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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the intelligence!=wisdom dept.

The Conversation:

The love of all things English begins at a young age in non-English-speaking countries, promoted by pop culture, Hollywood movies, fast-food brands, sports events and TV shows.

Later, with English skills and international education qualifications from high school, the path is laid to prestigious international universities in the English-speaking world and employment opportunities at home and abroad.

But those opportunities aren't distributed equally across socioeconomic groups. Global education in English is largely reserved for middle-class students.

This is creating a divide between those inside the global English proficiency ecosystem and those relegated to parts of the education system where such opportunities don't exist.

[...] It's unfortunate so many schools view an English-speaking model as the gold standard and overlook their own local or regional wisdoms. We need to remember that encouraging young people to join a privileged English-speaking élite educated in foreign universities is only one of many possible educational options.


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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday August 11 2020, @01:58PM (2 children)

    by looorg (578) on Tuesday August 11 2020, @01:58PM (#1034906)

    You might as well just say Ni Hao. You are more likely to find a person that understands that greeting, albeit somewhat depending on where in the world you are. Esperanto is just one gigantic failure of a language.

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  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:42AM (1 child)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:42AM (#1035320) Homepage Journal

    One thing it got wrong was genders. Yes, it has masculine and feminine. You get the feminine from the masculine bu adding a suffix. To get the common-gender word, you add a prefix. This establishes masculine as the unmarked gender. As a result, speakers tend to use the masculine word in common-gender situations. So if you're talking about ducks, you tend not to bother putting the common-gender prefix on, and you end up using the masculine form even when the ducks are female.