Statement by Giorgio Pagano – Radicals/ERA
"Gelmini wants to make Italy like South Korea," says Giorgio Pagano, Secretary of the "Esperanto" Radical Association.
"The proposal brought forward by the minister to introduce a national English exam in third grade, and exam that would be set alongside the Italian and the Math exam, proves that the goverment’s political aim in safeguarding the language is the complete opposite of what it should be: total destruction. Let us remind that it is the same goverment that has cut the budget of the many organisms designed to protect the Italian languag," Pagano continued. "We can compare this to the language path that has taken place in South Korea, a monolingual country where there are those who try to educate in English as the official language, to mantain, according to many scholars, the leading powers unchanged. It is the same thing that is happening to us: English is used as a passport to authorized innovation, in order to preserve the rigid structure of the party-ocracy, erasing mulitlinguism which made diversity a value. This value is obviously never chosen over the approval of terminal colonization.
Rome, May 11 2011