Minority Children

Help with learning was initiated some years ago. At this school there are about 20 "learning mothers" (Lernmütter). These mothers are willing to accept a foreign child along with their own to have them do their homework together and to do additional learning. The idea, of course, is not only transferal of knowledge. The main point is for these children to be invited to Rankweil homes. There they see how the local people live, how and what they eat, how they do things. They also see the toys of the local children and after homework they often play for some time before they go home to their parents' house. In many cases friendship emerges between the children.

In the beginning this was very difficult because Turkish parents had the fear their children might be turned into Catholics or be given pork to eat. But when they saw that this was not at all the case and that their children profited a lot from this arrangement, tables turned. Now Turkish parents come to the headmaster and ask for help with learning. This is not always easy to arrange because the mothers do it on a voluntary basis without any pay. At parent teacher meetings at the beginning of the school year the programme is announced and advertised. One of the mothers co-ordinates all these efforts.

It is this system actually that transports a lot of cultural knowledge and understanding. The main problem is that this process is largely a unidirectional one: Turkish and Yugoslavian children learn about our way of life and not the other way round. The explanation is easy enough: many of the guest workers live in substandard housing estates or very old houses and therefore find it difficult to invite people to their homes.

But the children learn al lot, and in many cases the two mothers also get in touch and meet. As the headmaster's wife was also involved in the programme he has first-hand experience and tells of invitations to weddings, of letters they get, even years later, etc.

The drawback can be that some of the Turkish parents delegate all responsibility for learning to the Austrian "learning mother". In rare cases they even blame them for bad marks of their child. This behaviour, of course, makes co-operation difficult. So the co-ordinating mother organised a meeting together with an interpreter for all the Turkish mothers, but disappointment was great when only two mothers turned up.

In the present situation it is the policy to have 25 out of the 44 foreign children in this programme. A larger number seems unfeasible for two reasons: first, there is a limit to the number of mothers willing to commit themselves to the programme, and second, not all these children are in need of this kind of support.

A problem that has to be faced is that only a certain percentage of Austrian parents identify with this programme, whereas other parents argue that such a programme favours foreign children and support measures that might be needed for Austrian children are not taken. It normally helps to make it clear to these people that the better the foreign children feel in our environment, the better for the Austrian children in the same class, the same school, the same community. On top of that, Austrian children who are slow learners can and do get additional classes; the same applies if they are dyslexic (there used to be 8 hours per week for the school for dyslexic courses. - Budget cuts have reduced this number to 3, which makes the groups much bigger and working more difficult.).