For the past 20 years I have worked in Aruba, a country where the official language of instruction in primary and secondary education, Dutch, is a foreign language to 94% of the population. (Daily practice in classrooms is bilingual - sometimes quadrilingual - but final exams and tests are in Dutch.) The majority of the population speaks Papiamento, followed by Spanish (14%) and English (8%). The vast majority of the population speaks all four languages to a certain extent. Many scholars, together with me, argue that maintenance of Dutch as the language of instruction is detrimental for the success of the students and of the educational system. However, many, continue to support the use of Dutch in primary education on the basis of the presumed inadequateness of Papiamento as a language for learning (a perspective that I disagree with) and the assumption that Dutch would open a world for the students that would not be accessible to them if Papiamento were the language of instruction.

The following two questions are meant to open a discussion:

Repeating the question: Is there academic support for the use of foreign languages over home languages as language of instruction in primary and secondary education?

And I would like a secondary question:

Is there any published academic insight into the '(in)adequateness of languages for learning'?