When Your Mother Tongue Has No Place in School

Today is International Mother Language Day. A date placed on the global calendar at the initiative of UNESCO to remind us that every human being is born into a language. A language through which they first call their mother, express fear, laugh, and begin to understand the world.

For me, this day is not just symbolic. It brings back memories of classes held behind closed doors.

For years, I worked officially as an English teacher. Structured curriculum, approved textbooks, clear lesson plans. Alongside that, I also taught Kurdish informally and discreetly. Not because secrecy carried any thrill, but because there was a gap I could see every single day in my students’ eyes.

One of the biggest misconceptions about education is the claim that “language doesn’t matter, content does.” Anyone who says that has likely never tried to learn complex concepts in a language they do not think in.

There is one student I still cannot forget. His grades in mathematics and science had dropped sharply. Teachers labeled him as weak. His family grew anxious. He repeated an entire academic year. The problem was neither intelligence nor effort. He simply did not fully understand Persian.

When a child struggles to comprehend the very wording of a math problem, the issue is not cognitive ability. It is linguistic access. We expected him to do two things at once: decode a new language and grasp abstract scientific concepts. Predictably, he fell behind. And just as predictably, his confidence began to erode.

When I explained the same mathematical and scientific ideas to him in Kurdish, nothing miraculous happened. There was no dramatic transformation. He simply began to understand. He stopped fearing mathematics. He stopped seeing himself as “slow.”

These changes may sound small. For a child, they are life-altering.

Over years of teaching, I came to understand that excluding a mother tongue from education is not merely removing a subject from the curriculum. It is quietly sidelining a part of a child’s identity. The unspoken message becomes clear: the language of your home, your grandmother, your stories, is not formal enough. Not academic enough. Not important enough.

Meanwhile, I have seen how quickly Kurdish students can learn a third language like English. The irony is difficult to ignore: we have institutions, exams, and certifications dedicated to foreign languages, yet no structured support for children to read and write in their own mother tongue.

This is not an argument against any language. No language threatens another. Education in one’s mother tongue is not a privilege or a political slogan; it is an educational necessity and a human right. When children develop literacy first in the language they understand deeply, acquiring the official or additional languages becomes significantly easier. This is not theory. I have witnessed it in classrooms.

The consequences of linguistic exclusion extend beyond academic performance. When a student repeats a year, labels follow. Labels shape self-perception. And once a child begins to believe they are incapable, their effort declines accordingly. A linguistic barrier quietly evolves into an identity crisis.

So when we speak of International Mother Language Day, I do not think only of cultural celebration. I think of responsibility. I think of the students whose educational paths were made unnecessarily difficult simply because the language they were born into had no formal place in their schooling.

No child should lose a year of education because they could not access knowledge in the language they understand best.

If we are serious about educational equity, the conversation must begin in early classrooms, at the moment when a child first realizes whether their language is recognized or erased.

For some, today is just a date on the calendar.

For me, it is the memory of a child who only wanted to understand.

And understanding was his right.

16.02.2026

Hanieh Mohammadi

My lovely Student

My lovely Students