There was a good turnout for the multicultural society’s election debate on integration on Åland yesterday evening. It took place in Mariehamn’s library. All the parties were represented in the panel and I was there for the Social Democrats along with Siv Hallbäck and Mats Granesäter, both of whom put in excellent performances. Though it was only one of the four questions that we were asked to discuss, almost the entire debate which followed the initial presentation of the parties’ positions by their panelists was given over to discussion of “hemspråksundervisning”.
All the panelists were strongly against with the excpetion of the Social Democrats. Pleasantly, there was much more support from the audience. An audience which, perhaps unsurprisingly given the location and the topic of discussion, seemed to have a high proportion of Liberal and Social Democrat supporters.
Agruments raised against were:
1. that it will cost too much to offer it to every possible language group
FS. Many, many, many times, despite repeated attempts to explain that we’d said where there are sufficient students to warrant it.
2. that it is discriminatory against those language groups we can’t offer it to because there aren’t enough chlidren who speak the language
Olof Erland, Liberal. It’s a misuse of the word discriminatory. Every group is treated the same, what counts is if there are enough children who speak the language. I understand, for example, that there is some variation in which languages are taught at Lusse depending on how much interest there is from the students in learning them, but we don’t say those students who want to learn a language where there isn’t sufficient interest are discriminated against. In the case of hemspråksundervisning, it’s an attempt to prevent an improvement in the situation for many children by arguing that it does not improve it for all of them.
3. that it is discriminatory because we only proposed introducing it in Mariehamn
Centre. She didn’t want it outside Mariehamn either, but objected to it being offered in Mariehamn on the grounds it wasn’t going to be offered outside Mariehamn! It was therefore discriminatory against chlidren in Geta. There was me thinking Centre were all for the municipalities making decisions for themselves. Mariehamn appears to be an exception.
4. that we are trying to create an elite who are bilingual English/Swedish or Finnish/Swedish
Åland’s Future. No, we aren’t. But at least this argument implicitly accepts that hemspråksundervisning is a good thing for the children. There are also other languages, such as persian, where there could be sufficient pupils to merit hemspråksundervisning. What’s notable about English and Finnish is that they are already taught in schools here, but that very little account is taken of the fact that there are children for whom they are not foreign languages.
5. that it is bad for the children
Ben Haidari, Liberal. No, it isn’t. There is a general consensus in the field that it doesn’t have negative consequences for how well they learn the dominant language in their society. There is also research which shows the opposite to be true (see, for example, Professor Kenneth Hyltenstam’s work in the area). At the same time it’s extremely important not to neglect Swedish. We are not suggesting all teaching should be in the children’s home language. Just that they should get an extra couple of hours a week of support-teaching in the language they speak at home. There is no inherent clash between doing that and providing top quality teaching of Swedish.
Posted by hagmarkcooper 
