http://forumoj.esperanto.org.au/comments.php?Discu...

This letter to some person in the Australian government who I have never heard of before seems to give an interesting idea of how LOTE (language other than English) education in the school system could be bolstered by Esperanto; the better part being that the person in the govt seemed rather receptive to the idea if it did not completely replace LOTE in itself.

Of course, being a democracy someone in the bureaucracy down the line probably disagreed and it probably never got considered, and likely won't for god knows how long, but it's an interesting piece to read, or so I found.

Why not write to the Department of Education, Principality of Hutt River? (Possible answer: they haven't got one, since Australia is willing to provide free schooling to their kids ).

The government are accepting ideas from the public for the Australian national curriculum right now, or at least still were when I was in-country last month. The national curriculum is finally taking shape after many generations of having half-a-dozen odd slightly different curricula spread over the whole land. This proposal is a good idea. However I think the thylacine is right re the bureaucracy. They'd need more evidence the idea works and is viable, which probably means some enthusiastic teacher at some (non-HRP) school would just have to take the initiative and start teaching it, win over the reluctant community (many of whom probably think art and Shakespeare are pretty dumb things to teach too), and get the results. Actually, has this happened already in Australia?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Language_ac...

Four primary schools in Britain, with some 230 pupils, are currently following a course in "propedeutic Esperanto"—that is, instruction in Esperanto to raise language awareness and accelerate subsequent learning of foreign languages—under the supervision of the University of Manchester.[34] Studies have been conducted in New Zealand,[35] United States,[36][37][38] Germany,[39] Italy[40] and Australia.[41]

The results of these studies were favorable and demonstrated that studying Esperanto before another foreign language expedites the acquisition of the other, natural, language. This appears to be because learning subsequent foreign languages is easier than learning one's first, while the use of a grammatically simple and culturally flexible auxiliary language like Esperanto lessens the first-language learning hurdle.

In one study,[42] a group of European secondary school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command of French than a control group, who studied French for all four years. Similar results have been found for other combinations of native and second languages, as well as for arrangements in which the course of study was reduced to two years, of which six months is spent learning Esperanto.[43]

Seems like evidence enough for me to proceed further.

3rdblade:Actually, has this happened already in Australia?

Not entirely sure, I swear I've heard something about a possible trial run by uni students although no doubt that might have been in the UK instead.

A search of this page shows that there is one group of people giving actual lessons with Monash University, but just as uni-bound watered down communism is propagated at universities and still doesn't get any public support, I'm sure the same can be said for Esperanto in this case.

A problem might be in the teaching component - looking at the people doing teaching at my university, I'm not too certain many of them would care about Esperanto, let alone languages full stop (since my French course, being one of the biggest language courses at the university, has more people with science degrees doing it than people with teaching degrees last time I checked), which as the letter I linked to said, goes to show that LOTE in general in Australia's in trouble as a whole if we're lacking teachers who can actually teach in another language.

To those abroad, how do your LOTE programs stand? Is it just Australia or is LOTE education in most English speaking countries fundamentally broken? I get the impression 3rd hand that in America that Spanish is given great importance but not necessarily taught in schools very efficiently (but the US LOTE program or equivalent seems better off than Australia's, depite having different multicultural policies - seems language diversity and culture diversity don't link up), but I may be wrong so feel free to correct or add or whatever

@ Genjix: I agree. And I can give my tainted and clearly biased first hand experience for that as well, since learning Esperanto has been the saviour of my language study throughout my life. Just dispelling public bad opinion is hard.

At one time I thought they should have a law that in democracy, only smart people should have their say, before realising that in most cases it was the smart people saying all the stupid things in the first place - in Esperanto's case, the problem is overcoming those who overanalyse the situation. For example, no kittens die or anything when someone learns Tagalog, despite Tagalog's relevance in the bigger picture being questionable, and no one with a scratch of national credibility and enough influence on the ballot box would complain that Australia's losing its culture by teaching Chinese to students despite how much of a behemoth chinese culture represents. Yet, Esperanto comes into the mix and some dude with a law degree and who runs a business puts in his rusty 5 cents about how learning Esperanto is a waste of time on the basis of artificiality etc et al, and all the benefits get overlooked without anyone questioning the notion of artificial being bad. Not to mention how people say "it's more important we teach our children better English instead of SMS-language", without knowing what Good English actually is or knowing what's bad about SMS language (nor what's good about it either).

Mind you, me complaining like this does nothing to win over detractors, but I need to get that bit off my chest .

@ Miland: Ha, those guys probably get away with home schooling, of course, it requires them to have any children there in their population of 30.

Nice case. Generally people aren't stupid. Yet when clever people deem themselves experts at everything, commenting on things they know nothing of, then we get the situation we inherit now.

Someone hears 'Esperanto' and immediately blurts out ARTIFICIAL!

Yesterday I was reading about an urban planning movement called New Urbanism. Where employed it has dramatic success in building communities. The concept goes against Suburbanism and the American dream of big houses, large roads, residential areas .etc. Listening to a diatribe by an American against New Urbanism, my heart sank when he blurted out ARTIFICIAL.

Emotional reaction. All I can say.

Genjix:Nice case. Generally people aren't stupid. Yet when clever people deem themselves experts at everything, commenting on things they know nothing of, then we get the situation we inherit now.

Someone hears 'Esperanto' and immediately blurts out ARTIFICIAL!

... my heart sank when he blurted out ARTIFICIAL.

Emotional reaction. All I can say.

SKANDAL, ARTIFICIAL intelligence (/ flavour inside the yogurt).

It does make one wonder why humans are so anti-artificial at times, considering the world we grow up in, everything we say and think are artificial by nature (and therefore naturally artificial, or artificially natural ). Perhaps we as people generally find ourselves hard to live with for some reason, maybe that reason being that we've always got the question on our consciences about whether what we do is really the right or wrong thing, and thus whether the artificial world we're creating for ourselves is really a good thing...

@ Qwertz:

Ich kann das Lied nicht verstehen Was ist der Liedtext in Englisch/oder "summary" in Englisch? (Auch, gibt es Rs wie in Italisch in das Lied?)

Artificial intelligence is a big issue for many I think since it makes us feel uncomfortable with the idea that we can "create" a soul, and since we've gone for so long thinking we as people are the only things that can have souls, it's a big slap in the face to ourselves

EDIT: Mind you, this probably isn't the best way to make either artificial intelligence nor table tennis look friendly:
TOPIO table tennis playing robot

We even lengthen our live time artifically i.e. with artifical produced medicaments etc. Why we all do that and don't go back to nature/ the roots? Maybe rewind back to bigbang? Pfff...

artificial is an artificial word. ĉiuj devenas la sunon mem.