One nation, one language?

Drawing on diversity protects country's future

In any other nation, the ability to speak more than one language symbolizes a good education. Not so the United States, where Senate Republican leader Bob Dole, using the flag as a backdrop, has called for the abolition of bilingual education.

One language, he told a recent American Legion convention, is the ”glue” that binds the nation together.

In the Texas justice system, one language – English – has been made into a new family value. In an Amarillo custody suit, state District Court Judge Samuel Kiser chastised Marta Laureano for speaking only Spanish to her 5-year- old daughter at home. The child attends public kindergarten where she speaks English. Laureano, whose job requires her to use both Spanish and English, believes being bilingual is an advantage.

Kiser disagrees, and has likened Laureano’s pride in her Latino heritage to child abuse; he threatened to remove the child from her custody.

”If (your daughter) starts first grade with the other children and cannot even speak the language that the teachers and the other children speak, and she’s a full-blood American citizen, you’re abusing that child,” Kiser told the mother. ”You’re relegating her to the position of a housemaid.”

Kiser is correct that language ability can affect earning potential. Indeed, bilingual communication is designed to keep non-English speakers learning while they master English. Taking it away would only dim their opportunities to participate economically and socially in Dole’s cherished American Dream.

Dole claims that ”elitists” are the promoters of multilingual education, but that is hardly the issue: Most bilingual elementary teachers work in underfunded schools, many of which serve predominantly Latino student bodies. About half of Hispanic children in this country live below the poverty line, far from the ”elitist” educators Dole targets.

Hoping to propel himself to the presidency, Dole has seized on the English- only issue. More and more politicians define those who are different as threats to national unity. To do so requires remarkable myopia.

Latinos, about two-thirds of whom are Mexican-Americans, will become the largest minority population within 15 to 20 years. Within 50 years no one group will dominate, the nation will be divided evenly between those currently known as minorities and today’s majority, white Americans. In other words, those who defend homogeneity are doomed by demographics.

Moreover, the internationalization of trade makes diversity a national asset. Many minority citizens can navigate cross-cultural challenges with ease. The more this country learns to draw upon its diversity, the more it protects its future.

It is time, Dole maintains, ”to return as a people to the original concept of what it means to be an American.”

But that definition remains static only in myths. We are a great cultural mix. Our ancestry comes from the English landing on our northeastern shores, and from the Spanish explorers who even earlier pioneered areas from Florida to California. Both groups were met by the original Americans, and our demographic destiny was as much determined by those first encounters, as it has been by the political, military and economic strategies that followed.

Clearly, the nation is moving through another nativist cycle. History shows that Americans are susceptible to scapegoating foreigners when facing significant change and narrowing economic options. That people who speak languages other than English are now targets is not so surprising, but the political hostility is unwarranted and unjust.

Bob Dole and Judge Kiser have armed themselves with weapons of mythology and ignorance. It is little wonder that our debates about affirmative action, diversity and immigration result in growing conflict and confusion.

Bilingual education is a part of the solution to these disputes, not a cause. Exploitation in any language alienates; social justice is the glue this country needs to survive.

Educational equity, fairly funded schools for all, and the guarantee of civil rights regardless of ethnic or racial heritage would inspire our nation’s future prosperity and peace.



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