Teachers ruining Malayalam

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I have been on the interview board of the  Education Department’s skill acquisition programme, a novel initiative which is still ongoing. This programme has been envisaged by the state government to make the youngsters employable. The students are mostly highly qualified  with MTech and MBA.
During the course of an interview, a candidate’s CV said she was a topper in the Malayalam paper in the All- India Secondary School Certificate Examination. So I asked her to write a sentence in Malayalam which she wrongly spelt. Though I asked her to correct the  mistake, she could not even locate the glaring error therein and was smug under the belief that there was no mistake. Only when I pointed it out to her, she realised it was a mistake!
Her teachers too had failed to note and correct even the basic mistake. This is the standard of even the topper in Malayalam. And the pro-Malayalam professors, poets and politicians want to impose Malayalam as first language and prime language on all children while they cannot even teach flawless Malayalam to the hapless children.  I feel that there is no emphasis on quality which has made our education system a big failure.
(Dr. M. Vijayanunni is a former Chief Secretary of Kerala.)