[fimg=left]http://www.democrazialinguistica.it/4/momento_sputnik.jpg[/fimg] EU, Giorgio Pagano: " Sputnik moment for Europe "
Statement by the Secretary of the Esperanto Radical Association.
" The ‘Sputnik Moment’ which Obama spoke about to the American people, in Europe it’s called Esperanto." So states Giorgio Pagano, Secretary of the Esperanto Radical Association.
" Saving 16 billion dollars on the education of a foreign language, the American goverment has financed a third of the pubblic research in 2005; think of how much research Europe could do and how many investments it could make with the 350 billion EUROS a year which the non-English speaking countries spend to learn English! This is the mother of all the innovations, without which, the internal part of the EU would be reduced to a mere affair fir colonization and imitiation," Pagano continues.
" We must think of a way to work for the benefit of the whole Unione, non to become the soure of "happiness" for the other Constitutions. In Italy the schools have closed their doors to Italian Mothertongues and have opened them to English ones instead: Thanks to the Gelmini Reform, which requires teaching non-linguistic subjects in English, incentives for those who wish to discuss their thesis in the language of the USA or the United Kingdom.
Training the mind in a language which is not the native one, without allocating appropriate funds for research and withou giving them an employment, either, investing our money on youngsters that we send abroad to make the foreign country richer; now is the time to rise as the world’s first exporters of linuistic democracy" he concludes.