“Our nation’s public schools have the clear responsibility to help students who don’t know English to learn that language as quickly as possible. To do otherwise is to sentence the child to a lifetime of political and economic isolation. Quality teaching of English and of America’s civic culture should be a part of every student’s curriculum.”
K.C. McAlpin, ProEnglish.org
Do you want your child to learn a foreign language? Summer schools and semester-abroad programs proudly advertise that the very best way to become fluent in another country’s language is through the immersion method. In other words, you send your child someplace where he or she will take classes in which the teacher and the other students speak only that language. If the child stays with a host family and develops friendships with non-English-speaking natives, the whole process goes even faster. Before long, your student comes home with a thorough knowledge of the desired language.
In the United States, generations of immigrant children learned to speak English through the immersion method. It may have taken them awhile to catch up to their English-speaking peers in school, but they were encouraged to do so, and they learned enough English to function in our common society and to become valuable citizens. Many of us have parents or grandparents who spoke another language at home, but learned to speak English in their business and social surroundings.
But that’s not happening anymore. Now the same Americans who spend their hard-earned dollars to have their children taught another language through the immersion method are spending equally hard-earned tax dollars to support something called “bilingual education” for today’s generation of immigrant students.
In bilingual education, schoolchildren are taught core subjects such as math, history and social studies in their native language, and spend only a few hours a day learning English. The argument is that they can’t understand complex concepts if they are taught in English, because their level of comprehension isn’t high enough. These subjects are therefore explained to them in their native language so they can understand. This makes a certain amount of sense, but my question is, “How are you going to increase their level of English comprehension this way?” It seems like a Catch-22 situation: We don’t teach them in English because they won’t understand it, but they’ll never understand complex subjects in English if we don’t teach them.
Bilingual programs teach one lesson I don’t think we as Americans want our children learning – we are showing them that language should be a dividing factor instead of a unifying factor. Instead of encouraging them to learn a common language so they can communicate with people of other backgrounds and ethnicities, we group them into cliques of kids who speak the same language they do. Former Congressman Bob Dornan put it this way: “The United States has always been a land of immigrants, and English has long been the glue holding our multicultural America together.” If we all learn to speak to each other in a common language, we will develop friends, neighbors and business associates who were raised in another culture and speak a different language at home. This will help us appreciate each other’s backgrounds and customs. But, if we are broken into groups according to language, and live in neighborhoods where only one language is spoken (even if that language is English), it is easy to develop an us-versus-them attitude.
Columnist Don Feder has this to say: “With bilingual education, multilingual ballots, drivers license exams in everything from Albanian to Vietnamese and mandated translation services, we make it so easy for the foreign-born to avoid learning English. ‘United We Stand,’ proclaimed the post-Sept. 11 signs. What unites a people more than a common tongue?” We all need to stick together, as Americans, to solve the problems this country faces and to make the future better for all our kids.
Bilingual education is not fair to our children for another reason. Those who don’t learn to speak English well have fewer opportunities to succeed in this country. Their choices of a job or profession are limited. “Our English language empowers each new generation of immigrants with access to the American dream,” says Dornan. “That’s because without a common language, we are unable to fully realize and participate in the opportunities that America has to offer.”
Each year, more non-English-speaking children enroll in Nevada’s schools. Let’s make sure they learn to speak English there. It’s right for them and it’s right for Nevada.