George Orwell (one of Britain’s greatest writers) said in perhaps his best known book ‘The Road to Wigan Pier” the the British are “despite their convictions of innate superiority, actually the laziest people in Europe”. He was describing a different time (the first part of the last century) but I wonder how many across Europe would still agree with this. The German ambassador to the UK, Georg Boomgaarden, said on Thursday that the numbers of British school children learning foreign languages was problematic. He didn’t actually agree with Orwell but there was a hint that he might have had some sympathies with him! He acknowledged as a good thing that language teaching had become compulsory in primary schools in the UK – and was still compulsory up to the age of 14, but then nothing. Mr Boomgaarden said “It makes no sense to make early language training compulsory and then not follow it up.” He also said  he thought England would benefit culturally and materially if there was a return to the days when modern foreign languages were compulsory for 14 to 16-year-olds. You can read the article in the Independent here.

We have often written about the differences between British school children and their contemporaries in Europe and how far behind the British children generally are in their language learning. German particularly is suffering a dramatic fall in popularity and this is potentially hugely significant when over 100 million people speak German in Europe and this represents one of the biggest trading partners of the UK.

So why not change things a little – learn a foreign language today - UIC has courses in 6 different modern languages – including German. Over the next few weeks you might see some of the “think German” campaign being promoted in the UK.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Foreign Languages, UIC London. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.