Where is multiculturalism leading us?

Emphasis on the positive, on building a distinctive ability, changes the entire tone of the discussion of bilingualism and multiculturalism, Mr. Glazer points out.

OVER THE years I have raised a number of questions about the requirements for and the practice of bilingualism in American schools. Readers who know my work, particularly as expressed in some chapters of Ethnic Dilemmas (Harvard University Press, 1983), will be aware that there are some aspects of what we call bilingual education in the United States about which I have questions.

I take up this topic again, partly because the conference for which I prepared this piece was sponsored by the Center for the Study of Books in Spanish for Children and Adolescents. I was attracted by the word book. The ability to read in a foreign language, the capacity to appreciate books in another language, immediately struck me as bringing a different note, a different tone, to the issue of bilingualism. When we begin to speak of “books,” the ability to speak and read in Spanish no longer presents itself as a problem or as the basis for a special claim. Instead, it becomes an advantage. Knowledge of Spanish is not seen as something that turns a person into an unfortunate victim, someone who needs special help; in the context of reading books, knowledge of Spanish or any foreign language is seen as a positive ability, a virtue, a rare capacity that is to be nurtured and developed.

To me, this emphasis on the positive, on building a distinctive ability, changes the entire tone of the discussion of bilingualism and multiculturalism. Advocates of bilingualism are no longer seen as aggrieved parties, as people who demand special programs in sufficient measure. Unfortunately, many people who are involved in the debates over bilingualism have developed just such a picture of its advocates. By simply adding the word book, advocates of bilingualism immediately alter the tone of the discussion and make the knowledge of a foreign language a treasured ability.

Let me describe one other experience that opened my eyes to the possibility of developing children’s knowledge of a foreign language. Recently I have been studying a New York City school district that is undergoing revolutionary change. It is shifting its middle or junior high schools from large schools ( typical of New York and other cities), with a thousand or more children, into minischools or alternative schools, with at most a few hundred children. It is encouraging teachers and principals to develop distinctive designs for such schools, which it then advertises in a booklet it distributes to parents and children, who can choose which school the children will attend.

Forty percent of the children in these schools are Hispanic, according to the school system census, and may be presumed to come from Spanish-speaking homes. Some of the mini- or alternative schools are, of course, bilingual. But the description of one school caught my attention. It is a bilingual computer-oriented school. Schools that emphasize computers are very popular and in high demand. However, among the admission requirements for this school is the following: “This program requires fluency in Spanish.” I can imagine that some readers of the admission requirements would find this one restrictive, even segregationist. But what struck me is that it was treating the knowledge of Spanish — indeed, fluency in Spanish — as a virtue, rather than as a defect to be overcome.

When we treat the knowledge of Spanish as an ability to be nurtured and developed, we do not, by that token, say that the knowledge of English in an English-speaking country is unnecessary. It is essential. We are saying that knowing two languages means that one is provided with two competences rather than one. We are also saying that to effectively learn one language and develop it to the highest level of fluency does not require the eradication of another. We are attacking the theory of learning that says that to learn one thing means to forget another — that a human being is like a container with only limited capacity, and pouring in English means spilling out Spanish.

Now admittedly I am using metaphor. Clearly, there are limits in learning: there are only so many hours in the day and only so many minutes in the school day, and competition over how those hours and minutes are used can be fierce. When we adults try to learn a foreign language, we discover how many hours are needed to gain any degree of competence. And we know that, when we get involved in debates over the curriculum, there are limits to what can be done: to do one thing often means not to do another.

However, while limitation is a reality, we also know that the capacity to know two languages well is not rare. Millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of people around the world seem to manage this skill, and they are not all persons of high academic ability, as any traveler will verify who has seen how widespread knowledge of English is among those who deal with tourists. In such countries as India, bilingualism is an everyday reality for tens of millions of people.

I have been a critic of bilingualism as I have seen it practiced in some schools, and I have become involved in the arguments and controversies surrounding it. Of course, there are many harsher critics than 1, and bilingual programs in general are much on the defensive these days. I think it important to understand the basis of this criticism, which has been so persistent. Advocates of bilingualism and multiculturalism must understand the arguments of their critics if they are to respond. Moreover, in considering the arguments of critics, advocates just might learn some things that will lead to changes in their own attitudes and practices.

