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Curriculum renewal in school foreign language learning
An overview
- Source: Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, Volume 9, Issue 1, Jan 1986, p. 14 - 42
Abstract
“But you, who are wise, must know that different Nations have different conceptions of things and you will therefore not take it amiss, if our ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same as yours. We have had some experience of it. Several of our young people were formerly brought up at the colleges of the northern provinces; they were instructed in all your sciences; but when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods .... neither fit for hunters, warriors, nor councellors, they were totally good for nothing.
We are, however, not the less oblig’d by your kind offer, tho’ we decline accepting it: and, to show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their sons, we will take care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them”.
(Response of the Indians of the six nations to a suggestion that they send boys to an American college, Pennsylvania, 1744).