United Nations Forum on Minority Issues, 12th Session, 27-29 November 2019, Palais des Nations, Geneva, Switzerland Theme 1, Human Rights and Minority Language Education Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (www.Tove-Skutnabb-Kangas.org) How long have we known what should be done? Some of the main causes of the educational failure for Indigenous and minority students were correctly diagnosed centuries ago. Indigenous peoples knew the devastating results of submersion programmes where children were taught only through the medium of the dominant language, English. In the USA, Seneca Chief, Handsome Lake, knew this in the mid-1700s1, meaning 270 years ago. Still these submersion programmes using the dominant language as the only or main teaching language continue all over the world. Churches and educational authorities in the USA knew and admitted in 1880 that teaching children for the first several years in their own languages before transferring to English medium gave them better English competence than teaching them in English from the start.2 This was 140 years ago. Still, the principles are not followed. A government resolution in India 19043, meaning 115 years ago, described exactly how education should be organized. It recommended using the mother tongue as the main teaching language minimally up to age 13, with English taught as a second language. These 115-year old recommendations for mother-tongue based multilingual education, and the argumentation for them could have been written by the best researchers today, on the basis of hundreds of both small and very largescale studies. Still, the recommendations are not being followed. UNESCO’s 1953 book The use of the vernacular languages in education included firm recommendations, written by experts, on how multilingual education can best be organised – over 65 years ago. Likewise, UNESCO’s Education position paper in 2003, Education in a multilingual world. Still, most ITM4 education is today organised against solid scientific evidence of how it should be organised. Is today’s situation because of lack of knowledge? Many of us, including the panellist here, have talked with thousands of minority and Indigenous parents, and children and their teachers. We have done research; we have written thousands of books and tens of thousands of articles about the theme.5 The many solutions are complex, and multidisciplinary: there is no one solution that fits all; all good suggestions are context-dependent. Still, we KNOW in general terms what should be done. We have clarified the pedagogical principles that need to be followed. The remaining (fewer and fewer) counterarguments against strong models of mother-tongue-based MLE, are political/ideological; they are not scientific. Are we getting anywhere? Are the principles being followed.