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From: dik@cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter)
Subject: Re: Esperanto? The EU? (Very, very long)
Message-ID: <D45Guv.Ly3@cwi.nl>
Keywords: esperanto EU language planning education
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Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
References: <elnaD42uo7.Axq@netcom.com> <3i0v34$7is@fido.asd.sgi.com> <3i1ntk$8lc@blackrabbit.cs.uoregon.edu>
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 1995 15:11:19 GMT
Lines: 39

In article <3i1ntk$8lc@blackrabbit.cs.uoregon.edu> bhelm@cs.uoregon.edu (B. Robert Helm) writes:
 > This has happened before in Europe.  English instruction is subsidized
 > and imposed.

In the Netherlands it is subsidized (like all instruction) but not imposed.
The requirement currently is only at least a single foreign language (where
the choice is English, French and German).  Although some of the bigger
schools offer other languages as optional (a school is big when there are
over 180 children in each year; many schools are not big and some are
much smaller).  It is allowed that schools impose some additional
requirements, but the bigger schools do not.

 >               It did not reach its current favored position in
 > Europe's schools because millions of consumers in the "free market"
 > bought Hershey's chocolate instead of Cote d'Or and sent the wrappers
 > to their respective Ministries of Education.

Well, in the Netherlands it did.  Look at the figures posted some time
ago (I think it was over 90% English in the Netherlands).

 >                                                      The grievance
 > might also concern spending seven or more years learning a language
 > encrusted with irregularities and idioms so that they will one day
 > have the privilege of watching "The Last Action Hero" and the
 > O. J. Simpson trials in that tongue on all 500 of Rupert Murdoch's
 > European TV channels.

Perhaps.  We do not get many English spoken channels overhere.  We here
English also on the Dutch channels, all 5 of them.
...
 >                                             That is, Esperanto might
 > be a tool for implementing the present EU policy of "two foreign
 > languages" for all.

There is no such EU policy.  There are national policies, and they are not
this one.  But they differ probably.
-- 
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj  amsterdam, nederland, +31205924098
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn  amsterdam, nederland; e-mail: dik@cwi.nl
