One morning in a Class 2 EVS classroom in the Garo Hills, the teacher opened the textbook to a chapter about the “lion’s den” and “a baby camel”. The children listened politely, but their faces revealed confusion. Lions and camels were creatures they had never seen — not in their forests, not in their stories. Most spoke only Garo at home. Patiently, the teacher translated the sentences into Garo, but the lesson still felt far away.
Then she asked the children to name animals they knew. The classroom suddenly came alive. They shouted out “dog”, “hornbill”, “tiger”, “fox” , “monkeys”, and “owls” — animals they had seen near fields, heard about in songs, or encountered in folktales, where the owl had to hide itself in the daylight, or short-tailed monkeys grew accustomed to the paddies, millet, and cornfields of people. Their knowledge spilled over with excitement, but none of it appeared in the textbook.
The EVS lesson was important, but its language and examples had made the children’s world invisible. And that invisibility mirrors a larger crisis we face today.
Great Restructuring and its shadow
Across the world, economists and technologists speak of the Great Restructuring — the sweeping transformation brought by automation, artificial intelligence, and globalisation. Stable, middle-class jobs are shrinking; routine work is being taken over by machines. Education systems everywhere are scaling to prepare children for an unpredictable future.
But amid this upheaval, one question becomes urgent for India, especially for communities in the Northeast: what happens to our languages and cultures in such a world?
The Great Restructuring as popularised by writers such as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in Race Against the Machine and The Second Machine Age, is not only about employment; it reshapes how communities live, migrate, and imagine their futures. Families move for work, children grow up in cities far from ancestral villages, and mother tongues are often left behind. This “hollowing out” of culture runs parallel to the hollowing out of stable livelihoods. In times of disruption, minority languages and cultures are among the first casualties.
For Indigenous and minoritised communities, this double burden is stark. On one side is the pressure to master English or Hindi to “compete”. On the other is the dismissal of their cultural and linguistic heritage as irrelevant.
But is this the only way forward? Must adaptation mean erasure?
Multilingualism as a skill
Research worldwide shows that multilingualism is not a handicap — it is a resource. Children who grow up with multilingual environment often display greater cognitive flexibility, stronger problem-solving skills, and resilience in changing environments. These are precisely the skills the Great Restructuring values most — the ones machines cannot replicate.
And importantly, they are also the skills that make children competent and competitive in future job markets. A child who can explain the water cycle in English but also tell a river folktale in her mother tongue is not less prepared for the future but more. Her roots strengthen her wings.
Routine jobs are vanishing; skills that resist automation — creativity, adaptability, empathy, and complex problem-solving — are valuable. Culturally rooted multilingual education cultivates these capacities. Switching between languages builds cognitive flexibility and mental agility, helping children adapt quickly.
Folktales, oral histories, and local knowledge spark imagination and foster ways of seeing the world that no machine can replicate. Connecting science to rivers, forests, and farming practices makes learning practical and grounded. Knowledge becomes lived, not memorised.
Cultural competence is an advantage in a global economy. Multilingual children navigate multiple languages and perspectives with ease and flexibility workplaces increasingly demand. Above all, multilingual education builds resilience and identity. A child rooted in language and culture can face change without being uprooted.
In short, multilingual, culturally grounded education does not confine children to the past. It equips them with exactly the skills that the future will reward most.
Textbooks as anchors
Culturally rooted multilingual textbooks are urgent, not nostalgic. Education should prepare children for exams and jobs, yes — but also to affirm identity and belonging.
Imagine a Garo Hills class starting with the short-tailed monkeys or the hornbill. Scientific concepts follow in Garo and English, with a local term word bank. Children could interview elders or discuss sustainable farming practices.
Such learning is not “culture for culture’s sake”. It strengthens literacy, builds scientific vocabulary, and affirms belonging. It tells children: your world matters, your words matter, you matter – and you are capable.
The policy gap
India’s NEP 2020 recommends teaching in the mother tongue until Class 5 and reaffirms the three-language formula. Yet most States use top-down monolingual curricula. For tribal communities, this often forces a choice between English and a State language, sidelining indigenous tongues.
The contradiction is glaring while policy documents praise the benefits of mother-tongue learning, implementation rarely follows. Without investment in multilingual textbooks, teacher training, and community involvement, NEP’s promise risks remaining rhetoric.
The philosopher Paulo Freire once wrote that education should not be about depositing knowledge into empty minds, but about dialogue and liberation. In the age of the Great Restructuring, this insight is more urgent than ever.
If education gives only “wings” — English fluency, technical skills, global exposure — children may fly, but without roots, they risk losing themselves. If it gives only “roots” — a rigid insistence on tradition without adaptability — children may remain grounded, but unable to take off.
What we need are roots and wings together. Multilingual, culturally rooted education offers both: anchoring children in who they are, while equipping them to face what the world is becoming.
Creating such resources will not be easy. It demands collaboration between teachers, community elders, linguists, artists, and policymakers. It demands that we treat languages not as burdens but as assets for the future.
The Great Restructuring will continue. But children who carry ancestral wisdom and modern skills enter it prepared, resilient, and confident. A multilingual, culturally rooted textbook cannot stop automation or globalisation but can prevent the erasure of identities while preparing children to thrive.
Gisel Erumachadathu is the Head of Programmes at the North Eastern Institute of Language and Culture (NEILAC), a research institute in Guwahati dedicated to the preservation of Indigenous languages in Northeast India. She is closely engaged in promoting culturally rooted bilingual education within Indigenous communities across the region.