Ron Unz, the maverick Californian who made history by proving that bilingual education is an expensive ideological fraud, has just returned from the tony Renaissance Weekend in Hilton Head, S.C. This is the annual meeting where American intellectuals and policy wonks, almost all of liberal persuasion, reflect on the world. President and Mrs. Clinton were (and are) favorites of the sparkling gathering.

That is why Mr. Unz’s even being there – a little like a moose covering a conference of elk – was remarkable (organizers have been trying to encourage 5 percent to 10 percent Republican or conservative attendance at recent meetings). But even more astounding was the response to his presentations on California’s Proposition 227, which essentially abolished bilingual education two years ago.

“Given the atmosphere,” he says, “it is particularly interesting that my various presentations on the success of Proposition 227 and the advisability of replacing bilingual education with English immersion attracted not a single objection during the four days. Instead, numerous individuals – most of them solid liberals – commended my efforts and strongly seconded my views, in some cases offering their future assistance in states like Massachusetts and New York.

“This merely confirms my extensive national polling data, which have indicated huge landslide support for English among liberals -even extreme liberals – just like among everyone else.”

Such changes in these elite groups’ behavior and response to the issues of “nationality” and “citizenship” would be interesting alone. But Mr. Unz’s experience at the Renaissance Weekend is much like a Rorschach blot test for change, one of many indicators that Americans are beginning to see the absurdity of flagship group-rights programs such as bilingual education.

First, in only two years since Proposition 227 passed in a referendum with 6l percent of the vote, test scores in California have soared across the board for children learning directly in English and not “learning English through studying in Spanish.”

A second, related Proposition 203 was passed in Arizona in November’s election with 63 percent of the vote. And now “English immersion” advocates are moving on to New York and perhaps Massachusetts and Colorado. One interesting finding in New York: Mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced that one of the problems with “bilingual” education was that the teachers, mostly Latinos and many enlisted for ideological reasons in Mexico, weren’t themselves bilingual; they were only Spanish-speaking. In Florida a Zogby poll taken just before the election found support for all-English instruction in public schools leading by 83 percent to 12 percent.

As well, the appointment of Linda Chavez as the Bush administration’s labor secretary may open a new chapter in this era of language-nationality-citizenship questions (provided that her nomination survives the recently report she sheltered an illegal alien in her home at one point). Like Mr. Unz, Mrs. Chavez is a talented and fearless original. She made the trip from liberalism on these issues to her neoconservativism today, but her long-held aversion to affirmative action and to bilingual education may not cause her too many worries with Senate confirmation if Mr. Unz’s experience, that liberals themselves now criticize bilingual education, turns out to be true.

But which way will George W. Bush move? As governor, he has supported new immigrants and bilingual education. When I talked with him about these issues in a full day’s interview two years ago, he said he supported bilingual education “if it worked.” What if it didn’t? I asked. “Then we’ll do away with it,” he said with conviction. Since it is clear, after the experiences of California and other states, that bilingual education does not work based on many test scores and polls, what will his position be?

This interview, as well as recent comments he has made about strengthening border controls against illegal immigration (not to speak of his appointment of the no-nonsense Linda Chavez), lead me to think that, in office, he will become far tougher on these issues.

The impoverished but still not defeated pro-bilingual education lobby and mind-set is, in general, not giving in. Their answer to the program’s failure is another sure failure: two-way im- mersion, which means a second-tier Tower of Babel in which English-speakers and Spanish-speakers teach each other. As a speaker of five languages, I can attest it can’t work. You learn one language at a time by immersing yourself in it, not by the nonsense of pretending to talk back and forth in two languages.

Above all else, Americans should understand the core cultural reality, which is that these nationality issues are critical in the modern world. They define whether we become a formless conglomerate of groups bartering for position and privilege, or a nation of differing individuals united in the cause of national cohesion.

Professor Don Beck, founding partner of the National Values Center in Denton, Texas, says that until now we have had basic coherent national values and principles. Without them, “we will be hopelessly adrift in a sea of ethnic islands, dangerous jihad-like icebergs and destructive whirlpools of selfishness and predation. Only James Bond would thrive in such a lethal mesh of diversity gone-mad sentiments. Imagine the re-emergence of the feudal age under the guise of naive globalization. These threats continue to bubble and boil beneath the facade of our current way of affluence.”

Georgie Anne Geyer is a nationally syndicated columnist.



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