[LINK] "Native language skills key to Inuit academic success: report``

[rfmcdonald]

Bob Weber's Canadian Press article makes a point that has been made before, and often: in order to take full advantage of education, children need competency in their native language.

“We need to do much more to get the graduation rates up in terms of our kids who aren't getting through school,” Mary Simon, head of Canada's national Inuit group, said Thursday at the release of a report on the future of Inuit education.
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The report is the result of more than two years of work by federal, provincial, territorial and aboriginal representatives. It concludes that the key to improving a 25 per cent graduation rate for Inuit children is teaching them in their aboriginal language as well as in English or French. Education is considered by many as crucial to addressing many of the North's pressing social issues.

[. . .]

Bilingual education, the subject of three of the report's 10 recommendations, has long been controversial in the North.

Some argue that since proficiency in English is key to success for young Inuit, classes should be given in English alone. Others argue that children do better if they have solid skills in their mother tongue — which remains Inuktitut in Nunavut and other parts of the North — before they cope with a second language.

Ms. Simon has pointed to a 2008 United Nations panel that found the greatest predictor of success in school for aboriginal children was how long they were taught in their first language. As well, a 2006 study by retired justice Thomas Berger found that Nunavut's current education system is producing graduates competent in neither English nor Inuktitut.

Mr. Berger recommended bilingual schools and said it would take about $20 million a year to implement them.