The Wrangell sentinel., 1930-01-30
INDIAN SCHOOLS ARE
 STRONG FOR ENGLISH
Special Efforts Made to Have Chil- dren FOrsake Language of
 Their Forbears


 The January issue of the Month ly News Bulletin which is issued by the Alaska Division of the Bureau of Education of which Jonathan H. Wagner is chief, contains the fol- lowing:
 There is no finer or more vaiu- able piece of work to be done in the primary grades than to furnish to the native-speaking child of Alaska the opportunity to learn English, which is lacking in his home and in most cases his whole environment outside of our school. The entire days work will then be based upon the child's language necessities; first and last in the elementary grades, the object will be to teach English and everything will be cor related with it. Not that the en- tire days work is to consist of one prolonged formal language lesson; on the contrary, as much as pos sible English must be presented as was his native tongue, so that for the native child it is mainly a pro- cess of absorbing and giving back what he hears around him in the lesson, in the games and in the busy work of the properly planned sub jects.
 The school with it's lessons, games and grounds, supplies the language environment that is lack ing in the home and elsewhere. The problem in the school is to make English the language of the school, not in a passive sense, but actively, vitally: It must put English names for familiar objects and experi- enees into the foreground. That is the vital defect with many primary text books used in our schools for natives of Alaska. Many of the H. lustrations and lines in these books do not objectify objects and experi- ences familiar to the Eskimo child  of the north. It will be up to the teacher to supply and revise subject matter appropriate to the grade of the child who is learning to read and speak far more than reading and speaking to learn. It is also necessary to correct the spoken word in a vivid way and repeatedly with the object and action for which it stands.
 The ease with which a foreign word may push out a native term and eventually lose it's foreign quail ity is shown by the readiness with which we have adopted the French words garage" and chauffeur" ]" The continued use of a word with reference to an object, action or ex- perience will have the same result. There should be no attempt to pre- vent the child's speaking a foreign language, especially when it is his mother-tongue; to be bi-lingual is a distinct advantage. I remember a decade ago inspecting a school in a Spanish-speaking community of the southwest where the most conspicu- ous object on the school playfield was a large sign printed in Spanish which translated read: "It is not permitted to play ball nor speak Spanish on these premises. The teachers in that school were neg lecting their great opportunities to teach English; they should have been on those grounds and partic- ipating and directing in the speech of our country, and the play most appropriate to those premises. But the first and most important work of our teachers in the native Alaska communities is to teach the child who hears a non-English language at home in such a way that he will feel that English is his mother tongue and that his mothers tongue is the other language.