Passing on the gift of your heritage to the next generation

School boards in York Region offer extracurricular courses in variety of languages, writes Peter Rajchert

Yorkregion.com
November 26, 2018
Peter Rajchert

Every so often I speak with parents who feel a touch of melancholy about the fact that their children are losing the connection they had to their family’s original culture.

Canada is a multicultural country, of course, but over time most of our sons and daughters who were born and are growing up in Canada identify more with this country than their ancestral homeland.

Often they lose the ability to speak their family’s native language and become solely English speakers. In the future when they are adults they may regret this, as languages open to us cultures that someone who speaks only English might never experience.

Fortunately, this loss of culture can be prevented. In York Region, the York Catholic District School Board offers courses outside of the regular curriculum in Portuguese, Polish, Romanian, Urdu, Tamil, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Korean, Italian and other languages.

The York Region District School Board offers a similarly expansive assortment of language courses outside of school hours. Registration per student is only $20 for the entire school year.

At St. David School on Killian Road in Maple, Polish language students spent the last few weeks learning about Poland’s reconstitution as an independent nation in 1918. To honour the centenary of this event, they prepared an assembly with their teachers where they recited poems and spoke about the events that led to the rebirth.

As the anthem “Poland Is Not Yet Lost” played on loud speakers, these young Canadians and their immigrant families stood at attention and thought back in time and to a country that, through stories and poems and the language uttered by their teachers, became more real to them than ever before. Your children can have this experience too, no matter what your background might be.