Thread: Schools preparing for a bi-lingual world

Originally Posted by JuniusJnr

Oh, I don't mind having ESL classes for people who want to pay for them on their own. All they are for is so that people whose first language isn't English can learn to speak English better.

It is just that we shouldn't be paying for people to learn English and we definitely shouldn't be teaching kids in two languages in grade schools or forcing them to try to learn two languages. All we are doing is making our kids dumber and dumber. We need to teach the kids the basics and let them expand upon their knowledge according to their interests when they are old enough to know if they want to learn some other language or not.

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Perhaps you don't Remember Roise Avila? She claimed that schools were recieving spanish textbooks from Mexico which talked about mexico and not the USA's history. ESL is a joke. The best way to learn a language is through immersion, teachers should have compassion to foreign born students just like they do for the LEGAL immigrants who come here now. Most of them spend years learning english so they can get along when they get to school here.

We get rid of ESL and 1/4th of our problems go away.

ESL is an internationally known program that is taught world wide so that people who aspire to US citizenship can learn English and immerse themselves into the language.

I think you are confusing ESL with the practice of teaching kids in their own language.

I am perfectly well aware, since I work for the school system, that the teachers in our schools are teaching bogus history and that they don't always understand the subjects they are teaching. Many shouldn't even have college degrees because it is very obvious that many don't know what they are talking about. Your tax dollars educated those anchor baby teachers, in case you didn't realize it.

If we stopped trying to teach the hispanic kids in Spanish and forced them to learn in English in American schools, I agree, many problems would go away. But that has nothing to do with ESL which means: English as a Second Language. Asians, Arabs, Europeans and Polynesians use that program to learn English and so should the Spanish speaking people use it. We just shouldn't have to pay for it.