Thursday, October 08, 2009
Bilingual education makes no sense
From the RoundTable blog
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John Freivalds
Freivalds was born in Latvia and runs an international communications firm in Lexington.
As I chose No. 1 the other day in swiping my credit card, I wondered how we got to this point in having Spanish reach into the remotest parts of the United States. And as we debate the various health bills no one has brought up the unintended consequences of legislation, which is why we are now pressing buttons to specify what language we want to use.
Texas had a U.S. senator by the name of Ralph Yarbrough in the late 1960s and '70s. He faced tough elections and he catered to Mexican Americans to win. His 1970 election was going to be really tough so he wanted to get as much of the Mexican American vote as possible. He introduced all kinds of bills directed to that group to the point that the Dallas Morning News wrote "his name is probably attached to more legislation than any other senator in Texas history."
So in 1967 he introduced Senate resolution S.428, which was the seed that created the Bilingual Education Act. The motivation was not academics but rather "to cultivate ancestral pride ... provide children with a sense of personal identification essential to social maturation." But remember that Puerto Ricans in New York and Cubans in Miami did not push their congressional representatives for this type of legislation.
Eventually, the act directed at Mexican Americans allocated $15 million, but we now have costs in the billions both from the government and private industry. And we created a huge bureaucracy to administer it and thus a lobbying force to continue it. With the passage of this act, the idea that the United States was one big melting pot of cultures came to an end.
I am sorry to say that none of this makes any educational or economic sense. I have nothing against Spanish as I speak it fluently after studying in Mexico, serving in the Peace Corps in Panama and Colombia, having worked in most every country on Earth where they speak Spanish and one of my books was even translated into Spanish by a Mexican publisher. And my grandson just finished Spanish immersion elementary school.
Two refugee experiences and a lot of research, not ethnic pride, shaped my views. I was born in Latvia and came to the U.S. speaking only Latvian and German. And, lo and behold, in six month I was speaking English. To people born in a small country learning several languages is no big deal. I later repaid my refugee debt by sponsoring a Cuban family of five with three kids under 12. In six months, the kids were speaking fluent English and interpreting for their parents.
A linguistics professor once explained to me that before puberty children have free-floating neurons in the brain. These enables them to learn numerous languages and to do so without an accent. If someone learns another language after puberty they will always have an accent.
It is truly ironic that around the world literally billions of people are learning English as fast as they can so that they can enter the global marketplace while keeping their native language and customs in tact. In India, where many call centers answer customer service queries from the U.S., millions are learning how to get rid of their Indian accents.
Yet in this country, bilingual mania and expensive entitlement is telling people to go slow. California, feeling guilty that only Mexicans have bilingual education, now has a requirement that public documents be also available in Korean, Chinese, Tagalog (language of the Philippines), Vietnamese, Russian and two American Indian languages. It has gotten so out of control that parents of Spanish speaking children are now fighting not to have their kids taught in Spanish.
So the next time you are asked to indicate your language preference on a credit card swipe, ask yourself what is this for: liberal guilt, for the advocacy bureaucrats who have little knowledge on how languages are learned, politicians seeking ethnic votes or advertising agencies that insist that people will buy things only if the ads are in people's native language?
Since I moved to Lexington, I increased the number of Latvian households by 33 percent (there are now three), so we should begin our effort to have a requirement that Latvian be available along with Spanish. Ralph Yarbrough's need for votes opened up this linguistic Pandora's box and it will be hard to shut it. He forgot that the key to success in any country is that you must master that country's main language if you want to succeed. Comprende!
