Back To School: Félicitations aux peuple Nouveau-Brunswick

by Transmontanus, 5 September 2008

For months, the English-speaking parents of New Brunswick have been engaged in a sort of populist uprising, all in aid of the rights of their children to full French-language immersion education, from Grade 1 on up. Their motto: A Canada where French and English live together in mutual respect with understanding and appreciation of each other’s language and culture, and where linguistic duality forms an integral part of society.

Last year, when the provincial government tried to weasel out of universal access to French-language schooling, Anglophone New Brunswickers said no damn way. Last month, the government backed down. Not all the way, but this week, the kids went back to school after the holidays, and it’s not bad, for now: No universal French immersion from Grade 1 yet, but universal access in a couple of years, offering entry at Grade 3 or Grade 6; also an end to the elitist regime that gave only “higher-achieving” kids the coveted French immersion classes.

Besides, this gives me an excuse to post the cool New Brunswick flag:

Comments

graeme
Friday 5 September 2008 at 20:17

Sounds good, and far more sane than the idiotic “debates” about bilingualism here in Quebec.
Will
Saturday 6 September 2008 at 1:45

That is indeed some shit hot flag they have going on.

Abstract: L.K. Hagen (2008; Evolutionary Psychology, 6, 43-63) proposes that effortless first acquisition compared to more difficult second language acquisition provides evidence that the monolinguistic nature of our ancestral social environments implies a near-constant state of intergroup conflict. I argue to the contrary that the capacity to acquire multiple languages simultaneously in childhood without decrement to first language acquisition suggests that there was selection pressure for multilingualism. I further argue that this cognitive capacity is evidence for an ancestral environment in which distinct groups commingled (e.g., through long-term trading and marriage relationships) in relative security.

In his recent article, Hagen (2008) proposes an interesting hypothesis about language capacities, specifically bilingualism, and the nature of social environment our hunter gatherer ancestors inhabited: Our remarkable facility in learning a first language at an early age – and our equally famous difficulty in learning another one later on – are thus easily predictable consequences of our prehistoric heritage. If language evolved in some group that did not have sustained and peaceful contact with others, then a bilingual brain would not be of much use, natural selection would not have favored it, and we would end up with exactly the state of affairs we now have (pp. 57-58). I agree with Hagen that our capacity for bilingualism does provide insight into the nature of our ancestor’s social ecology; I suggest however that what we know about human language capacities leads to a very different conclusion about prehistoric sociality. Hagen argues that the difficulty in learning a second language compared to learning a first language is evidence that our ancestral communities lived in states of near constant hostility. I propose, to the contrary, that the ease with which children simultaneously learn multiple languages evinces a state of sustained cooperation and exchange between groups such that speakers of different groups, speaking different languages, recurrently commingled over long periods of time.

PDF here

http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP06182185.pdf
Anarch
Saturday 6 September 2008 at 2:30

Do these people not know anything about politics. Both are certainly true.