Children in France may be forced to learn English
By IANSSunday, January 30, 2011
LONDON - Children in France will be forced to learn the English language from as early as nursery school if President Nicolas Sarkozy gets his way, a media report here said.
Sarkozy, who has recently come under fire for his own grasp of French language, has said that he wants France’s youngsters to learn “the language of Shakespeare”, the Daily Mail reported Sunday.
He further enraged a proud — and sensitive — nation by suggesting that children should learn the Queen’s English… from as young as three.
Critics fear that Sarkozy’s latest suggestions about linguistics will dilute the cherished French language and its dissemination.
The mooted educational change has sparked intense debate in France, with staunch right-wing traditionalist intellectual Eric Zemmour dipping his oar, praising his country’s resistance to learn English.
It is “a sort of unconscious linguistic resistance to the colonisation of minds”, he was quoted as saying in the Sunday Times.
Zemmour said that the desire to study English is just a “fad”, akin to “learning German during the occupation”.
However, Sarkozy’s Education Minister Luc Chatel this week said: “Not mastering English in France these days is a handicap.”
He said that plans were afoot to educate three-year olds English with the help of computers. In England school pupils tend to take on a foreign language at the age of 11, though some start earlier.
“Three years old seems much too young for me,” teacher and linguist Claude Hagege said, arguing that at that age a child will not have even mastered their mother tongue.
Bizarrely, under new educational reforms signed off by Sarkozy, some 1,000 language teachers are to lose their jobs this coming year, the report said.
Some say that the plans are a reaction to the president’s personal frustration at not being fluent in English and missing out on some of the jocular banter that flies at the world leaders’ top table.
According to the daily, it is the latest in a growing list of perceived anti-French behaviour by Sarkozy, who turned 56 Friday.
Earlier in January a minister leapt to the defence of Sarkozy after the president was accused of speaking in a vulgar and common manner and without paying due attention to normal grammatical rules.
