Throughout our history, many attempts have been made to bring all our people into this lively discussion, yet most of our recent efforts have been catastrophic failures. One of the most damaging, in my view, has been bilingual education, a program that has failed academically and become a tool of those who would disassemble the mosaic of the nation.
It is time to clear the drafting table and construct a new set of principles for tomorrow's curricula, one that lets diversity flourish under its own power and allows public schools to emphasize what unites us as a nation.
First, let us understand where we are, and how deeply and subtly recent muddled thinking has infected our presumptions. The very words we use to describe the problem lock us into a failed way of thinking. Calling people "minorities" now automatically makes us assume they are disadvantaged or treated unfairly. It triggers a set of almost automatic government programs, each designed to equalize the presumed minority with the majority.
The result is that a minority group becomes even more isolated, even more set apart from the whole, and its members, particularly when they are students, are sent the message that their "true" culture is whatever has caused this separation. 'Me subtler message is that they are not really Americans at all, or are adjuncts to American society, or even, sadly, that American culture is not worth having anyway.
Of all the programs created for educational or statistical minorities, bilingual education, above all others, was supposed to give youngsters the means to break the walls that separated them from the overall life of the nation. Children who sat confused and alone in English-speaking classrooms, unable to follow the lesson or speak to classmates, would be taught in their own language first, and slowly led from native-language-only instruction to English-only instruction.
Alas, it has done no such thing. In stead, kids get stuck halfway, because the program gets stuck halfway, and the students often wind up not terribly literate in their native tongue, and almost wholly illiterate in English.
Over time, the concept behind bilingual education has shifted from that of helping students learn English to helping them keep a foot in both worlds: the American, and their "own"-as if that were somehow different. Thus, bilingual education itself has become an act of separation. It takes children out of the common experience of school and makes them "different," set apart, the very opposite of what was supposedly the goal.
Today, bilingual education almost always means schooling for native Spanish speakers, and because they are almost exclusively the group serviced, the bilingual education issue has been terribly mishandled politically by both sides in the debate. Those courting Latino votes have politicized the curricula itself, and those who are little more than bigots have hidden their xenophobia behind legitimate academic doubts about the programs.
How do we extricate ourselves from this mess?
We simply start over, but truly start over. Rethinking bilingual education is not enough. We must rethink the assumptions that led us to bilingual programs to start with.
Suppose we determined that a fundamental purpose of public schooling is to prepare all of our youngsters for full participation in our American culture? Suppose the message we decided to send to all pupils was that their heritage is, first and foremost, the common American heritage they share with their classmates? This is not to say that we make youngsters of Italian background ashamed of their Italian roots, or that we make African American children feel that their history is less important than that of others, or that we look down our noses at Latino culture.
What we ought to be doing, though, is letting pupils know that when they look at a classmate they should see that child as a fellow human being first and a fellow American second. Whatever they see that makes that person somehow different should come third.
The practical consequences of this approach should be clear. Programs emphasizing separation would be alien to the curriculum. Programs that help give all students a sense of shared identity would be given pride of place.
We would make clear to all students that we share a common tongue. English is not the best language ever invented, or the easiest to learn, but it is our language and has been for more than two centuries. We should be giving young people the sense that in learning English, they are becoming part of this nation's history and full participants in its present fife. Instead of allowing bilingual education to reinforce minority group identification, teachers should help children participate in the real dialogue around them, using the language of the country that is now their home.
'Me lifetime advantages of schooling under such a premise are clear. If students are to succeed in America, they must have the same opportunity as everyone else. The student who is handicapped by a total or partial language barrier will be at a significant disadvantage in the job market.
The public schools, at least as we now know them, were not born with this nation. First we established the principles that guide our society-by fighting the Revolution, by giving voice to our vision of government and humanity in the Declaration of Independence, and by enshrining the American idea of government as servant of the citizens in the Constitution. Later, as our nation filled with wave after wave of immigrants seeking to adopt our principles, public schools arose as an expression of our national ideals.
Bilingual education has proven to be a strategy that undermines those ideals,
the ideals of one nation, under God, of a more perfect union, of a single we
in We the People.
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