Beverly Hills, California—Famed movie actor Kirk Douglas urged California voters Monday to support a controversial ballot that would require English-only instruction in state public schools, saying bilingual education “handicaps” students who speak other languages.

Douglas, 81, issued a statement in support of Proposition 227, a referendum that would require a year of immersion in English-language instruction for students whose native tongue is not English. Advocates of bilingual education argue the proposition would hurt non-English speakers by causing them to fall behind their peers in academic subjects such as mathematics or science.

Douglas, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was born in upstate New York in 1916 as Issur Danielovitch Demsky. He wrote in the statement of growing up in a multi-ethnic neighbourhood with friends from Lithuanian, Italian and Polish families.

“All of us kids went to the same school,” he said. “We all learned to speak English without the accents our parents never lost. As a matter of fact, we taught our mothers and fathers to speak better English.

“Please don’t handicap your children by supporting bilingual education,” he said. “The risk is that they may never be fluent in any language.”

California was to vote on Proposition 227 Tuesday.

Douglas appeared in dozens of films and Broadway plays during a career that spanned decades, including the 1960 epic “Spartacus”, and received a lifetime achievement Academy Award in 1996. He is the father of actor-producer Michael Douglas. Last year, he published a book about rediscovering his Jewish heritage. dpa dm ma



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