international education

[kidsfuture]

As pupils around the world are telling us they want us to do something about climate change, why don't we ask for our children to be prepared for international science projects, by asking for them to be taught Esperanto which gives them fluency in only a year? Schools in Africa have been doing this since 2004! But nothing is reported here about this major educational advance. By doing this we can start to prepare them to discuss, understand and then eventually address climate change. This is our responsibility to respond to sensible parents elsewhere in the world for our children.

Why esperanto? People learn English. And fluency in a language in a year is beyond nonsense.

Esparanto is based on a minority of indoeuropean languages and therefore excludes larga numbers of speaker who speak langauges from other langauge families.
And knowing Esparanto does nothing against climate change - stopping deforestation wether for cattle, cheap avocados or fuel - does, oh and investing in reforestation massively.

And - as a non native speaker of English - I think English is doing the job quite well.

I should have spell checked, but the cat was trying to escape out of the window.

English was originally promoted as part of the imperial curriculum during the our empire rule around the world. The failure of children to have international science projects today to help them learn and then discuss climate change is because it takes non English pupils 7 to 10 years to gain fluency. By that time they have left school and are denied any access to international education. In Africa where they are still suffering from our 'English' curriculum, they have been teaching Esperanto since 2004 in Togo, Benin, Kenya Tanzania, DR Congo Burundi and many other countries because it does give very rapid access to fluency and they haven't got the money to learn another national language anyway in most cases. Esperanto is also used as a bridge language to start learning English so it is supporting English, but giving access to international education BEFORE English fluency can become available if at all. I didn't believe any of this until I tried it and now I can go into a room of Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, people from all over the world and have a conversation with any of them.(and I failed French and Latin) There is no way English can do that for you because of the many years it takes non English people to get fluency. The problem of climate change will not wait for the world to learn English because they never will! Even the British Council admits Esperanto is making progress where English cannot. Please check it out first. Facebook has millions of Esperanto pages!

One of my friends at school used to speak Esperanto. We considered it a bit twee but hey, she enjoyed it. She lives in India now and speaks English most of the time.
I think English is working quite well for the majority of people. It's quite an easy language to learn and progress can be quick, since exposure to it is widespread. I can also walk into a room full of people from around the world (and indeed do so daily) and we are fine communicating in English.

Some of my relatives are among the only mother-tongue Esperanto speakers in the world - they had parents who brought them up with English as a second language... they did not bother inflicting Esperanto lessons on their own children. Complete waste of time.

Also not actually that easy to learn - I studied 2 MFLs at school and am bilingual in a 3rd, plus did Latin and Greek so I'm reasonably okay at languages. The Esperanto textbooks were knocking around at home and I did have a look at it one holiday and didn't get very far.

I agree where English is your birth language or is affordable then one will obviously always use it but the majority of our planet's people don't speak it! Even when we had our Empire the majority of our imperial population never spoke English. For non English pupils without the rich world educational budget to spend that we all have access to, most do not find it possible to become fluent before they leave school and consequently their only access to international education is lost. This is because English is five times more expensive than Esperanto to learn because of the extra time needed and in their countries they have left school before it is possible. Why else would all the African and other countries using Esperanto in their schools be doing so? It is not really fair of us in the rich world to put all the extra cost of having an international education onto the parents in the developing world, where they are struggling to have basic water supplies, even schools at all, just because of it being very convenient for us, is it?

We need to keep in view the discussion aim of how are we as parents around the world going to be able to respond to Greta Thunberg and others' complaints, about the need to effectively respond to Climate Change and pollution presently threatening our children's future. In practice this is only possible via an affordable form of international education if we are going to open the opportunity for our children to join with others around the world to learn how to improve the outlook for their lives. This becomes possible when they are able to join together in taking part in international science projects to discuss and understand climate change, now communication is much more wide spread, but still obstructed by lack of a common and affordable language which they all need for success in this. It is interesting that parents in many countries in Africa have already shown they want their children to be able to participate in such science projects and so are sending their children to schools where they are learning Esperanto to enable them to succeed in such an aim. But for success such science projects need to include children from the industrial world as well as Africa, so they can all work together while guided by their teachers. At present considerable numbers of African children are already prepared for this and are waiting for our children to be helped to also participate. Ideally this needs to start before Greta Thunberg leaves school so we need to start asap, and join with all those other parents in collective support of our children. Our government here has stated in 2017 that Esperanto is approved for use in our schools, so the way is open for parents here to join with those in Africa and respond appropriately to these threats to all of our children.