"A Fair Go" is a traditional Australian expression for valuing social justice.
The choice of first LOTE to be taught to our children can provide:
1. A Fair Go for your Child
- Esperanto lets your child learn from you and other trusted adults, it is a language you can feel confident to help teach, or to learn together.
- Esperanto helps your child to succeed and feel capable.
- Esperanto provides opportunities to learn about the whole world; its unity and diversity.
- Esperanto is a flexible tool for early education which promotes success in later language learning, whatever the choice.
2. A Fair Go For Your Class
- Choosing Esperanto shows respect for all cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
- Esperanto gives all children a chance to succeed, whether they are generally or linguistically gifted or disadvantaged.
- Esperanto provides the literacy-promoting advantages of transparent grammar.
- Esperanto gives all children a level playing field, as much as possible.
3. A Fair Go for Australia's Children
- All English-speaking countries have a chronic shortage of qualified and competent Language teachers. Efforts to recruit more teachers have been both constant and varied, but there is no way that all Australian children can be offered a second language delivered by language specialists. Children in poor and rural areas are being further disadvantaged by missing LOTE education.
- Starting all over again with a different language when your language teacher gets a transfer, or you change schools, would be a very rare misfortune if Australia equipped most primary schools to provide Esperanto LOTE using generalist teachers.
- Our children deserve for their time to be used effectively and efficiently and one lesson per week is not an effective way to learn a language. Properly equipped generalist teachers can provide shorter, more frequent, more flexible and integrated learning opportunities.
- Our children should be offered tasks that are achievable in the time available. Becoming bilingual may be such a goal, if Esperanto is the first LOTE.
4. A Fair go for the World’s Children
- The 90% of children whose first language is not English are the least able to access medical, environmental or political help, and the least able to pay for the education that would change things.
- They can learn Esperanto in between a fifth and an eighth of the time English would take, gain access to the world community through contact with Australians of the future, and still have time to master and use their own languages.
