The more things change, the more….
Posted by Ricky in Opinion under on Sep 04 2007
One of the incidental, but great, pleasures of getting by in another language is to discover exactly the same self-doubts and navel gazing over at the neighbours. Following our annual wail at levels of literacy and numeracy, I came across this within an online conversation in France’s LeMonde:
The High Council of Education’s report underlines the fact that each year “four out of ten Primary children move into Secondary with serious deficiencies”, that “nearly 200,000 among them have inadequate mastery of reading, writing and arithmetic”, of whom “more than 100,000 are without even basic skills in these areas” It is “urgent to address this”, it says.’
Now if we have the same problems, perhaps we should share solutions. Umm, perhaps, even, we could get together with those neighbouring countries who, after all, share the same cultural roots, whose languages derive from the same source, who largely come from the same migrations, whose history cannot be unravelled from our own, whose problems are almost bound to be similar, and form some sort of union. After all, by the strength of our common endeavour we can achieve more than we achieve alone. I know, let’s call it the European Union. Nice and short and un-controversial.
