If bilingual education is bad, (not proven), then outlaw it. Don’t create one more stupid law that will require all sorts of lawsuits to define and delimit and give nativists and xenophobes one more weapon with which to attack people they don’t like.
California made an effort to kill bilingual education in favor of immersion. Subsequent studies seem to indicate that neither system has demonstrated a significant advantage over the other.
As noted, your links to the increasing number of Hispanic speakers with little English appears to have everything to do with adult immigration, (legal or otherwise), and nothing to do with the educational system.
So, you are proposing an unwieldy law to attack an unproven problem.
You really need to do a bit more basic research if you think that you are going to persuade anyone with distoted facts and poor logic.
Only Hispanic students are forced into bilingual education and they are the only ones that get worse results. Keep in mind that no one else is being forced into bilingual education. I took Spanish and French in school, but nobody forced to do it. Well Vanderbilt did require two years of the same foreign language. Nobody required anything but language courses in a foreign language.
Okay. Pass a law that says that there will be no more federal funding for bilingual education. You don’t need to outlaw it. States wouldn’t be doing it in the first place without federal funds. We didn’t have a problem in the first place before the seventies. BTW, could you post a link to the California Study?
I am from Southern California, and have spoken from time to time with “English only” advocates, and in my experience they generally seem concerned with the growing number of Spanish speakers in the state, and the prediction that Spanish speakers will be the majority of the population in California’s future.
“English only” IMO seems like a last ditch effort to hold back the inevitable linguistic and cultural diversity that is rapidly growing in many parts of the Southwest. And I wonder if “English only” advocates are envisioning the future with a non Spanish speaking minority getting the best educations, jobs, and holding most of the political power and wealth, while managing to find ways of keeping a Spanish speaking majority jumping through their “English only” hoops.
Do they not see strength in diversity?
Sure. http://www.wested.org/cs/we/view/rs/661
Of couse, it would be nice if you provided actual references to support some of your wilder claims, rather than citations to stories and reports that do not actually support them.
I linked to an entire textbook by Professor Hayakawa and one of posters said they would never read anything by him. It seems kind of futile to link to material that other posters have rejected without reading.
I don’t see strength. I see weakness, Look at what happened in Yugoslavia. They had diversity up the wazoo. Peace was maintained by vigorous suppression by Tito. Once Tito died, their diversity quickly degraded into chaos and civil war.
I find most people simply state diversity=strength as an axiom. They usually resort to abuse when you question their slogan.
Ask yourself if your diversity actually embraces treating women as chattel? Stoning a woman for adultery? Routinely aborting female babies? Marrying a 12 year old girl to an 80 year old man? From what I’ve seen people are inclined to call the police if their neighbor eats a dog or a cat.
We have freedom of speech in the Constitution, but what is that freedom worth if your fellow citizens can’t understand what you are saying?
I read part of the study you cited, but it was an interim report, two years into a 5 year study. I found the final report. http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED491617.pdf
I skimmed it a little bit, but I noted that the report was written by advocates of bilingual education. They reported that a lot of school districts were ignoring propostiion 207 and continuing bilingual instruction.
I looked for some more recent discussion and found this.
The situation today is that immersion English actually works for most students and they end up being mainstreamed. A side effect of this is that English learner classes (EL) have become an euphemism for slow learners and students end up in EL classes that have actually never spoken a foreign language and really have problems with standard English.
I was trying to figure out what percentage of Hispanics in California actually graduate from High School since proposition 207. I remember at one point reading that the percentage was lower than blacks.
I found a couple of recent documents on the subject.
It shows a Hispanic drop out rate of 22.7% which is much lower than the Black drop out rate of 30.1%, but still much higher than the general drop out rate of 18%. I remember the discussion that the EL programs are actually used for a lot of people with generalized education problems rather than English specific problems. Since about 82% of the people in the EL are Hispanic, I calculated that the drop out rate for Hispanics that are classified as fluent in English by the time they get to high school are dropping out at a 18% rate, which is the same as the general population.
Internment Archives.com- search S.I. Hayakawa, document 00179, page 3, shows his support of Japanese Internment during World War ll, and his attitude toward the redress movement.
