Introduce Esperanto as a foreign language subject in European high schools
Mon, 19/01/2009 - 20:26
Introduce Esperanto as a foreign language subject in European high schools
Countries like Brazil and the US are begining to consider passing laws that allow the teaching of Esperanto as a subject in high schools. But Europe should be leading the movement, by setting the example and teaching Esperanto to high school students. You could start as an experiment in a few sellected schools, and then, after a 2-year trial, judge the results yourselves. Polland, Germany and Hungary have already started. Why not do this in every country in Europe? Esperanto will NOT replace English or any other language, but, as an auxiliary transnational language, it would lower greatly the costs of Education in foreign languages and in translations. So far, no country has adopted Esperanto as an international language, because there weren´t any other countries thinking of doing the same, but if Europe as a whole, start this movement, certainly many other countries would do that.
Information about Esperanto can be found here
Thanks to the webmaster!
Informations about esperanto language can be found in a lot of websites. Just use a search engine, and you probablly will be surprised.
Well, perhaps people from UK don't realize, but the present language situation in the Union (and in the world) is an actual source of social discrimination. Usually, people (children) from higher social classes succeed to learn english rather well (but almost never perfectly). Children from medium social classes "succeed" too. But those from lower classes have more difficulties to learn, and especially languages (in most cases: english). On the other hand, english speaking people (as their mother tongue) don't "need" to learn any foreign language. That is unfair, injust... A lot of world citizen have to spend a lot of time and money to learn english, but they never become able to use it at an equal level with people whose english is mother tongue. A lot of them completely fail in this learning. After that, they don't dare learn others! That is the "invisible" reality. To speak foreign languages (especially english) is still a privilege...It's more difficult for an Italian, a Spanish, a Portuguese to learn english, than for a German, a Dutch, Scandinavians...
Esperanto is easy for everybody, but nevertheless it is powerfull, precise... because it is regular and logic.
A French, (for example) can reach in one year the same level than in 7 years of english...
The diffusion of english have historical and economical reasons, but it is not the only solution, and it is not the best one.
It's unfortunate that only a few people know that Esperanto has become a living language.
During a short period of 121 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA factbook. It is the 17th most used language in Wikipedia, and in use by Skype, Firefox and Facebook.
Native Esperanto speakers,(people who have used the language from birth), include George Soros, World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet.
Further information can be seen at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670 A glimpse of the language can be seen at http://www.lernu.net