much of its context or purpose. Education will be streamlined into tests and recitation of poetry, wisdom and daily praxis will have been flattened into highly effective methods of rote memorization. After all, when information comes at you at the speed of light, you can’t expect everyone to cognitively embody all of it. It’s better to adjust the ambiguous parts of epistemological query and simply remember what smarter people tell you is right. Students still sit in rows, facing their teacher, their notes in front of them waiting for the nebulous entity of knowledge to bless them with a merciful hand.

In India, depictions of sages sitting at the feet of banyan trees in front of a ragtag group of students often including some great king of some great kingdom, show us that this is not an isolated cultural byproduct. There has been transmission of methodologies through the eons, across cultures.

In this light, when we learn a language- our own or the language of another, do we perceive it as more information that must be digested and regurgitated? or is it something deeper? Something that requires the agent to not only process, but also possess and apply knowledge? Do standardized forms of pedagogy still apply to language learning? And does the language we acquire and eventually master, alter our identity and selves, our cognitive behaviors and therefore our environment?

I’m not saying I know these answers, but these are the questions that fix my expression in rigor contemplatus, staring blankly at the haphazardly written English that says nothing and means nothing.

I do not yet know the answers to most of the questions that take up real estate in my brain, but I suspect they will not be found in rows of silent compliance. Perhaps they can be discovered in thoughtfully designed spaces where language is not memorized but inhabited, where knowledge is not bestowed but co-authored.

This is probably why this Substack exists and why I am now pursuing a Master’s degree in Education Technology; we have inherited classrooms shaped like temples, courts, and banyan groves, so perhaps it is time to ask not only what we are taught beneath them, but who we become.