Your “just common sense” is someone else’s “cultural genocide.” This is the same argument that was used to aggressively (and sometimes successfully) exterminate indigenous minority languages and their cultures throughout the world.
When you don’t provide schooling in a language, you are making a powerful statement about the relevance of and opportunities for speakers of that language. There’s no reason someone couldn’t get a high school and college degree by means of Spanish—people do it all the time in many countries. Or through Navajo, or anything else. It’s a question of whether people value it enough to devote the resources to it.
What is common sense is bilingualism. You learn your ethnic language, and a national language, and there need be no conflict between the two. A lot of English speakers seem to think that people can’t really be bilingual, or are threatened by hearing something they personally can’t understand. If I had a 100% Navajo-medium education, and lived in an area with Navajo roadsigns, that doesn’t mean I can’t communicate with someone from New York. We’d use English for that.
My family, like so many others, switched to English in the 20th century. I have only ever picked up a little of my heritage language, which isn’t taught anywhere, and which I can never learn. Even if I did, I can’t share it with most of my living family. That’s one thing for me; you emigrate, you lose culture. It’s quite another for the speakers of indigenous languages and the Spanish speakers in the Southwest and the French speakers in Louisiana, who were already in place when English rolled in.
…are you talking about the people of the ancient kingdom Mauretania, or the people of Aotearoa? Because if its the latter the very least you could do is spell the name right to make it clear what you are talking about. Lego didn’t apparently make a series about Maori Warriors.
I assume you are talking about this:
As the resident Maori on these boards I’ll just say that from my point of view it was very cool of Lego to listen to Maori and to do what they did without creating a shit storm. Good on them.
I posed my question in the hope that it would prompt people to research for themselves and think on their own. Obviously it didn’t work in your case.
So according to some sketchy website you found, 98.5% of Japan is Japanese. Did you even think about what you copied before you pasted it? You could probably replace the country and nationality terms with the American equivalents and it would make about the same sense, to wit:
It seems that the consensus among progressives in this thread is that diversity is good for all nations. So adding more Middle Easterners to Europe would improve outcomes? Adding some new ethnic groups to the Middle East would be beneficial? Adding some new Europeans and Asians to South Africa would be positive?
Isn’t that a bit disingenuous, though? You define diversity as something that can only be positive, and then say diversity is always good.
Yeah, I know. Please learn how to express your ideas more clearly.
The point is that Japan is not ‘homogenous’ in terms of ethnicity. It shouldn’t be the go-to example when people want to talk about a ‘homogenous’ society. Every time people say Japan is an ethnically homogenous country is a slap in the face to people who live in Japan but don’t identify as ethnically Japanese. It’s not homogenous.
San Antonio had street signs in English, German & Spanish back at the previous turn of the century. Anti-German sentiment from the WW1 changed that but there are German Texansare still proud. There was a* real* problem with “secessionism” in the 19th century–but not over language. I remember a school trip to the Treuer de Union monumentin Comfort, built in 1866 for victims of a Confederate massacre.
Here in modern Houston, ballots come in four languages: English, Spanish, Chinese & Vietnamese. Naturalized citizens are required to learn English unless they’re very old, but might be more comfortable deciphering some of the more opaque “Propositions” & Amendments to our much-Amended state Constitution in their mother tongue. The language can be pretty opaque. (Those languages & more appear on Metro transit materials.)
The HISD offers several multilingual programs so that refugees & migrants can be educated as they learn English. (Learning English remains the major route to success here, given the number of adults paying for ESL classes.) Also, the highly competitive Magnet Schools include Language Immersion & International Specialty curricula to teach young Houstonians to function in a global economy.
Of course, some Texans remain fearful & xenophobic. But time is on our side. English is not going away but it has never been “the only language” here.
No–the Japanese Census is being difficult. It doesn’t ask people their ethnicity, it asks them their nationality. A bit of Googling is failing to turn up any stats on ethnicity within Japan that aren’t identical to stats on nationality.
25 years ago I went to tons of meetings about the Japanese eating our lunch. Japan more or less taking over was a common sf trope (like in Blade Runner.) Not so much now. Maybe if they were more diverse, and could adapt better, they’d be in a better position today.
I lived in the Congo about a year after independence. By “building up the economy” do you mean grabbing its mineral wealth. The Belgians finally let the Congolese into the local and quite good university just before they left, so the graduating class more or less became ministers being the only educated Congolese. Admittedly the Belgians were one of the worst of the lot, but colonialism hardly counts as diversity.
I mean in the sense that English was never challenged in any meaningful way as the main language of American society and government. There were millions of German-speakers, but they were expected to learn English and assimilate into American society.
That would imply that people are being forced to stop speaking a particular language, which is not what I’m advocating. What I am advocating is that everyone be required to learn a particular language.
What is that even supposed to mean? Does the United States have to provide schooling in every language spoken in the country? It is precisely to advance the opportunities of non-English speakers in American society that I’m advocating for English-language education.
I’m not opposed to bilingualism considering I’m bilingual myself. People shouldn’t forget their ethnic language but instead they should be required to learn English, I hope you can see the difference between the two. People can learn their ethnic languages in either afterschool/weekend schools dedicated for that purpose or even in public schools in particular classes, but the primary language of instruction in the latter case ought to be English.
Only the first suffered any significant persecution to forcibly assimilate, the latter two were simply demographically overwhelmed by Anglophone settlers.
When you say “a single language should be instructed in all schools,” are you saying that we should make English fluency a high priority for all students in our schools, or are you saying that we should not conduct instruction (except for foreign language instruction) in languages other than English?
The first is something that isn’t controversial except among the tiniest minority of folks. The second is scientifically proven to be poor pedagogy.