"The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. ... We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto."
Did he mean that Spanish -- the language of Miguel de Cervantes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, St. John of the Cross, et alia -- is a ghetto language? If so, he's a fool. But I don't think that's what he meant. What he surely meant was that not being able to speak good English, and speak it early, will limit one's opportunity in this country. Isn't that true?
A spokeswoman for a pro-illegal immigrant group called Voces de la Frontera was just on CNN condemning Gingrich thus (I wrote it down exactly as she said it):
"Three words come to my mind: ignorance, eliticism, and racism."
Eliticism, eh? Hmm.
Anyway, a boy at my church just celebrated his 12th birthday -- but his first as an American. He was adopted by his Dallas-area parents from a children's home in Russia, less than a year ago. He was tossed into a local suburban school speaking barely a word of English. Now he's pretty fluent. His dad told me that there was nobody there to advocate bilingual education for him, or anything like it. His son had to sink or swim -- and it did the boy a world of good. IJS.
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
Gingrich is right, no matter how it sounds. I teach in the inner city. There was a recent protest of tardy sweeps, and we heard that, "Tardy sweeps are a form of white oppression." The anti-assimilation retards stay up all night thinking this stuff up. Immersion is better. The bilingual programs DID isolate the kids. The Hispanic population has a huge tendency to remain isolated and then claim "racism" for the lack of success...when it's the white bashing that CAUSES the lack of success. The kids are taught that Che was a hero, that white society is suspect, so that punctuality, industry, thrift, honesty, (and the rest of the Protestant Ethic) is "white" and to be avoided. So what does that leave kids of color? Sadly, not much.
Is'nt it funny how the phone rings with a person with another language is on the other end? It seems they get jobs faster then good english speaking people. Personaly,i can't understand most of them as to what it is all about. So therefore,i would not buy anything from them,even if they talked slower,lol.
Lilian, What you say makes so much sense- it is racism and condescending to believe a people are so weak and incapable they can't make it. I'm Black and in the 60's that what did blacks in in this country.The idea that we were incapable of doing what our parents in segregation, in the south of all places, were able to do.Plus, the can't do attitude translates to contempt and disrespect by other races and immigrants. Brazil suffered suffer linguistic isolation until the government mandated Portuguese only and now it is the spoken by all Brazilians ( I'm not referring to Amazonian Indians; that's a whole different issue). Before that every ethnic group that settle there lived in ethnic enclaves and their children were taught within that enclave in their native tongue.Few people spoke Portuguese and in the 1930's the President realized the country would never be united without a common language.
When English only is mentioned here it's decried as racist, blah,blah,blah, but apparently we're not the first to consider the benefits of such a policy. Bilingual countries are a mess-Canada, Belgium and split citizenry along linguistic boundaries. We don't need that. The racial issues are enough.
I was also a ESL teacher and over the years my position on spanish in the classroom has changed drastically. It needs to stop.
anon, Admittedly, I'm in favor of bilingualism (at minimum-- if everyone were trilingual that'd be even better; and there *are* parts of the world where even illiterates are commonly polyglots). Tens of thousands of English monolinguals are trying really hard to learn Spanish... now here we have children with the advantage of already speaking child-level Spanish, and we want to make them English monolinguals?
Yes, they need to learn English. But "Spanish in the classroom needs to stop"? Why do we want to turn bilinguals into monolinguals? I just don't get it.
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.