Lingua franca is German, not Luxembourgish. Luxembourg does not offer the full cycle education in Luxembourgish, only the introductory pre-school is in Luxembourgish, then the education switches fully to German with French as a second language. This may create quite a weird situations especially for children of foreigners. Just imagine a Russian-Italian family where both parents use both of these languages at home. The child is then put into completely different language situation where it is required to learn Luxembourgish for 2 years. Then suddenly all the language acquired is wrong and the correct language to be used in the classes is the proper German, quite similar but different from Luxembourgish. At the same time the child is required to be learning the French. And English, in the later age. At the end, many Luxembourgish people end up speaking many languages but none of them properly. This has certain disadvantages, but also one advantage - people are in general tolerant to other people making mistakes in language which helps accepting foreigners. At least on the surface nobody ever shows any signs of hostility towards foreigners. Because with more than 50% probability either the person you are talking to or their partner are foreigners to Luxembourg. The biggest disadvantage this has is probably the stress on the children who have hard times following the instructions at public schools since the very young age and are forced to experience many failures if coming from diverse language background. This is also why the school system does favorize children of locals who speak Luxembourgish at home and watch German TV. And keeps defavorized certain immigrant communities who cannot afford private schools with more favourable language setting while their children at public schools have to face the language problem with a different language(s) being spoken at home. This is even intensified by traditional splitting of children at the age of 12 based on their academic results.
Not really... alphabatisation (Literacy) is usually first done in German and it is true that in primary school most questions and work materials in most subjects are initally asked and written in German. From third grade on French is introduced and learned seperatly from German. And from secondary school onwards (depending on the system you're oriented towards) there will be a stronger or weaker weighting of German and French as the main course language depending on the given subject. But any Luxembourgish student in regular public education will tell you that eventhough the courses are being meant to be either held in German or French respectivly (except for the other foreign languages of course) the most widely used oral language will be Luxembourgish for the most part. One example would be math courses in the "classique" system which are meant to be held in French after maths have been entirely taught in German in primary school; but most math teachers hold their courses entirely in Luxembourgish except for the written material because they know that holding the courses in German would seem kind of silly to most students and holding them in French would only confuse or at least complicate learning to a certain degree for for a lot of students (especially for kids whom's first language is Luxembourgish). That being said I agree that the Luxembourgish school system somewhat favorises pupils that speak Luxembourgish at home and as a result consume a lot of German media normaly. But then I ask this: What country doesn't favorises their native population somewhat? I think Luxembourg even does a great job in considering students who speak different languages. But on the other hand even for some Luxembourgish pupils it is sometimes very hard to switch to French as the main litterary language at school later on (I speak out of first hand experience lol). I agree that it is even somewhat harder for children that come from a diverse linguistic background; but I personaly do not see the problem with that. When a Luxembourgish child for example moves to Italy or Russia he or she will usually also not be able to get good grades without learning the local language first (International schools excluded, of course). I agree; that Luxembourg is in a much more particular situation due to the simple fact of its demographics but I don't agree with the current political urge to simplify the education system for "foreigners" to the detriment of Luxembourgish speakers. It is of course important to always take the foreign population into consideration and to make the school system as fair as possible for everyone; but the fact remains that for Luxembourgish people there is only one very small country that enables them to send their kids to schools that takes their very own linguistic background into consideration. And parents of all kinds should take that fact into consideration in advance about: if they can an even if they are willing to expect of their kids to deal with the Luxembourg situation or not. One solution would be to offer Luxembourgish education in different languages; but I feel like that would be very undesireable because this would result in a situation where kids from different backgrounds would never meet and this in turn would result in a situation where society as a whole would get spilit... There is no real answer to that problem... I would say that, on the surface level, Luxembourg has dealt with the entire language complexity in a very exemplary manner so far and should continue to do so
