My wife and I recently had our first child, and we’re thinking of moving to a different municipality as we’re now living in one at the Limmattal which is not known for being native speaker and highly educated… One thing I’ve noticed is that people often react negatively when I explain one of the reasons behind our decision. What I mean is that we deliberately looked for a municipality with a solid educational environment and where a larger share of children grow up speaking the local cantonal language (German in our case) at home. By “foreigners” I don’t mean nationality or passport. I mean children whose primary language at home is not the local language. A German, Austrian or or the one or two German speaking Belgians obviously isn’t what I’m referring to if they speak the local language at home. This isn’t about ethnicity, religion, or where people come from. If an immigrant family speaks German at home, I wouldn’t see any issue at all. Likewise, a Swiss family that only speaks another language at home would fall into the same category from an educational perspective. My reasoning is simply that children generally benefit when classmates already have a strong command of the language used in school. If a class has many children who first need to learn German (or French/Italian in the Non-German-speaking part of Switzerland), teachers inevitably have to spend more time on language support. Costs, not all municipalities unfortunately can afford. That doesn’t mean those children are less capable. It just changes the classroom dynamic. To me, this is no different from parents comparing school quality, graduation rates, class sizes, or other educational factors before deciding where to live. Yet whenever I mention this, some people immediately assume I’m talking about nationality or that I’m against immigration, which isn’t what I’m saying at all. Is this simply a taboo topic in Switzerland? submitted by /u/Advanced-Cress-535
Originally posted by u/Advanced-Cress-535 on r/Switzerland