That’s because schools now are very different than they were in the 1940s!
So schools were horrible in general but parents picked on the Welsh aspect? I’m not sure about that.
That is not what I was trying to say. As far as I know, no children from English speaking homes were educated through Welsh in the 40s. They are now and every effort is made to ease them in gently with special lessons. I cannot imagine a child of 5 being faced with a Welsh alphabet before they know any Welsh, before learning to,read in English. Back when in rows of desks, the cane etc., being taught in words you did not know may not have been the worst thing, but it did not help and the other things have changed too!
Before the age of seven this is what happens in Welsh medium settings. Children are thrown in at the deep end and it works. Why shouldn’t it? The majority of children in the world are naturally bilingual, they know that different people have different words for chicken and learning this doesn’t traumatise them in any way. It’s only after about seven that it is thought necessary to send children new to Welsh through trochi schemes in order to get them up to speed quickly.
I don’t want to labour this, but the thing is that you’ve inadvertently (I know you don’t mean to) started to veer towards the kinds of arguments used by hard-core anti Welsh education campaigners. They (there’s only a handful of them and they tend to use multiple identities) specialise in disseminating false information about how bad, traumatic even, it is for children to learn in a second language.
Yes, schools used to be brutal, but you used to get beaten for getting your sums wrong, having untidy handwriting, and talking (in any language) in class, as well as for calling a hen iâr.
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Yes, I do see what you mean. I definitely do not want to stop any child being taught in their second or even third language - some would not get any schooling if we did that! There must be Romany children from, say Poland, who have come here and are being taught in either Welsh or English. Refugee children from Algeria, speakers of Arabic and French… lots and lots of examples. There must be folk older than me who were part of the kinder transport, who knew Yiddish, Hebrew and German or Polish and had to learn in English, or even, just possibly, Welsh!!
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I think the difference is between teaching methods 100 years ago and those now. Yes, small now children are thrown in at the deep end, but they thrive - because they have teachers who are aware that they are new to the language and who take time to make sure that they understand, etc., etc.
In the ‘bad old days’, children would turn up at school, sit at a desk and have to repeat the sounds the teacher made at them. There was no attempt to make sure they actually understood what those sounds meant - it was just rote repetition. There are reports of Welsh-speaking children from the beginning of the 20th century being able to recite the designated class book (the name of which I’ve unfortunately forgotten - sorry) but not having the first clue what any of the words actually meant. That’s the real scandal of English-language education being forced on these children - that they didn’t actually learn anything at all.
It’s a completely different situation now, thank goodness - 100+ years of research into pedagogical methods mean that immersion schooling is now an incredibly effective learning environment.
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That is true and was true to my certain personal knowledge for years! Not, in my case, in the context of Welsh, but I was obliged to do Latin O-Level (needed to get into Oxbridge). My ability to translate Caesar’s Gallic Wars Part??? (forget which)…was not such as would give me any chance of passing. I therefore learned in the fashion of a parrot both in English and Latin and well enough to tell if the translation piece before me matched properly with my learned rendering. I only passed by the skin of my teeth, but I did pass and nobody at school cared a jot that I didn’t actually know which words meant what!
I think this discussion has come to a natural end point since we’re now all discussing different things. 
I don’t see how schools failing to teach children English could have contributed to children stopping speaking Welsh. Unless, of course, parents, seeking the undoubted economic advantages of the English language, responded to this ineffective teaching by deciding to switch the family language to English. 
I do think this was part of it. In some regions, you needed to have English to get a job (e.g. in the Valleys, where there was a massive influx from all over, including England and Ireland) so families tried to give their children the ‘advantage’ that they didn’t have. Also, as so many of the Welsh-speaking children were so poorly educated (because they weren’t actually getting an education, just repeating random sounds) it bolstered the prejudice that it was the language holding them back (and/or that Welsh was not an appropriate language for education purposes), and all would be better if they were brought up in English instead.
But hint taken … I’ll shut up now
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Oh crikey! It was more a hint to myself than to anyone else! 
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Today on Dal ati, Bore da, Ysgol Dewi Sant, Llanelli was celebrating its 70th birthday. It was, it seems the first Welsh Medium Primary provided by a local authority. So before March 1947 there were no, repeat NO Welsh medium schools! Except maybe the odd chapel school. I presume secondary schools followed once children from the first primaries reached 11! I started school in 1945 when I was still 4. So, even if I had lived in Llanelli, I couldn’t have learned in Welsh!
… So our local Welsh Primary School,Ysgol Gynradd Gymraeg Lonlas (Swansea), must have been one of the first, in 1949?
https://swansea-edunet.gov.uk/en/schools/lonlas/Pages/Default.aspx
I find this hard to reconcile with the fact that my mother attended Llangadog School from 1927 (aged 3 - yes 3) where her tadcu was headmaster and her aunty “Nen” was a teacher, until she went to Llandovery grammar school whence she matriculated and went to UWC Cardiff (at the age of 16 - yes 16) in 1940-ish. I’m pretty sure she would have encountered very little English in school or at home till then.
Very few of her contemporaries survive, so I’ll have to check with my friends in Adran Hanes & Hanes Cymru, Aber.
I guess so, but imagine the post War Labour Government encouraged local input into choice of language, hence Llanelli’s successful experiment! I can’t find data, but it wasn’t that long before, in Gogledd Cymru, scondaries were Welsh medium!
Nothing to do with that. It was the 1944 Education Act that paved the way for this to happen.
The 1988 education reform act then made welsh a core compulsory subject up to age 14 in all schools.
This changed in 1999 to make it compulsory to age 16.
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I was still shocked to find that NO Welsh medium schools existed before 1947! Anything happening in ones own lifetime seems recent!
…But I found that as a child on holiday in North Wales, some people couldn’t understand English. Perhaps it was just my Geordie accent (at that time).
still zero Welsh mediums in many parts of East Wales… 
things changing though…new Welsh medium for Y Trallwng (Welshpool) soon
My 4 year old grand-daughter has just come back from her first day at (Welsh medium) big school with a request to bring something or a picture of something tomorrow beginning with “e”. I suggested “eglwys” or “enfys” but her mum and dad made an inspired choice - “Efrog” (*) because the 3 of them are going there next week for my son’s job interview (croesi bysedd)
(*) For those of you who don’t know “Efrog” - here’s a hint. There’s a new one in USA
(More worryingly - she has come back from her first day having acquired three boyfriends (her words). As her tadcu, should I be worried?)
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