Guten Morgen, niños; ouvrez les livres — and qing zuo xia.*

Forget French immersion; children as young as four could be taught in up to four languages — every day — at an unusual multi-language specialty school being proposed by the Toronto Catholic District School Board.

Far from being a confusing Tower of Babel, its champions argue that a possible French-Spanish-German-Mandarin-immersion program being considered for north Scarborough as early as this fall — a first in Ontario, if not Canada — would offer a gateway to the languages of the world’s economic superpowers at an age when kids are best able to master them.

“My view is we’re not preparing our students for the world stage — we barely do a passing job with French, and we’re a bilingual country! — so we’re asking parents if they’d like to educate their children in languages of some of the largest economies in the world,” said Michael Del Grande, chair of the TCDSB.

“Maybe we would teach math in German, and geography in French, and health in Mandarin… I’m trying to trailblaze! We’re too isolated here in Canada.”

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Del Grande has proposed what he calls a European-style multi-language program to be housed in the former St. Maximilian Kolbe Catholic School near Warden Ave. and Finch Ave. E., which closed in 2011. If enough parents of pre-schoolers across Toronto indicate they would enroll their child this fall or September 2016, the board would launch it as a kindergarten program and grow it one grade at a time. The school has room for 259 students.

As a French immersion school with German and Spanish also as languages of instruction, the school also could, if parents agreed, extend the day by half an hour to add instruction in Mandarin.

The board has posted a survey on its website and would need the parents of about 75 kindergarten children to show their interest by May 15 in order to launch this fall, said Gary Poole, the board’s associate director academic.

“There’s a new, global mindset among some of the new urbane community parents who see language as opening up opportunities for commerce in the future. It’s the European influence,” said Poole. So the program is not aimed at just those children whose families speak those languages.

The board has long known the value that language instruction brings to brain development, said Carla Marchetti, the board’s senior co-ordinator of international languages: “It increases your vocabulary acquisition, obviously, but looking at similarities and differences in grammar from one language to another also does increase your critical thinking.”

Currently, the Toronto Catholic board runs language programs in 49 elementary schools that extend their day by 30 minutes to make time for compulsory daily lessons in languages such as Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Filipino and Mandarin.

But learning several languages all at once through immersion isn’t impossible, Marchetti said, citing children who grow up with one parent speaking to them in one language, the other parent in another language and the school in English.

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Del Grande confesses to having another motive; he hopes the unique program could attract more Catholic students to the board, including those who might have been headed to a public school because they were unable to get into one of the Catholic board’s seven popular French immersion schools.

“I’m looking to see if Catholic students might like to come back to Catholic schools from the public board; maybe we could even draw some students from north of Steeles,” he said. “I’m basically casting a fishing line out to see if there’s enough interest.”

*“Good morning, children, open your books and please sit down.”