Comments on: Does Schedule 1 include a racist agenda?

By: vicki

vicki — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 22:13:15 +0000

I live in a rural area of Wales, we speak English at home, though the area is welsh speaking. We are teaching our home educated child welsh, but it isnt easy, with no real resources in north wales, to use, which are local wales.. However the idea that you HAVE to send your child to school because that is the ONLY place they will learn a language is just insane.. I taught myself, italian, latin and swhalli, as a 16 year old.. Never once had a formal lesson in any of them! When i needed the language i learnt it.. like any tool for a job!

By: Shell

Shell — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:09:00 +0000

And as Katherine says; how would children be able to avoid learning English when they are part of the community?
Ex-pat kids learn Spanish and French don’t they? Or is the suggestion that Johnny Foreignor couldn’t do it?
All this follows Badman’s foot in mouth moment where he equated Forced marriage with arranged marriage.

By: Shell

Shell — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:04:34 +0000

This little exchange shocked me too. I thought I would blog on it at some point.
One thing for me having worked so long in the Deaf Community is that many hearing children of Deaf families started school without English because they only used BSL at home. Even back then I remember horrible suggestions about removing hearing children from Deaf parents but ALL those children learned English fairly quickly once in school.
The same went for the Vietnamese children who came over escaping the horror of Socialism. I remember having a child of 9 join a class where I was working and she and her 4 year old brother picked up English really quickly.
I am amazed not just at the racism but the sheer lack of expectation of children who can be bi-lingual very quickly given the opporttunity.

By: Katherine

Katherine — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:26:45 +0000

Also seems to me that we have to question the assumption that a child that doesn’t speak English at home, won’t learn it any way. They will be surrounded by it - TV, books, signs, neighbours, shopkeepers etc etc etc. However insular the family English is everywhere in this country.
It will probably come later granted but what actually are the chances that it won’t come at all?
And of course literacy, numeracy and all general knowledge etc can all quite easily be tackled in languages other than English.