Monday 26 June 2006
Chairwoman of Parliament: ‘Dutch language as subject important’
ARUBA – More attention needs to be paid to the Dutch language in secondary schools. Aruban students in the Netherlands run regularly into difficulties due to insufficient knowledge of the Dutch language.
Chairwoman of Parliament Mervin Wyatt-Ras (MEP) indicated this during the elucidation on the closing statement of the tripartite parliamentary deliberation between kingdom representatives, which took place in The Hague between the 12th and 16th of June.
Wyatt-Ras has decided this time to do the elucidation alone, because Rudy Lampe of the RED party had already given an own account. This time she left the political judgement of the document to the different parties. She obviously didn’t like Lampe’s course of action.
She mentioned that there were some working visits before the deliberation started, like in Tilburg where they met with Aruban students. From this encounter they realized that it is very important for the students to be proficient in the Dutch language in order to be able to successfully follow continued education in the Netherlands.
The transition from Aruba to the Netherlands results in a culture-shock for some students. There are also students that just fit in and have no problems at all. Especially the students that follow higher vocational training in the Netherlands have problems with the Dutch language, while the ones on the universities are less often coping with this problem. We will have to take this problem into consideration with the language teaching in Aruba, said Wyatt-Ras.
The Aruban delegation also met with the permanent representative of Aruba in Brussels, Thijs van der Plas and talked about European Union funds for Aruba; employees of the Education- and Tourism departments of the Aruba House in The Hague; in Amsterdam with PvdA-euro-parliamentarian Max van den Berg, who was willing to explain in parliamentary deliberations in the Netherlands the matters that take place in Europe and that could be of interest for Aruba and the islands of the Neth.Antilles; the Lower House, where they examined the process of digitalization of many official documents that are currently still filed in big orders; and at last they visited the Dutch education-inspection, where they exchanged information on the education innovation and especially the introduction of the ciclo basico and ciclo avansa in the secondary education in Aruba.
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