Britain turned down the offer to remain a member of the cultural exchange program after Brexit.
The U.K. decided to leave the EU’s Erasmus+ student exchange scheme because Brits’ poor foreign language skills made membership too expensive to justify, a senior British official has revealed.
Lower take-up of the scheme by British students compared to other nationalities — put down to a weak aptitude for language learning — meant London expected to pay in nearly €300 million more a year than it received back, Nick Leake, a veteran senior diplomat at the U.K. Mission said this week.
It comes as youth organizations on both sides of the channel launch a renewed push for the U.K. to rejoin the scheme — and as an EU advisory body urges the Commission to get negotiations going.
So if I am reading this correctly, the problem is that UK students are not interested in going abroad (weak foreign language skills) and many Continental European students want to come to the UK (as almost everyone is learning English).
This means the UK has to pay more money than it receives.
But with this money, they would be ‘buying’ the chance to hold the interest of highly educated young people, who might love the British way of life and come back to work in the UK…
Sounds like just another step into economical and cultural irrelevancy.
Saving some money short term, losing a whole bunch long term.
weak aptitude for language learning
This is such bullshit. As a Brit abroad, our problem is weak language education. We are taught to such a poor degree and we are not taught how to learn a language. It’s been the biggest struggle of my adult life trying to get conversational and after a year I am still way behind my cohorts - it’s not some genetic predisposition to being bad at language learning, but a lack of language infrastructure in childhood.
Amazingly native English speakers the world over seem to have this genetic predisposition! All of us just can’t seem to get it together when it comes to becoming multilingual.
OR… maybe it comes from being born into mastery of the language everyone else on earth is trying to learn. I get three words in Spanish out before my conversation partner asks to switch to English. What am I gonna do? Stamp my feet and demand I get to practice my hobby and deny them the opportunity to work on a valuable career skill. Nah. We’ll speak in English.
Your ancestors (assuming you are British) created a global language hegemony. My ancestors moved from southern Italy to the US and learned their language.
Not entirely sure what you’re saying, sorry if I got it wrong, but it seems like you’re implying I said the opposite of what I actually posted.
My point was there is no genetic predisposition to being bad at language learning but that the language education in the UK is woefully bad. I’ve spent more time learning how to learn Spanish than actually learning it because we’re not taught the skill of language acquisition from childhood.
The reason the government hasn’t invested in language skills is because it’s the lingua franca (the irony of that phrase isn’t lost on me), but the argument of “weak aptitude for language learning” used in the article is patently false.
I was agreeing with you and being a little sarcastic. Of course you are right, there is nothing genetic about it.
There is very little incentive for native English speakers to learn a second language because English is far and away the most popular second language.
Which I’m sure is a contributing factor to the complete lack of investment in second language education the anglophone world.
Ahh just misread then, all good :D
and who’s fault is that, smhsmh
whose
