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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:39PM (1 child)
I don't know, we've got plenty of misunderstanding, hatred, and war even between native English speakers. Might be interesting to do a historic analysis of how bad those have been between same-language groups versus different-language groups, but I suspect there's not actually much difference. The quest for cultural supremacy and power is not going to be quenched by something as simple as being able to understand the insults you're hurling at each other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @04:49AM
They tend to be less bad as you're expecting things to not translate properly between languages. It's why you have your interpreter interpret to your language and not to the other person's language. It greatly cuts down on shenanigans with purposeful mistranslation. But, when you're speaking the same language and things aren't being clearly communicated, that can get very ugly as all parties involved are supposed to agree about what the language means, but that doesn't always happen.
That's not to say that there haven't been major problems between speakers of different languages, just that they are more likely to be caught as it's expected that some concepts and words won't translate well.