He did not share the internment camp experience with other Japanese Americans, but referred to it as “an adventure.”
So, I can only imagine how Japanese Americans must feel about him.
Here’s your problem, or at least part of it … you linked to an entire textbook. I recall inviting you to take what you think is so great about Hayakawa’s book and constructing an actual argument with it. I’m beginning to think you don’t actually understand what an argument is.
I don’t have any respect for Hayakawa, so you’re not going to be persuading me just by dropping his name and a book title. Do your homework.
Apparently you don’t think any Japanese-American who didn’t support the redress movement actually deserves basic honesty. I have read other articles where he talked of being a hated and despised minority during the war and the concern for family members in the relocation camps.
I didn’t know, until I read his speech, that staying in the relocation camps was voluntary. Many Japanese-Americans actually relocated to the mid-west during the war. Hayakawa actually lived in Chicago during the war and quite a few friends and family members ended up in Chicago. I wonder how many Japanese-Americans still live there? Apparently the anti-Japanese hysteria was so bad in California that Federal authorities decided to relocate Japanese-Americans before the mobs started lynching them. Chinese started wearing signs saying, “I am Chinese”. The curious part is that Japanese-Americans living away from California didn’t have these problems.
It is kind of hard to imagine hatred like that today. I can only extrapolate by taking anti-arab feeling after 9-11 and multiplying by 100.
And I reiterate, that you are a moron if you think I will spend hours summarizing Hayakawa when you have already rejected without knowing anything about it. I will try to find a summary for other dopers that actually are interested. I will ignore anything you write.
FWIW, I haven’t read all the posts, and somebody may have mentioned this previously, but English is the official language of the State of California since 1986, I think:
If you understand and agree with Hayakawa it doesn’t require you to summarize his entire book chapter by chapter and it shouldn’t take you hours to do it. Show us you’ve given this some actual thought.
It is amazing that Spanish is the language that seems to be bucking for acceptance, yet it may just as easily have been Italian back in the day in NYC. Somehow those people ( my grandparents ) knew that they had to adapt and they did so. They were successful people in this country. Whenever someone joins our society ( the easy way or the hard way ) they usually end up being successful. The easy way being voluntarily.
So do Spanish speaking people not get the idea that it would be good for them to learn to speak English in so many ways. I suppose that they don’t realize that most people in the world know a few words of English for one reason or another. As an English speaking person, I am extremely biased, however when I watch Anthony Bourdain traveling into the most remote villages in the world, there is always someone around who speaks a little English. It’s sort of the universal language. I suppose Spanish could be as well.
Just realized the other day that hundreds of programming languages are written in English and you just have to accept that it is at the very core of our digital society. It would seem odd to write code in a language other than English.
There are some Spanish speakers who would like to see Spanish made an official language or established in the schools sysytems or something.
However, the overwhelming majority of Spanish speaking immigrants are doing, today, what the Mandarin-speaking, Vietnamese-speaking, Hindu-speaking, Russian-speaking, Swahili-speaking immigrants, along with all the rest, are doing and learning English. Since Spanish-speaking people can immigrate without the use of ships and they live relatively close, there are more of them. This tends to mean that by numbers, (not percentages), more of them are already at an age when learning new languages is difficult. However, making an argument that “Spanish speaking” people want or do anything differently from all other immigrants, (now or in the past), fails on the reality that as a group they are, indeed, behaving just like every other group and learning English.
(To the extent that some Spanish speaking people have not learned English, it is not difficult to find communities where German, Polish, Italian, and other languages were the common tongue for decades. In my family, the German side arrived in the 1850s and it was a decision by one matriarch around 1900 that the family stopped speaking German.)
I’m still waiting for JoelUpchurch to provide any evidence that Canada isn’t a democracy.
I don’t disagree with that in principle, but you then seem to make the leap that the only valid shared assumptions are the one adopted by US society. In Canada, the shared assumptions that we’ve been working with from before Confederation is that we can operate using two languages in our government. And with technological advances in translation and interpretation, that assumption is working better. I can watch the debates in the Commons on and it doesn’t matter which language the MP is using - there’s simultaneous translation, so I can hear and see the debates in real time and understand the MPs regardless of language.