The case for French immersion

What are the good arguments against French immersion schooling in Canada today? Answer: there are none.

Despite that, this is the time of year when many parents across Ontario and Canada are anxiously asking themselves whether they should enrol their children — or indeed keep their children — in a French immersion program. The stakes are high; no parent wishes to make a mistake in choosing a child’s educational path.

Full confession: I have two kids in French immersion. I myself am a member of the first generation of Toronto French immersion graduates — those who started learning French in kindergarten in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I work regularly in both languages. My father, a newcomer to Canada, queued up from 5 a.m. to sign me up for what was then a pioneering initiative — to school kids in English Canada in their second language in the wake of the 1969 Official Languages Act.

Strange thing: Some 90 per cent of my Grade 8 class — many of them strong students in their own right — dropped out of French immersion as high school approached. I and a few stubborn stragglers stuck with it. Stranger thing still: The arguments for dropping out of French immersion back then, or for not enrolling in immersion at all, have not changed at all over the past three decades. They are the same three I hear from fellow parents across the country as they struggle with the French immersion question.

The first argument is that French immersion will cause a student’s English to suffer.

I am aware of no serious study that affirms this presumption. If anything, studies appear to point to the opposite conclusion — to wit, that French immersion students graduate with excellent, if not superior, English-language skills.

The second argument, this time hailing from parents without French, is that they will not be able to help their child with homework in a tongue they themselves do not understand.

This argument, too, does not hold water. Witness the high academic achievement rates among countless English-asa-second-language immigrant Canadians graduating from English-language schools.

The final argument — deployed in the 1980s just as it is today — is that French is not a critical second language for employment purposes in Canada or internationally.

Why does my child need a second language? And if she needs one, why French? Why not, say, Mandarin or Spanish or Hindi?

The best answer today is largely the same as it ought to have been back then. We are Canadians. In Canada, there are two official languages — English and French. And we need as many people as possible across the country speaking both languages fluently in order to ensure that the federation fires on all cylinders — politically, economically and culturally — and stays together for the long run.

Consider that 150 years into modern Canadian federalism, Statistics Canada suggests that only 18 per cent of the national population is properly bilingual. This is a pitifully low proportion given that we choose our prime ministers and cabinet ministers, deputy ministers and senior civil servants, diplomats, many premiers, and Supreme Court justices from this small talent pool.

If it behooves us to widen the talent pool significantly, we must still recognize that the glorification of bilingualism — in which French immersion schools themselves participate — as the highest standard of the cultivated, public gentleman or woman in Canada today can appear slightly absurd when we see that the leading countries of Asia and Europe are training younger generations of citizens to be fluent in three or four languages, with few complexes or parades.

The good news is that, if Canadian multilingualism must inevitably pass through English-French bilingualism, then it helps our cause that French remains a top 10 global language today, with a future global footprint estimated at 700 million speakers by the year 2050. That makes it one of the world’s leading languages of this century. Talk about employment opportunities.

In short, not only are these standard arguments against French immersion very weak, but we in Canada should by now be treating French immersion as a patently minimal standard of education rather than a vaunted maximum — a maximum we’ve hardly reached, in any event.

Let us have the best possible schools, with the best possible teachers across all subjects. But on the question of French immersion, let us not make much of a fuss: So your kid is bilingual. Check.

Now, why only bilingual?

The glorification of bilingualism can appear slightly absurd when we see leading countries training younger generations to be fluent in three or four languages