EDUCATION in the mother-tongue makes sense for most students - provided they are also taught English adequately and effectively as a foreign language. Parents who subject very young children to hours of private English tuition - to try to ensure they are ahead in the race for a dwindling number of places in English-medium schools - may be doing them a disservice. By perpetuating the stigma attached to Chinese-medium education, they make it harder for good schools to switch to mother-tongue teaching.
Many parents, however, believe the Education Commission's recommendation that English should not generally be taught until Primary Four leaves them little choice. The commission's proposal deprives the linguistically gifted of the chance to move on to English-medium schools with a firm foundation in the language. Other children, though less likely to benefit from English-medium education, should be exposed to the language at as young an age as possible.
As the commission recognises, however, the value of this exposure depends on the availability of qualified teachers. Youngsters will learn poor English from teachers whose grasp of the language is weak. The mistakes learned when children are most naturally mimicking adult speech may prove hard to correct.
Parents' desire to do the best for their children's education should not be dismissed as pushiness. It should be an incentive to boost the number and quality of trained primary and pre-primary language teachers and to introduce more modern methods of teaching English. The commission suggests that schools be encouraged to implement alternative programmes and parents be given a choice. This, however, can be no substitute for a commitment to teacher-training. There are not enough skilled English teachers at primary level. That is one of the roots of the language problem.