William "Chops" Westfield wrote: > On Mar 10, 2008, at 7:44 AM, William Chops Westfield wrote: > >> make the field level for an impossible variety of players. > > So what happens in Europe There is no Europe WRT school systems. They are all pretty much national, and the differences between them are big. > if students in K-12 grades have little to no working knowledge of the > native language the class it being taught in? I would think that this > would be even more of a problem in Europe than in the US? You mean French in Germany, Brits in Spain, that kind of thing? Seems to be quite the exception. If you move to the country, you have to learn the language. That's just it. Of course there are some problem areas, but they are different. For example Turks in Germany. Their problem is mainly cultural: they (that is, some of them) don't want to be in Germany, they don't want to live like Germans. So they don't integrate, they don't learn German, they have problems with the way things are done there. They don't want their kids to learn what they learn in German schools. But they stay, nonetheless. For generations. Maybe forever. (Always "they" means "some of them".) Nobody knows how to solve that. > Our high school won't have an ethnic majority. How ... odd. Is it really odder than before? I mean, wasn't it already kind of odd that the ethnic majority was an immigrant majority? I think the problems don't arise from the ethnicity (after all, the "ethnic majority" in the USA is only an ethnic majority because it lumps all kinds of ethnicities together into a rather arbitrary group "Caucasian" -- most of whom probably don't even know what or where the Caucasus is -- and you won't find many references to a Caucasian ethnicity in Europe) but from culture. I've seen ex-Mexicans that are more American than some Americans. Culture has a lot to do with education. So isn't it a really good thing that they all are in the same school? Gerhard -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist