The perils of learning in English
Young children should be taught in their mother tongue instead
WHEN WINSTON CHURCHILL was at Harrow School, he was in the lowest stream. This did not, he wrote in “My Early Life”, blight his academic career, for “I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that...We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English...Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing.”
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “Babel is better”
From the February 23rd 2019 edition
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