The Linguist

APRIL/MAY The Linguist 31 INSTITUTE MATTERS galleries with their 'passports to learning' and collecting stamps. Once they got a certain number of stamps, they would 'graduate' at a university wearing a cap and gown, with their mums and dads there – many of whom had never been inside a university. A study judged the initiative's contribution to social mobility to be 'highly significant', and seven years later The Children's University was in 11 countries. You went on to run KidZania. Can you tell us more about that? At KidZania, kids aged 4-14 can choose from 60 or so jobs to role-play. The idea is that grown-ups are seen but not heard, so children are not influenced in the roles they try. It was designed to be self-initiated, self-directed and self-sustained learning that was also fun. A friend of mine rang to say they wanted to bring KidZania to the UK and needed me here. After a year, KidZania HQ in Mexico City asked me to be their Global Director of Education. The guys in Mexico kept telling me KidZania is educational and I said, "Yes, but you have no evidence." We needed to map languages at a very early age. Because I'm sure if you conducted a similar piece of research on language learning, interest in languages, and perceptions of linguists, kids from less affluent backgrounds would not think they could become linguists. I'm sure that's right, especially if they're not routinely exposed to languages in the way you were as a child. Yes, it was just a normal part of life for me. I'm sure this would now be deemed illegal, but one grandfather used to ask me to cycle to Germany to get schnapps for him, and the other would ask me to cycle to Belgium to get him cigars! It's a magical moment, isn't it, the point where you can sort of swim in another ocean because you can use languages. So, if you could do one thing to improve UK language learning, what would it be? Universal Erasmus from the age of five. What would you say to a young person to help them to engage with languages? Firstly, for me, that young person would be very young, because one of the mistakes we make in this country is to leave it too late. So I would put that very young person in a room with a lot of other kids who speak different languages. I wouldn't say anything, I'd just give them some Lego and leave them to it. That would be a joyous thing! One final question: if you had a motto what would it be? Angela Merkel's "Wir schaffen das." 'Rousseau meets Willy Wonka' In his book Natural Born Learners, Alex Beard says, "In learning terms, Ger Graus is Jean-Jacques Rousseau meets Willy Wonka." A renowned figure in the field of education, Professor Graus OBE is a Board Director at Hello Genius and advises a number of EdTech start-up companies. He is also a member of Bett's Global Education Council, advises the Fondazione Reggio Children in Italy, and is a Visiting Professor at the National Research University in Moscow. www.gergraus.com out what that meant and what difference we sought to make to a child's development. What did your research find? We initially took a sample of 61,000 kids who came on school visits to the London KidZania and analysed age, gender, ethnicity, urban or rural, richer or poorer, and where they stood on the index of multiple deprivation. We found that all stereotypes are set by the age of four. So the airplane has two activities: the pilot activity is 90% boys; the cabin crew activity is 90% girls. And there is almost no change between four and fourteen. There's also a bias on activities above or below the target age range: nine-year-old girls choose seven-year-old activities; nine-year-old boys choose ten-year-old activities. These patterns were the same in every country – in India, Turkey, Mexico, Dubai, Russia and more. This confirmed my fundamental belief that children can only aspire to what they know exists, and will only try what they think they can reasonably aspire to. That's why we have to give children an exposure to other @Linguist_CIOL

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