[Dave Tonetti] A rebuttal to ‘harmful’ English education

A story ran in the British newspaper The Guardian recently with the following headline: South Korean parents told: Pre-school English ‘harmful.’ The sub-headline was: “Pressure group argues that money spent on early year classes is wasted and urges starting at age 10.” The operative word here is “pressure group,” but I’ll come back to that in a moment. For now, I will content myself with dissecting the arguments in the article, and dissection they need.

The very first line in the article attributes a claim to the “pressure group” that English education is “slowing their educational development,” “their” being children under the age of 10. That children under the age of 10 (however arbitrarily that magical number has been chosen is left to the reader’s imagination) could experience a slowing of their educational development is an obvious abnegation of the incredible learning capacity of a child’s mind.

Let’s stay with the age of 10 and consider what a child, any child of normal intellectual capacity, learns in those first years of life. Can you imagine? For starters, a child learns to recognize people, places and things and categorizes them into complexities of association that quite literally baffle developmental psychologists. Nobody really understands, and scientists will admit this, scientists I emphasize, how a human child’s mind from infancy can make such intricate categorizations.

That is just the barest minimum of cognitive feats that children’s minds accomplish in their early years. Children also learn a distinction between “self” and “other” very early in their development, prior to the age of 3, spatial concepts we take for granted, and quite surprisingly, very young children demonstrate an inherent tendency to altruistic behavior.

By far however, the greatest achievement of the human mind is its capacity to develop facility with language. To suggest that a child of normal mental ability is somehow “slowed” by language education is to misunderstand in the most fundamental way at least two very important aspects of human psychological development: what a child is capable of, and how language is acquired by children.

The pressure group, called “World without Worries about Private Education,” claims not only that educating young children to learn a second language could be “slowing their educational development,” but that it is potentially “harmful” and that “children are more likely to acquire more English if they start learning later.”

This is patently false as many years of research has demonstrated repeatedly in studies of bilingualism all over the world. Given enough exposure, the opportunity to practice, and providing reason for learning, children will learn any and all languages within their environment. Monolingualism is much rarer than bi- or multilingualism in the world. It is well-established that children have a much greater ability to develop native speaker pronunciation and grammatical facility than their older peers. Before their first birthday, children are “imitating” the “noises” that they hear and by the age of 3 have acquired basic syntax and internalized grammar rules.

Having said that, it must also be emphasized that no child speaks even their native language perfectly; they are children and they are learning. The optimal time for learning a second (or even a third or fourth) language is at the same time as the first, i.e. as early as possible.

“World without Worries” further claims that older children learn a second language better because of “well-developed cognitive skills and (motivation) to learn.” Again, this is a distortion of reality and based on falsehoods of human development. There is a vast repertoire of research on children who are bilingual from early ages that has solidly proved that they have a number of cognitive advantages over children who are not.

Early bilinguals have more highly developed critical thinking skills, are more creative and show more flexibility of mind than monolinguals. They outperform monolinguals in standardized tests of all academic subjects, including mathematics, and have higher academic achievement overall. This is because learning languages is a cognitive problem-solving venture and not just a linguistic one.

In regard to motivation, young children are strongly motivated to communicate. A multilingual childhood is also a multicultural childhood; in the world of the 21st century the ability to communicate cross-culturally is of paramount importance. Multilingualism engenders understanding of cultural diversity because language and culture are inseparable. Learning other languages also fosters insight into alternative perspectives about the world, which is also part of the reason why early bilinguals show higher cognitive abilities. Young children have not usually internalized negative perceptions of other cultures that could easily deter motivation to learn a foreign language in older kids. Young children experience language as a tool necessary for communication, so they are therefore highly motivated to learn, as opposed to an academic subject for older students, in which to receive a grade.

Many people point to the private English education system in South Korea and regard it as ineffective. It is viewed as a system for generating profit for all-too-often unscrupulous owners employing under-qualified “teachers.” This is no doubt true in some cases.

However, it is equally true that many owners and teachers genuinely care about the education they are providing. It is unfair and inaccurate to tar the whole lot. This makes as much sense as paving over the garden because there are a few weeds among the flowers. Many Korean children have had the benefit of caring teachers who have devoted time and energy to helping them learn. Through those efforts lots of kids have been given a gift of communication, the benefits of which go far beyond the classroom.

Pre-K institutes are effective, especially if they are immersion programs. Young children feel an intense need to communicate and that is the driving impetus in immersion. In the public education system, students are taught English through antiquated methodologies by teachers who instruct in Korean. The students are mostly bored and unmotivated because of these methodologies and more importantly, the lack of a real reason for learning language. Worse, they have limited instructional time and English is just a subject to pass. The result is that the vast majority of students enter university after six years of English instruction with very marginal skills. Talk about wasted time!

“World without Worries,” as a pressure group, is peddling fear-mongering propaganda disguised as academia in order to curtail or dispose of private English education institutes. This is their real agenda, a politically motivated abolishment of English hagwon, not an agenda based on academia or the real issues of second language acquisition in young children. Their reasons for their fear are not so apparent.

There have been a number of arguments traditionally put forward to discourage the practice of learning English in South Korea. Common among these are the following erroneous myths: a) that a child will not develop their Korean language skills, b) that learning another language will confuse children, and c) that older kids learn better than younger children. None of these is true.

“World without Worries” is trying to convince people that they are wasting their time and money putting pre-kindergarten children into English education schools. This is a sad reflection, and worse, they are using fear to achieve their ends by proposing that parents may be harming their children by giving them the gift of language.

Common sense, outside of the credibility that research has provided, tells parents that opening the minds of children with language cannot be harmful. It is “World without Worries” that is harming people by trying to convince them with false arguments and fear that young children learning English is somehow a bad idea. Of course, it is nonsense. Outside of love, language is the greatest gift we can give to children.

By Dave Tonetti

Dave Tonetti is an invited professor at Korea University where he teaches Ensligh as a foreign language. He holds a master of education in applied linguistics. ― Ed.