Krista and I opted to put our kids into English Immersion school, owing to the fact that we thought that they might do better being educated in a language they can actually speak. We were wrong. My niece and nephew are kicking derriere in calculus, taught in the original Rene Descartes French, while my kids can barely add in their mother tongue. I suspect that the experiment is repeatable, and that we’d see the same results if it were Latin, Mandarin or Klingon Immersion.
Last weekend, I started and argument with my brother about whether the government should be funding French Immersion (some would call it a debate), which was initiated by me stating that he was “an elitist who thought that his kids were too good to go to school with the great unwashed.” You can see how that led to more of an argument than a debate. But you have to understand that this is what my family does for fun – someone picks a position on a topic and makes a grandiose, often uninformed, confrontational statement – and then “debate” it until we have to break out the defibrillator.
But it got me thinking about all the other types of immersion that one could base a fully funded system of education on. I grew up in Farm Immersion. A large part of our kids’ education has been through Trade Show Immersion and Horse Show Immersion. I could use more help around the house, so Landscape Maintenance Immersion or Gutter Cleaning Immersion are on the table – although technically that would be Home School. But the one that seems to have the most potential to me (and by that, I mean the one that seems like it could be the most beneficial to me) would be Doug’s School of Equine Immersion.