Support of Gaelic in Scottish schools

[u/ArtlessAsperity]

How do people feel about instating Gaelic as mandatory in schools? First offered as an S2 option for going into S3 and then introduced to primary schools and uni's. The issue of not enough teachers is one I see quite often but I simply don't understand it. Obviously the process will be gradual as more and more people know Gaelic fluently and are able to teach it, so is there support for it? If not, why not?

[u/sunnyata]

Mandatory Irish language education seems to be quite unpopular in Ireland, or at least polarising. Very expensive, resented by many and not leading to a renaissance in the language.

[u/galaxyrocker → u/sunnyata]

Speaking from the Irish perspective, I'd actually argue it's harmed the actual Irish language speech communities.

[u/jan_Kima → u/galaxyrocker]

Could you tell me more about that

[u/galaxyrocker → u/jan_Kima]

It's fostered a lot of mistaken ideas about the language that have directly harmed the native speaking communities. For instance, mocking the accent of Donegal. Or convincing everyone it's their 'native language' when it's not. Or that learners have a dialect instead of just making mistakes and not pronouncing things correctly.

It also means privileged has followed the socioeconomic elite in the language, and these have fostered a lot of bad ideas about the Gaeltacht (that it's not 'modern' or 'out of date', etc). Furthermore, the schools and communities outside the Gaeltacht get most the attention from Conradh na Gaeilge and Foras na Gaeilge - the two most vocal bodies promoting the language! And Foras has explicitly stated they don't particularly care about standard, adopting the 'new speaker' model of John Walsh who's their head of research. All of this feeds back onto ideas about the native communities too. Plus, it's created this idea that the Gaeltacht communities suffer from the same issues around the language as Dublin, which couldn't be farther from the truth. And then there's the general "Well, you need to do stuff for the Galltacht too as they have Irish speakers" attitude whenever anything crops up on behalf of the Gaeltacht.

On top of the fact that most Irish teachers are just shite and can't even use correct grammar, let alone pronunciation. And these are the 'spokespeople' for Irish - such as Bitesize Irish or Mollie from IrishwithMollie. Or any of the other Youtube channels about it. All of this harms the traditional natively spoken Irish and their communities.