There are all kinds of reasons to applaud this. As a student of Hindi, I love reading the readers made for the initial grades (with beautiful illustrations!), and as I move up, I can use the texts in parallel, reading the Hindi and checking with the English that I understood. Just like I suggested that the huge amount of Open Course Ware films of classroom lectures from all around the world, especially China and India, might be a gigantic boon to a comparative curriculum researcher, these text books would also be great for someone studying curriculum and pedagogics in India.
Some schools in the US have decided to introduce Hindi as a foreign language with staples like French, Spanish and German. "We're going to teach our kids how to speak important languages. We will welcome teachers here to help teach our kids how to speak languages," US President George Bush had said during a National Security Language Initiative in New York.
With an initial budget of $114 million, this initiative aims at helping more Americans to become multilingual. Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, Persian and Hindi are all "important languages". Instructors are being recruited to teach these from kindergarten right up to the university level. In India, the recruitment process is being facilitated by an arm of the human resources development ministry, called EdCIL (Education Consultants India Limited). [Read full story]
Image from WikipediaStian, who blogs on education, was delighted to find free course ware of NCERT on the web in English, Hindi and Urdu. The material is available in PDF format. Stian opines :
