Sharing the same language

THE ISSUE: Bilingual programs
OUR VIEW: It's not clear they're working as well as they should

It didn’t get much coverage in the U.S. press but the Slovak Republic has passed a law limiting the use of any languages other than Slovak.

We bring this to your attention not because we perceive any burgeoning interest in the affairs of the Slovak Republic (a small country that used to be the back half of Czechoslovakia) but because this event reflects interestingly on debates taking place in our own country. In particular, at a time when we are prone to think that Americans have become so polarized they can never again meet on common ground, it may be refreshing to realize that on some issues we are not, in fact, so far apart as many people have assumed, certainly not as far apart as other peoples in other nations.

According to one description, the new Slovak law ”makes it a crime for an ethnic German doctor to speak in his native tongue to his German patient, for a rabbi to speak Yiddish or Hebrew in a synagogue, for two gypsies to use Roma when they get married. The action outlaws the entire educational system of the 600,000 indigenous Hungarians living in the Slovak Republic.”

That does indeed sound extreme, unfair and just plain nasty. Consider, too, that the Hungarians did not come to the Slovak Republic of their own free will as immigrants; the current borders were drawn around them by other European powers following World War I.

But here’s what else this shows:

* It is not just in the United States that many people feel it is imperative that a nation’s citizens share a common tongue.

* The proposals coming from Official English and similar groups are, by comparison, hardly harsh or radical. The vast majority of English advocates are not trying to outlaw foreign languages as the Slovak Republic apparently is; they are merely arguing that English is – and ought to be – America’s lingua franca.

We have opposed attempts to write a law declaring English the official American language because we think such a step is unnecessarily provocative. At the same time, there is no doubt that every U.S. citizen from Denver to Miami, San Diego to Maine, should be proficient in English.

That is why, for example, it is so important that bilingual educational programs offered in public schools actually make kids fluent in English. Last year, the federal government spent more than $ 3 billion on bilingual education programs. But a New York City Board of Education report concluded that in that city, at least, bilingual education was failing miserably: Of students who enter bilingual education classes between sixth and ninth grades, fully 90% failed to move up to regular classes within a ”mandatory” three- year period.

Is the same thing happening in Denver? The studies necessary to find out have not been conducted. But according to a DPS spokesman, the new head of bilingual education, Tony Vigil, is concerned about the effectiveness of programs currently in place and intends to implement a new plan that, he hopes, will achieve greater success.

Bilingual individuals are an asset to any society. But bilingual societies are generally composed not of bilingual individuals but of two groups speaking two different, mutually incomprehensible tongues. Such societies are inherently unstable and, in the words of New York Rep. Peter T. King, ”both separate and unequal.”

The solution is not to brutally ban foreign tongues a la the Slovak Republic. But neither is it to fool ourselves into thinking that America can be remodeled in such a way that Americans who don’t speak the native language won’t suffer for that. The unambiguous goal of bilingual education should be to help everybody learn English as quickly and as fluently as possible.



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