POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL
I don't think this is regressive. The decision is based on hard facts, not just budget needs.
The kind of immersion program that has been so popular in recent years does not appear to be successful, and by 'successful' I mean in a statistical sense, not anecdotes of some successful children.
There are always children who have special advantages like nannies speaking French or are themselves gifted. We cannot generalize from such cases.
It is a fact that the average person is capable only of speaking one language well and a second rather poorly. For these kinds of children, immersion results in students who speak two languages roughly and neither really well.
Many children in current immersion programs do not continue in them beyond grade school. They are left, rather disadvantaged for high school.
Making sure children get their basics in their own language - those early years - is a very important need. A few linguistically-gifted children are able to grasp this material in an immersion environment, but most children are not very successful at it.
Starting children in a strong second-language program at grade 5 or 6 is probably the best that can be done on a mass basis. Public schools, on the whole, work for the average in skills and ability. I think New Brunswick is just being sensible.
We all know that languages are learned more easily in youth.
But what teachers and other bureaucrats miss is that that fact does not cancel the additional fact that most kids only have so much capacity for learning.
Children do have a natural intellectual endowment just as they have an endowment of energy and temperament and physical appearances.
Teaching two languages badly in the name of ease of early learning simply ignores this fact.
