Thursday, September 30, 2010

Private schools in Sant Cugat for foreigners

If you are coming to Sant Cugat with your children and are looking into private schools, keep in mind that unless you stick to a foreign-language school, most private schools are very bad at teaching Catalan or Spanish to non-speakers.

For that reason, if you don’t want to go an international school that matches your culture, public schools are a good choice. Sure, Catalan is pretty useless as a language, but at least they have specialized teachers and are dedicated to helping your kid learn how to speak the language. Once they know Catalan, Spanish/Italian/French isn’t too far off (we tell ourselves this to make us feel better).

Recently I heard of one case of a kid (who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish or Catalan) going to pretty good non-international private schools , arriving in class and being given a Catalan/English dictionary and being told to start at ‘A’.

The bottom line is that you should check to make sure that the school you are sending your not-yet-fluent victim kid has an actual program to teach Catalan and/or Spanish to non-speakers. Just letting your kid’s teacher wing it is most likely going to end in disaster.

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