Charlottesville, Va.—July 4 is just around the corner, so now is probably a good time for a sappy and platitude-filled discussion about what it means to be an American. Everyone knows, of course, that Americans are fond of apple pie and baseball. They have names like Sally and Tom. Some of them have freckles. They pledge allegiance to the flag and can recite the Declaration of Independence by heart. They also seem to host a lot of barbecues.
The Cleavers and the Bradys have skipped town, and with them went all of the things with which they have traditionally been associated. The truth about Americans is that there is no one truth about Americans. We are a grand mishmash of people. We have different religions, skin colors, cultures, political beliefs and values. There is little, then, that unites us, and there is little that can. The best hope we have for national unity is something that, oddly enough, we didn’t even create ourselves: the English language.
It is strange, then, that attempts to require people moving to the U.S. to learn the English language have been met with fierce resistance. A large bilingual education movement exists in many states with large immigrant populations. Bilingual education, first adopted in the 1960s, is essentially an attempt to ensure equal opportunity for English- and non-English-speaking students to do work.
It sounds great, but the program has not become what it promised to be. The discrepancy between the plans and the reality is due to a decision made in the early days of bilingual education that children should be taught in their native language for a time, so that they could continue to learn other subjects while learning English. Experts predicted that the transition time for most children would take no longer than three years.
Thirty years later, bilingual education programs have not succeeded in making children bilingual. Instead, they result in the prolonged segregation of non-English-speaking students when many such programs begin to concentrate more on teaching in the native tongue and reinforcing native cultural values than anything else.
The rationale is that it is better for kids’ self-esteem and stress levels to teach them in their native language, but there has yet to be research published that strongly supports that hypothesis. Actually, acquiring English skills may give students more confidence in their ability to finish school. According to a 1995 report issued by the National Center on Education Statistics, students’ failure to learn English correlates strongly with dropping out of high school.
It is hard to imagine that asking someone to learn anything could be seen as limiting when education, by all accounts, expands the mind. Learning another language can only open doors, not close them. It’s not as if learning English would be time badly spent. Learning English literally opens up the world for people. English is rapidly becoming a global language, being the language of choice in international organizations, such as the European Union. The same can be said of few other languages. Asking immigrants to learn English isn’t some subversive way to undermine their culture. It will not replace their native language; it will supplement it.
In many households, including my own, family members speak English at work and school and another language at home. It is a healthy mix: People of other cultures are exposed to and interact with all aspects of their new home country, while still preserving the traditions of the old one and passing those ideas along to their children.
Keeping children in native-language programs past the prime years for language acquisition means that they will be at a disadvantage in dealing with the larger English-speaking world. It means that immigrant populations will have a harder time communicating their needs and wishes to English-speaking governmental bodies like state and national legislatures.
In the end, asking people who move to the United States to learn English isn’t that much to ask. If they are moving here, they presumably think that they may be better able to prosper in the U.S. than in their home country. For that improved chance of prosperity, it’s not an unreasonable request to ask them to try to interact with those of us who are already here, so that we may understand each other better, get along more easily and generally make life a lot more pleasant. Coming to America without the willingness to learn English is like going to an indoor pool without the willingness to get wet.
America is no longer the land of apple pie and baseball. Americans are brown and they are white; they are Catholic and they are Unitarian Universalist; their names range from Nguyen to Smith. We have much to learn from each other. It would be a sad thing if we were unable to do so for lack of a common language.
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