While the Ministry of Education’s decision to expand compulsory classes for bentu (本土, “local” or “native”) languages to the junior-high school level should be applauded, it raises questions about attitudes toward these languages.
On Saturday, the ministry announced that seventh and eighth-grade students from next year would have one mandatory weekly session of Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese), Hakka, an Aboriginal language or Taiwan Sign Language, while the subjects would be optional for ninth-grade students.
Schools would offer at least one Aboriginal language session per week to ninth graders.
This is a positive development for Taiwan’s commitment to preserving the nation’s languages, many of which are at risk of dying out due to past government policies that oppressed them in favor of Mandarin.
One session per week might not seem like a lot, but it would expose more students to such languages and give them opportunities to explore further as teenagers who have an enhanced understanding of the importance of learning their mother tongue.
They would be able to search for other resources, such as family members or online supplements, to further their capabilities, which would encourage their parents and other relatives to use the language more.
Many parents have said that one bentu class per week at elementary schools is not nearly enough for children to learn anything meaningful. Is it wise to simply replicate this model at the junior-high school level without reflecting on what worked at elementary schools? Will it just become another situation where students learn English for nine years, but can barely speak it when they graduate?
The problem is that adding more classes is out of the question, as many teachers, school staff and parents are already complaining that this change would take a lot of time away from “major” subjects or other sessions that students are given to pursue their own interests.
It seems that many parents do not value bentu, seeing them as a “special interest.”
That is exactly why they are in decline.
Moreover, the National Policy Foundation, a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) think tank, called the policy change “bullying education.”
However, it was the KMT that bullied these languages into decline by punishing people for speaking them, so to even dare state such an opinion is utterly shameless.
While two years of one mandatory class per week is probably not going to do much to revive such languages, anything is better than letting them die. The point is to at least keep the students exposed to them, while legitimizing languages that were banned in schools for so long.
Not everyone who takes the courses will be interested in them, but it is a lifeline for those who are. As bentu entertainment also gains clout, more students might become interested.
The question is how to get everyone on the same page and agree that it is immensely important to keep these languages alive before it is too late. If schools continue to treat the subject as a burden, and parents think that it is a waste of time, the students would have little motivation to engage.
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