Stop forcing our students to use English

De Volkskrant (Amsterdam)

I get the idea that Dutch students should be encouraged to speak English, the world’s “lingua franca” – but you can have too much of a good thing, says Felix Huygen. Already more than two-thirds of postgraduate education in the Netherlands is done in English, even though a law says it must be conducted in Dutch – and now undergraduate teaching is going the same way. Leiden University is the latest to announce plans to switch entirely to English for various science and technology subjects. This is madness. Many students struggle to express themselves in their own language: how will they cope using someone else’s? It takes years of immersion in an English-speaking country to achieve the same nuance of expression one enjoys with one’s mother tongue. I’ve seen politics students who discourse animatedly in Dutch on Aristotle’s ideas on democracy reduced to tongue-tied stammering when made to use English. Indeed, a 2003 report found a marked decline in academic achievement when universities made the switch. But the government ignored it. Desperate education experts now plan to take the government to court. If the politicians won’t see sense, let’s hope the judges will.