IMPACT OF HIGH SCHOOL PREPARATION
399
river, who said that all politics begin with the house and the neighbor–
hood. I believe that all discussion about school reform also begins there.
Perhaps, Chester, it doesn't end there. The state is requiring that elemen–
tary school children in all grades receive instruction and competence in
world language. K-8 feeds my school district, a high school district, and the
elementary school districts are completely independent of me. They have
their own boards. This state mandate that is to be implemented in two
years, but I must plan for it now.
To Dr. Scholz. In the elementary districts that feed my high school,
language instruction begins in grades 6, 7, and 8: French, German, Latin,
Spanish. There is no language instruction K-S. No instruction whatsoever
in world languages. First, which language do we focus on for the children
in K-S? How many languages? These children are all highly homogeneous,
in class, race, and ethnicity. Secondly, do I use language specialists who
now teach grades 6, 7, and 8 in K-S, hire more of them, or can I use the
elementary-trained teachers, not trained in world languages, to teach world
languages? At the micro level these questions are bedeviling all of the New
Jersey school districts trying to figure out how to teach world languages K-
5 when there are no more language programs.
Kurt Scholz:
There are some things in the U.S. educational debate that I
never understood. I do not want to sound morally superior; no country or
school system is morally superior to any other. But when your second
educational president announces that his main goal is that by the end of the
third school year every U.S. child should be able to read and to write and
to have the basic mathematical skills, forgive me for saying that in the
German-speaking school systems, it takes ninety-something percent of the
children three months to learn to write and to read, to write in two dif–
ferent styles. There are some things I never understood in the U.S. debates.
Three years for the basics, from a European point of view, that's incredi–
ble. As far as the early acquisition of a foreign language is concerned, the
situation in Austria is much easier, because our second language is the pre–
sent world language, which is English. So we don't have any problem there.
As said before, some 60 percent of Viennese children start with English at
the age of six. They do not speak English very well but almost 100 per–
cent start to understand English at the age of eight. So this is much easier
in Europe than in the United States.
Igor
Webb : Consequently, the problem I think you're going to face is that,
for most Americans, the notion of studying another language is abstract.
It's an abstract good thing to do, it's not a real good thing to do, because
actually you don't need to speak any other language since
the
international
