Bilingual education is a type of education in which students are tough new information in 2 or more languages. Given the fact that most schools nowadays introduce foreign languages from the early stages of education, we can consider all educational institutions to be bilingual. However the preponderance of foreign languages differs from one school to another. If you really want your child to receive a good education, you need to read some bilingual education articles and find a school which is intensively bilingual.If you are not sure whether or not this type of education is truly valuable, you might find the following lines to be very interesting.
Cognitive values
For starters, children who study in two or more languages are more receptive to new information and they have a wider access to curriculum. Cognitive flexibility is just as useful to native children as it is to foreigners. For example, a foreign child will have an easier time adapting to a new country if they have access to bilingual education. Needless to say that even native English children will also be more educated and they will have access to a wider job variety when they grow up, if they benefit from bilingual education.
Can bilingual education confuse the children?
This is probably the most common dilemma that is debated in bilingual education articles. The fact is that children have a great capacity of learning and they are a lot more receptive to new information than adults. In most cases of families moving to other countries, the children were able to learn a new language a lot faster than the adults. This proves that children have an unlimited learning capacity. Receiving a multilingual education will only make them more focused and it will help then develop a logical thinking instead of memorizing information which they don’t understand. In the United States, there have been a lot of budget cutouts in programs concerning this type of education. In most situations, certain government representatives motivated that these programs were costly and unnecessary since the lingua franca of the United States is English which is also spoken in most parts of the world. However, let us not forget that America is based on social and ethnic diversity. Given this concept, we can all agree on the fact cutting the budget for bilingual programs contradicts the American values.
When bilingual education becomes a problem
There are certain communities which consist mainly of foreigners. In these communities, it is not uncommon for schools to teach mainly in the native language of the members of the community and to treat English like less of a priority. These situations are not normal and they are not beneficial either. The predominant educational language needs to be English in order for all children to receive an equal education and equal opportunities in life.