As background, let me describe the typical experience in the public schools of the children of non-English-speaking households in the decades before bilingual programs became a right under state and federal law. The typical experience of such children was indeed what we might call “sink or swim.” Looking back on their childhoods, many of those who are critical of current bilingual programs recall that they did indeed learn to swim. There is a talent in children for picking up new languages that adults unfortunately lose. This is not to say that all children will learn a new language easily or will learn it at the same rate, just as not all children will easily learn to swim. Perhaps more systematic study of mass immigrations of the past will show that many more children sank than swam.

I AM TYPICAL of many of those who have wondered why the new practices were necessary and mandated. I came from a home in which the parents spoke Yiddish and in which I spoke that language until I went to school. I do not recall any great difficulty in shifting to English — I probably already knew it because of my older brothers and sisters. One result of my schooling was that I completely lost the ability to speak Yiddish. I could understand it; yet I was incapacitated almost totally in responding. Oddly enough, it was only when I began to study German in high school and had the structure of a related foreign language in my mind that I could again begin to respond orally to questions in Yiddish.

Like all experiences, this one has something unique about it, but in many ways it is typical of my generation and my time. It is the basis of the common question posed by critics of bilingual education: We did it — why can’t you?

Aside from completely ignoring the linguistic background of the child, the schooling of my day also completely ignored any distinctive cultural backgrounds of children. The history we learned was the history of Anglo-Americans: the Pilgrims and the pioneers who settled the country, the statesmen and generals who fought the Revolutionary War and wrote the Constitution. Immigrants and persons of non-English origin simply played no role in my education. When I went to school in New York City, the population of the schools was overwhelmingly Jewish and Italian; yet there was no hint of that in our textbooks, no reference to Jewish or Italian figures in history. There were no Jewish or Italian books in our school, whether in English or Yiddish or Italian.

Nor was there any reflection of the composition of the student body in our teachers. Some of them may have been of Jewish origin, but to us they were only teachers — and very American ones. Certainly we children never saw such teachers as ethnic role models. We may have seen them as academic models, but mostly we saw them as models of Americanization, of the assimilation to which we aspired.

Were we crippled because of this in growing up? I don’t think so. We did become “assimilated.” We lost the knowledge of our home languages. We learned little or nothing about our backgrounds — if we did, it was in afternoon schools, run in synagogue or church basements, in the tacky settings of ethnic organizations very different from the grand and awe-inspiring school buildings. Because we saw our parents as deficient in some way because they did not know English — or perhaps because all children see their parents as deficient in some way — we did not take seriously their admonitions to be attentive to the lessons of these afternoon schools. We didn’t respect the teachers, and we learned very little. We knew that, if we didn’t go to afternoon schools, no truant officer would come after us. Our attendance depended on the pressure our parents put on us. We didn’t know that we were surrendering our cultural heritage, a different language, something of value in itself. We knew that keeping up our Yiddish, learning Jewish history, or learning Hebrew would do nothing to get us ahead in school or in American society.

It was a schizophrenic existence, and soon even the schizophrenia disappeared as we dropped all effort to maintain knowledge of Yiddish, to learn Hebrew, or to learn Jewish history. Did it hurt us? Not in any practical or material way. Many of us did well in school, went on to college, and took up professional careers. And it is on the basis of such experience that we see so much criticism of bilingualism.

I think the experience of almost everyone who went to school through the 1950s underlies much of the attitude of resistance to bilingualism and biculturalism. But I have also come to think that it is an attitude in error, one that simply does not recognize major changes in our society and in the world. It is an attitude that reflects a world in which the superiority, in almost all respects, of the developed, Western nations was taken for granted. Thus their languages, their cultures, their peoples were favored. Our immigration laws themselves favored the people of certain European countries until 1965. By then, this favoritism had become an anachronism. The shift in our attitudes toward celebrating Columbus’ discovery of America — to use the old and now discarded formulation — is a symbol of this change. The emphasis on immigration in our celebration of the rededication of the Statue of Liberty is another indication of this change. We have always been a multilingual and multicultural country. Over the past 25 years, however, we have begun to feel that our need to impose, through law or practice, a common language and culture on immigrants has become less urgent.

