WHAT ALWAYS astonished me about bilingual education is that it seemed to have been devised by people who had never had experience learning a second language. If they had, they would never have believed that the system could do anything but fail.

And fail it has. The figures coming out of California, where bilingual education was finally thrown out by the voters after helping to hold back a generation of children, show that the way to learn a language is by total immersion. After just two years, test scores are up significantly for students who have no alternative but to learn to speak English.

Of course, every son and daughter of the great immigration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries already knew that. My father, who spoke hardly a word of English before going to school at the age of 6, knew that. Everyone who has ever been 1 thrown into an environment where there is no choice but to learn knows it.

And I know it.

In the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I was sent to Austria as an exchange student. I was 16, going on 17. I had one year of high school German under my belt, enough to say,”Hi, how are you?” The family I joined spoke no English. If I wanted to get beyond simple greetings and communicate more important things, including, “Where’s the bathroom?” I would have to learn German.

One of the first phrases I learned was,”Pas auf!”I was taking a tour of the farm and walking through the barn when my Austrian “brother”shouted the words. When I walked into a wooden beam set at forehead level, I understood that”Pas auf!”meant”Look out!” That’s how I learned. At first single words, then phrases, then sentences, often referring to a pocket German-English dictionary. To say anything, I had to translate it in my mind into German. To understand anything, I had to translate the German into English. It wasn’t easy, and it was frequently frustrating, but I had no choice.

Then something extraordinary happened. I was six weeks into my stay the halfway point, when I suddenly realized that I was no longer translating. I was thinking in German. My thoughts weren’t complicated.

I didn’t know enough German for that. But I no longer had to translate.

In fact, I began dreaming in German at that moment. I talked in my sleep in German. By the end of three months, my grammar wasn’t the best in the world, but I was sufficiently fluent to have gone to school and succeeded.

I offer that story because the defenders of bilingual education grant that young children can easily pick up a new language, but older children, teenagers, don’t learn as easily. I’ll grant that I had a facility for languages. But if I could learn in three months, anyone can learn in one year of immersion. I have no doubts of that.

I know that because years later, when I was 28 and beyond the easy learning age, I worked in Puerto Rico for a year. I took language lessons and studied Spanish, but I never had to speak it. Someone was always around to translate for me. Consequently, after a year, my Spanish was limited to 1 ordering in a restaurant and saying,”Hi, how are you?” And then I took a job in El Salvador. I thought I would meet enough English-speakers there to translate for me, but discovered to my dismay that everyone I had to deal with were people who knew less English than I know Spanish. If I couldn’t communicate, I would fail. I learned to speak Spanish. Again, it wasn’t complicated, but I learned. I had to.

We Americans aren’t good at foreign languages. We all had to take a language in school and nearly all of us remember the experience as torture. We assume it is as difficult for someone to learn English as it is for us to learn a new language.

As far as I can tell, that feeling is at the bottom of the bilingual education fallacy. And as long as we give students the crutch of being able to revert to their own language, we are right. And when immigrant students continue to do badly, we take it as proof that we need even more bilingual programs.

But anyone who has truly learned a language knows how wrong that is. Immersion is the only way. It is better, even at the age of 17 or 18, to give up a year of course work to take immersion English lessons, than it is to go through school never learning English adequately. You can make up a lost year. You can’t make up a lost lifetime.



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