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Comment by christophmccann | Hacker News Reader

In Scotland, there is a big movement to preserve the teaching of Gaelic. Whilst I think it is important to preserve culture and to preserve history, I don't think, in terms of youth education, that should outweigh the utility of skills and languages necessary for the modern world.

It seems slightly obtuse to me that whilst do not teach computer science, programming, engineering or science particularly well in schools, we should worry about the preservation of teaching of old languages. That being said, I think it is extremely important to teach kids (and the public in general) about history as a way of avoiding past mistakes so I don't think we should eliminate it - I just think there are more important things we need to fix first.

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The scots preservation of Gaelic is much less than in Ireland. When I was in school, I took Irish classes from when I was 5 until I left, as do the vast majority of children. Most Irish people have at least a handful of words and phrases they know. All of the road signs and government communications are translated into Irish.

(Disclaimer: I am Irish, and I do not agree with the mandatory nature of Irish lessons.)

The fact that 12-13 years of taking Irish classes daily leads to most Irish people having a few words and phrases is a damning indictment of our education system. It is also a perfect example of how saving a language that has fallen out of use is incredibly difficult. All that effort teaching a language to a country and, because it is almost never used outside of the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking areas, mostly in the west of the country) it has been my experience that most people very rapidly lose their ability in Irish after leaving school.

I have long held the position that forcing children to learn a dead (or at the very least, on advanced life support) language is doing more harm than good. It instilled antipathy towards Irish more than love for Irish in my peers. Making it an optional subject would mean only people who cared would study it, and they would perhaps be more likely to try and use it.

Gealic is not mandatory. English-only schools in west of ireland are underfunded. Parents could sign their children into English school with 50 another kids in single class, or into Geelic school with 20 children in class.

Irish is mandatory. All primary and secondary school students are required to learn Irish, normally around one hour per day on average. Our secondary school graduation exam (the Leaving Cert) has precisely one mandatory subject: Irish [1].

My mother is a primary teacher in a non-Gaelscoile (school taught through Irish), so I am well aware of the institutional funding bias that exists and agree it is completely unfair. It is another ill-thought out attempt by our Department of Education to prop up a failing system.

[1] Many Irish universities require English, Maths and a second language (Irish, French, German would be the most common). However if you don't want to go to college you don't need to sit those exams.

To be fair, I had almost eight years of French in school (Canadian), and the best I can do now is read it semi-fluently.

Languages have to be used or they're lost. I spent a year learning to read Old English and got up to a decent proficiency; that's gone, now, too.

Anything important enough to do well can instead be done badly.

Education policy in the West, but until the late 20th century, was oriented towards exterminated the use of minority languages. Consequently, there wasn't much experience until recently with policies to regenerate linguistic communities after oppression.

Mandating some minimal classroom instruction for non-mother-tongue speakers is exactly the kind of ineffective policies that people like Joshua Fishman criticize. More efforts these days is going into mother tongue preschools and "nests".

Side note: A couple of years ago I found myself working with a Welsh engineer who told me he learned English first as a teenager. Still almost can't believe it but he was very serious about it.

In Ireland, we have the Gaeltacht [1], which are areas where Irish is the primary language. I know a couple of older people who grew up in a Gaeltacht and only learned English in school, never using it at home. This would be much less likely nowadays, hard to avoid English on the Internet etc

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaeltacht

Welsh is less geographically concentrated, but is more spoken in the west and north. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language#/media/File:Wel...

That said, it's interesting that language has only a very limited input into the Scots' sense of nationhood, as contrasted with the Welsh for whom it is far more central.

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