English at School, Native at Home?

It is now the end of the year since the announcement of the "2030 Bilingual Nation" policy. Here's an update.

In the aforementioned article [A Bilingual Taiwan by 2030(two parts)], we have provided reasons why the policy is likely to fail to reach its potential goal with a bottom-up method because the real obstacle isn't children but parents. The lack of human resources (bilingual teachers), school fundings, and the cause of financial burden for families aside, the must-solve problem lies in parenthood, and family at large. Allow us to explain.

Parenthood is simple but difficult. It easily falls into two extremes, overbearing/over-attentive or the opposite. It's not our topic to break free from that tradition but from that norm, we could already predict the phenomenon the policy may create.

• Parents become more stressed-out than ever.

(Mostly) Mothers who have been worried sick about the future of their children will then have to twice as much, on the one hand, asking around how other mothers handle it and on the other, push children harder on their studies only to result in children moving further away from learning. While moms struggle more, fathers will have to earn more to cover the steep cost which creates more tension in the family than it already had. We all know how this could mean for the children.

• Parents do not know how to handle the process and outcome of the policy

Let's face it. While there are many great parents hidden among us, most of them are running with blindfolds on. They want to give the best for their children but don't know how and usually end up giving only what they feel is good and what they couldn't get when they were little. What does that mean? Nothing but more troubles for the children.

We must understand this. What hinders this well-intentional vision is not the elite or the rich. It is us commoners who need guidance first so we could guide our youth.

English at School, Native at Home?

Andy recently started promoting his colearning group. It struck him again that many parents wished to integrate the concept of colearning with English. They want to fulfill the concept with English but due to a lack of better knowledge of education, they seek results in the conventional testing system. It isn't entirely their fault but theirs regardless.

Let's say we'll do it. Let's have a utopian English education in Taiwan where all teachers are perfectly capable of teaching and the students enjoy learning. What's next? One logical outcome may be what we could see from the first couple of generations of immigrants in the U.S. Kids come home to their "foreign mother tongue speaking parents". From the perspective of language acquisition, it works well. However, is that the goal of it all, to overthrow our native languages and bring the U.S. straight to us? Actually, it sounds quite interesting.

Policies aside, let's look at this issue on a smaller scale and find a middle ground. How about we still send our children to a normal school but just let them go to a bilingual afterschool program or one that uses only the target foreign language?

It is highly possible and applicable if one commits to using only English in a country where most of the locals think isn't. Bilingual education is a good start. It doesn't matter what happens at the end but it in fact is leading people towards a different concept. The role of the government in this is to set a path as clearly as it could but it is the people who could decide whether to take it or not. We are responsible for our own actions, not the government. Sadly that is something that needs to be reminded constantly.

#education