Question:
With the school board cuts recently announced, is it only a matter of
time before children who do not speak English will have to have their
parent's teach them, or pay for private tuition?
1. Should the parents be responsible for teaching their children one
of our official languages?
2. Should the school system be responsible?
My personal opinion favours number 1 above. Any thoughts?
Answer:
And it is about bloody time, too. I don't have the exact numbers, but
ask any elementary school teacher how many of their ESL kids have in
fact been born in Canada.
Absolutely.
NO.
Special ESL classes are a fairly recent invention. The usual practice
till then was to drop immigrant kids who could not speak English a
grade lower than what they attended in their home country, until they
cought up with their English skills. 4 of my nieces and nephews went
through this. 3 have now graduated from university, the fourth works
for the federal government with only 1 year of university ed. One of
them is now a school teacher who has to struggle with kids who were
born in Richmond and who after 3 or 4 years of ESL still not only
can't speak English, they see no particular need for it, either.
However, all of them were born outside of Canada, and came here as
kids. They were brought up to speak the language of the land.
One of the problems with ESL instruction is that it became a
convenient method for school boards to pad their budgets. The
provincial government started responding to the district complaints
about non-English speaking kids in truly governmental fashion, by
throwing money at the problem. I'm not sure exactly who started this,
I think it may have been Vander Zalm, who paid school districts a
bonus so many $$ per each ESL kid in their system. Then the
regulations of who is considered as ESL got dicked around to include
anyone who had at least one parent born outside of Canada.
So if a kid had a dad whom he had not seen since his age 3 but who was
born in another country, the boy was admitted as ESL kid, even though
he didn't know a word of any other language than English.
My own son is worth quite a chunk of money to the local school board,
even though he was born here and never hears at home any language
other than English. Still, the school board claims him as an ESL kid.
It's time to put an end to this kind of bullshit and ridiculous waste
of taxpayers' money. There is a price that every immigrant has to pay
for admission to his new chosen home. And that is taking the time to
learn the languages of the land. At least in Canda immigrants are
fortunate for having a choice of two languages. In almost all other
countries it is strictly "swim or sink". Good practice, builds
character instead of reliance on governments to provide everything for
you.
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