Of course, not everyone feels this way. That is why we have votes for English as our official language (which it is and will be regardless of such votes). And that is why the attitude “We did it — why can’t they?” persists. We have to understand the basis, in childhood and school experience, of this attitude, and the advocates of bilingualism and multiculturalism have to explain all the ways in which the world has changed that make such attitudes anachronistic.

There is a second reason that criticism is leveled at bilingualism in the schools. Many of the requirements for bilingualism were imposed through federal law, federal court decisions, and state law. And many people whose experience and background do not include bilingualism view those requirements as an example of “special interest” legislation, as well as an example of federal intrusion into local school governance. Probably if we had had a referendum — nationally or in the various states that required bilingual education and imposed those requirements on local school districts — these laws would have been voted down, just as proposals to make English the official language through a statute or amendment generally pass.

Of course, almost all legislation represents some “special interest,” be it agricultural subsidies or rent control. All special interests seek legislation favoring them.

A third reason that opposition to bilingualism has continued is that this “special interest” is seen as working against the grain of American history, which has been an assimilating, acculturating history in which the immigrants and the children of immigrants forget their pasts, repudiate any foreign allegiances, and become Americans. Many people feared that formal bilingual requirements would hamper this process. This was to some extent a prejudice, not fully thought through. After all, the aim of bilingual education requirements was to make it easier to learn English, easier to become competent in the national language and thereby more effective politically and economically. To many of its opponents, the legislation seemed like a special effort to excuse the newest immigrants from learning English, and they could raise the legitimate question: If this education simply delays the learning of English or prevents the development of fluency in English, does it not delay and hamper the economic advancement of the new immigrant groups, since that advancement is so strongly dependent on competent English?

And there is a fourth reason for opposition. Undoubtedly, bilingual education programs not only reflect the interests and concerns of certain minority groups, but they also reflect the political and the personal interest of those who become professionals in such programs. The argument over bilingualism thus became, in part, an argument over jobs: more bilingual requirements, more jobs for Spanish speakers; fewer bilingual requirements, more jobs for non-Spanish speakers.

SO THERE were reasons for opposition: in the personal history of those who opposed the new requirements, in their objections to the intrusive role of government in local school decisions, in their skepticism over whether such programs hampered the learning of English and assimilation to a common culture, and in their suspicion that the argument was over jobs, not over effective education.

Let me add that there were — and still are — good reasons for such skepticism, since excesses clearly exist among the advocates of bilingual education. Some immigrant parents believed in sink or swim and felt urgently that they wanted their children to get as much English as possible. There were cases in which such parents had to go to court to get their children out of bilingual classes. Moreover, some of the teaching in these programs was unnecessarily nationalistic and separatist. I recall visiting programs in New York City where the heroes on the walls were Puerto Rican nationalists. Yet, even among Puerto Ricans there is disagreement over whether the Puerto Rican nationalists offer the best path for Puerto Rico. Why was public education pushing the views of one group of Puerto Ricans? Some programs were indeed politicized, teaching only one version of the truth. I also saw in New York some resistance to releasing children to the regular programs. They were being held in bilingual programs longer than seemed necessary, and one suspected that it was because the more children in such programs, the more jobs for bilingual teachers and administrators.

As Kappan readers know, there have also been endless arguments over whether these programs are effective; that is, do children learn English or arithmetic faster or more slowly when they are enrolled in such programs? The story of the evaluations’ of bilingual programs is a swamp that I will not venture into. I have concluded, somewhat unscientifically perhaps, that the success of a program depends on its teachers, not its formal structure, and I am ready to believe that some bilingual programs are very good, while some are very bad. The same is true for nonbilingual programs, and we will be able to conclude nothing on the basis of these massive evaluations.

But I have also concluded that these evaluations are somewhat misguided, because in the evaluations both the proponents and the opponents adopt what I would call the deficiency model. These evaluations, for example, do not inquire as to how good the students are in their original native languages — whether they can read in them or whether they do read in them. All the official bilingual programs are predicated on the deficiency model, at least partly because all the legislation assumes that the problem is only to teach English. The bilingual programs are to be “transitional.” Though many advocates of bilingualism want to maintain children’s first language, “maintenance” has become something of a dirty word. None of the legislation calls for maintenance, and the maintenance advocates are suspected, not without cause, of feeling some resentment toward the idea of assimilation. They are accused of having a political agenda as well as a cultural agenda.

