Don’t penalise George too hard.

By learning English in the States, Hispanic kids obtain access significantly more opportunities than they would otherwise have. By trying to stop Spanish-speaking kids in Catalonia learning how to use their first language effectively, the regional government is reducing their economic and geographic mobility.

A lot of bollocks is talked by self-described left-wingers about obligatory Catalan being an egalitarian measure designed to extract Spanish speakers from the ghetto. The truth is different: the great mass of Andalusian kids end up in low paid jobs or unemployed whether they learn Catalan or not. If they were black, this would be called racial discrimination.

If the Catalan government were really convinced of end benefits of its programme, it would comply with the law and allow parents a free choice of vehicular language. If Montilla were really convinced of the value of language policy, he wouldn’t send his children to the German School.

@boynamedsue: I can have reasonably rational conversations with socialists, because we all want the best for children but differ as to the extent to which the state should get involved. With nationalists no sensible dialogue is possible because their interest in children is limited to a need for sacrificial lambs at the tomb of the Ancestors and the altar of the Nation

Students flourish under ‘English immersion’

“Calif.’s bilingual education ban did not have to mean failure
Scott Bowles
USA Today
Monday, August 28, 2000.

OCEANSIDE, Calif. — When California voted two years ago to abolish bilingual education in public schools, many officials predicted doom for the state’s 1.5 million Spanish-speaking students.

Today, those officials are eating crow — gladly.

New standardized test results show that not only have those students not suffered in English-only classrooms, but their scores increased by more than 50% in some grades since the law passed.

And while a wide gap in test scores still divides students who are new to English and those who are fluent in it, educators admit they are stunned to see how quickly immigrant children adapted.

“Quite frankly, we underestimated the kids,” says Ken Noonan, superintendent of the Oceanside Unified School District and founder of the California Association of Bilingual Educators. Noonan, who once fought the bilingual ban, now is one of the staunchest supporters of “English immersion.”

Under the state law, all students, including those who don’t speak the language, are taught solely in English. Teachers are permitted to speak another language only if a student has chronic difficulty with school work or is having emotional problems in class.

Noonan says he feared that students, many from Mexico and Central America, would fall so far behind in class because of the language barrier that they would stop coming to school. Instead, they flourished. “We had research that showed it would take kids five to seven years to learn English,” Noonan says. “They learned it in nine months.”

There are all kind of studies. In USA there is an immersion movement (Anglo kids in Spanish speaking schools) and they claim that at the end of the process, the academic results are better, although the start may be slower.

Would you create public schools in Spanish in USA, in many cities the Spanish speaking population is higher than 50% or you think that English deserves a different treatment because it is an “important language”.

As I have mentioned in the past many times, I am for trilingual education. The objective would be that at the end of the education cycle all kids in Catalonia have the same possiblitities of success. I do not want ghettos.
The problem today is not the language that is used for education. It is the lack of discipline, the lack of interests by the parents, the insufficient budget, the lack of psycologists and specialized resources to tackle academic failure, etc. That’s the issue and I blame the Catalan government and the parents for that, but not the language.

Your experience is atypical, the vast majority of taxpayers (not unreasonably) rely on the state to provide education for their children. If they are educated in a language other than their family language, children suffer from a comparative disadvantage relative to those pupils educated in their mother tongue. This is not only common sense, but has been proven by many scientific studies. It would also go a long way towards explaining the frightening level of educational failure amongst hispanophone Catalans.

When you add the fact the catalan working class is overwhelmingly Spanish-speaking, and are excluded from power due to their supposed alien-ness (unless they publicly genuflect before the puta-mare de deus de Montserrat), a good Socialist like me finds himself making common cause with right wing mischief makers like Trevor, because of our mutual support for human rights that the so-called socialists of Catalunya want to deny their citizens.

Així què us empatolleu?