A few links

[seeingred]

I'm trying to post a weekly roundup of links at my main lj, dreamer-easy - lots of news about asylum seekers, especially with an election coming up in Australia later in the year. There's always much more than I can find time or energy to post, but I saved up a few for seeingred, so here you go - three opinion pieces from the Australian papers, and one blog posting

Comments

[purrdence]

There are still those in Australia that argue schools should be teaching European languages 'because they're easier'. If they *do* acknowledge that this line of thinking is a bit suss, they often then cling to Indonesian because 'people go to Bali' and it's 'easier' because Indonesian is written using the same alphabet as English, so it's not so 'hard' (read: strange and foreign).

[seeingred]

Gee, maths is hard too. In fact, just this evening I saw some high schoolers on Tumblr complaining about having to learn imaginary numbers. Do these people want to make money or not?! Imaginary numbers are critical for engineering, even I know that, and I can barely add up. The same principle applies to Asian languages. Although I suppose if the problem is the script, the kids could always be offered a choice between Russian and Vietnamese. >:)