I would like to see maintenance of a child’s first language divorced from politics. Maintenance would be presented as a way of maintaining a culture and a language. This is always valuable in itself. But Spanish is also of practical value, when our most populous neighbor is a Spanish-speaking nation, and when Spanish is one of the major languages of the world.

Many years ago, in 1957, just after the Soviet Union shocked us by putting a satellite into space, we passed a National Defense Education Act. The aim was to strengthen American education in science and in mathematics — in the belief, which may have been only partly true, that our failure to get a satellite up before the Soviet Union reflected badly on our scientific and mathematical education.

We also worried about our abilities in foreign languages. How many of us could read Russian, which was clearly a major language for the publication and transmission of scientific achievements? Very few. At that the, Joshua Fishman, a professor of social psychology and a student of bilingualism and the psychology of language, asked himself why, in a country in which half or more of the population are the descendants of immigrants who spoke languages other than English, were we so overwhelmingly monolingual? What had happened to our foreign language resources? I asked myself the same question. In World War 11, the armed forces started crash courses to teach various foreign languages to our soldiers, so they could serve as translators, interviewers of prisoners, and the like. One of the chief areas of combat, as you know, was Italy. And we set up courses to teach Italian to American soldiers, many with Italian surnames! In one or two generations they had lost the ability to communicate effectively in Italian.

In those days before there was anything like multiculturalism, Fishman got a substantial grant to study the decline of the knowledge of foreign languages among immigrants and their children. I was involved in that project, and our findings were incorporated in a large volume titled Language Maintenance in the United States. In those days of post-Sputnik hysteria, the reason the project was funded was purely practical: the U. S. Army was concerned over the loss of language resources.

Fortunately, fear of future wars plays no great role in today’s thinking about the education of children whose first language is not English. We are all aware — even if we think we did not suffer from it — that education has taken a narrow, rigid attitude toward the great variety of backgrounds of the children in our schools. We are all in favor of multiculturalism — of some sort.

But there are dangers, real and significant dangers. One danger is politicization. I have already cited the example of such politicization in the case of the portraits of Puerto Rican nationalist leaders in New York City schools. I can imagine a similar kind of politicization in the treatment of Mexico in multicultural programs. We can see a danger in the spreading of untruth or nonsense, for example, in the notorious Portland Baseline Essays. 1 There is the danger of casting the encounters between peoples in history — which always entail tragic elements of gross misunderstanding, cruelty, and bigotry — as a simple contest of heroes and villains, victims and victimizers.

I am not suggesting that there are any easy answers here. We will simply have to fight it out, as happened in California with scholars, teachers, community activists, and parents trying to come to a decent approximation of what to teach our children about history.

But in certain areas, there should be much less debate. The work of the Center for the Study of Books in Spanish for Children and Adolescents seems to me to rise above debates over what should be included in history books. When one sees that some of the books recommended have short stories by such writers as Jorge Luis Borges, Alejandro Carpentier, Julio Cortazar, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez or poetry by such writers as Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, and Juana Inez de la Cruz, the debate over bilingualism and language maintenance is to my mind transcended. Everyone benefits from the knowledge of great books or, indeed, simply good books, or even more simply books that engage the attention of young people.

I cannot believe that children engaged by such books will not want to go on enthusiastically to learn English and to savor the books in that language, too. The question then is not about whether studies show that this narrowly defined and prescribed program is better than that. It becomes, instead, how do we encourage our children — seduced as they are by MTV — to love literature?

Of course, we will still have to debate what kind of bilingual programs we should have, how we should evaluate them, what should go into our new multicultural social studies texts, and how we can keep them honest and true despite the pressure of special interests. But while we debate all these matters, we must also encourage the reading of great writers from around the globe, and those who can read these works in their original languages are the advantaged ones. I believe the debate over bilingualism would be muted — and in a healthy way — if more’ of it dealt with what the treasures of the Spanish language (and other languages in our increasingly polyglot nation) can offer all of us and less with deficiencies we are trying to overcome in children. Is it not easier to educate the children when we place before them things they enjoy and can profit from, than when we keep reminding them that they are in some way deficient?

1. For an analysis of the Portland Baseline Essay on Science, see Irving M. Klotz, “Multicultural Perspectives in Science Education: One Prescription for Failure,” Phi Delta Kappan, November 1993, pp. 266-69.



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