New Delhi, June 11 -- The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) issued a directive on 22 May. A few newspaper editorials and opinion pieces criticized this directive, but these were profoundly misleading.

Since the criticism was levelled at the CBSE directive to introduce teaching in the mother tongue of students in primary classes, let's first examine what the notice actually says.

It states that the first language of literacy-denoted as R1 or the language in which the child first learns to read and write-should be the child's mother tongue. If that is impractical due to the presence of children with different mother tongues in the same classroom, the children's next most familiar language-often the most widely used local languag...