Bilingualism In America: A Radio Presentation of the Humanities; No. 1

The Humanities Ethics, literature, criticism of the arts History, archaeology, philosophy and language He has come to teach him the Through the When nation, indivisible, in which by many cultures, but united by a single tongue. There is a self-styled lobbying group called U.S. English, which has formed and is collecting lots of money to declare English the official language of the United States. They collect a good deal of money, and send Sesu Hayakawa and Gerta Bacalis all around

the country, spewing out their racism, their ethnocentrism, their xenophobic, and their misguided patriotism and general ignorance. We must stop them. I think that's ludicrous, and I think all you need to do is to look at the vote on Proposition 38, which was an effort in the November ballot to eliminate the bilingual ballot. That measure passed in every single county in this state, and it passed among every single ethnic group. Hispanics voted in favor of eliminating the bilingual ballot, or, you know, voted in favor of eliminating the bilingual ballot. This is not an issue where the Hispanics are on one side, and the orientals are on the other, and the angles are on another side. That simply is not true. This is bilingualism in America, a radio presentation of the humanities. To speak a language other than English in this country is both revered and resented. The other most spoken language in this country is Spanish, and to speak it has become an issue

that cuts very deeply into the American psyche, suggesting that something fundamental is at stake. If 10 years ago you had told me that we would have a bilingual ballot in California, you had told me that you could go and apply for the Department of Motor Vehicles, license, and Chinese. If you had told me you could apply for welfare forms in Spanish, I would have said that's ridiculous, but indeed that is what has happened in California, and I think that concerns us. California Assemblyman, Frank Hill. We're concerned about sort of a gradual chipping away of the English Foundation in California and in this country, and so we want to stop that trend, and indeed we want to work back towards a society where all of us can communicate on the same terms. Immigrants coming into the country today, especially if they're from a Spanish-speaking country, are put in a state of confusion. Gurda Bacalis, Executive Director of U.S. English, Washington, D.C. Their children go to classes that are conducted in Spanish, and they do their homework

in Spanish, and they put on the TV, and they're at Spanish, and they go to vote, and it's in Spanish, and they don't know anymore what is expected of them. I think a simple declaration that English is our official language, our only official language, is going to clear the air because in the state of confusion as long as the rules aren't clear, everybody is at each other. They're my friends, but they're wrong. United States Senator Paul Simon of Illinois. First of all, as a meaningless thing, the second, there is no question that everyone in the United States ought to be able to speak English, but the aim of bilingual education is not to keep people from learning English, is to assist them in a transition from a mother tongue that is not English into the English language. It is necessary. I mean, it is necessary for participation in the American experience to learn English, and every group has done that and is doing that, and we'll do that. Dr. Joshua Fishman, Yeshiva University, New York.

No one who is an advocate of bilingual education of any United States is opposed to English, or is in favor of dethroning English, or removing it from its position of the first and the integrative language of the United States, no one is in favor of that. I am not a supporter of the English only amendment, whether advanced by former Senator Hayakawa or Gerta Bacallis of the English only group. No Al-Epstain, publisher of the Washington Monthly, and controversial critic of bilingual education. I think that is an absolutely needless slap in the face of all language minority peoples in the United States. There are a lot of problems about English that are fully within the lap of monolingual English American, monolingual English America does now have to read, or write, or speak English effectively. That is a big problem that has nothing to do with bilingual education. Those who are in love with English should tackle those problems.

Those are the real problems of English in the United States. What's your help? Those who are seeking signatures to qualify for the November ballot from now to time and today is the day. You just signed an initiative to make English the official language, and I'm just wondering why you're interested in doing that. This is America. Not Mexico, not Japan, not Vietnam, or any other country. We cater to Spanish and everything else. When I see things come home from school that are in Spanish and in English, we're catering to them and they're not going to bother to learn our language. So therefore they shouldn't live in this country. Well, because I think that when people come here and before the Turner Center and everything, they proved that there had no difficulty blending into the society, into a melting pot of America. So why should we go out of our way now? We are hated. People come into the country, take advantage of us. A lot of immigrants don't pay taxes. I have to pay taxes and I'm in trouble with the Turner Revenue Service now, and they got me. What's your help?

What's we're seeking? We are a nation of immigrants and we never made this accommodation for others. So we should not really change the rules in midstream. Gurda Bacalis. It is very denigrating and very much resented by people who came here earlier in for whom this accommodation was not made. I think in the interest of civic accord and domestic peace, we have to continue with the traditions we have established, namely the primacy of English and a clear goal of assimilating the children into the American mainstream. Dr. Joshua Fishman, Yashiva University, New York. It's foolish to take it out on immigrant groups that are arriving now at a time when the country is in a different stage in its history. And education is in a different state of its history. And we know how to do things better than they were done 30 years ago and 50 years ago. No old immigrant population in this country would forego social security just because

their grandparents didn't have it. We don't forego electricity because our grandparents didn't have it. We don't forego airplanes or automobiles because our grandparents didn't have it. That's not really the reason. I think that's just an excuse. Well, there is always some hostility to newcomers, to any who are, quote, different. Senator Paul Simon. We go through these cycles and there is on the part of some resentment to people who are Hispanic by background or Vietnamese by background or whatever the background. But we will look back 30, 40 years from now and say what a great thing it was that they came to our country and how they have enriched our country. Dr. S.I. Hayakawa, former United States Senator from California and founder of U.S. English. You know, you really can't become English. That is, you're always a foreigner in England. You can't become English.

You can't become Japanese either. There are Koreans that are demanding their for five generations who are treated as foreigners. But anyone can become an American and to have a big, big movement takes you to actually have among Hispanics to resist this whole process, is to arise really the anger or the rest of population. And you hear people say, over and over again, I'm an Italian. Descented from the Italians, my father came with Italy, but I'm an American now. Why don't they want to become Americans too? They want to be American in a Hispanic way. But they want to be American and they're all going to learn English. It's an American phenomenon that we're discussing. And it's Anglo-America that has gone through a loss of its own power, its own prestige in the world, whose economy has slowed down, whose own social mobility has slowed down. And they're taking out their frustration, their inability to solve their own problems, taking it out on foreigners, on immigrants, on culturally different people.

Those problems, none of them will go away if bilingual education were abolished tomorrow. They will still be there. Unsmiley never watched full of my teachers noted my silence. They began to connect my behavior with a difficult progress my older sister and brother were making. Richard Rodriguez. Until one Saturday morning, three nuns arrived at the house to talk to our parents. The clash of two worlds. The faces and voices of school intruding upon the familiar setting of home. I overheard one voice gently wondering, do your children speak only Spanish at home, Mr. Rodriguez? While another voice added, that Richard especially seems so timid and shy. That Richard. With great tact to visitors continued, you said possible for you and your husband to encourage your children to practice their English when they are home. Of course, my parents complied, but what they'd not do for their children's well-being. And how could they have questioned the church's authority which these women represented?

In an instant, they agreed to give up the language, the sounds, that had revealed and accentuated our family's closeness. The scene was inevitable. One Saturday morning, I entered the kitchen for my parents were talking in Spanish. I heard their voices changed to speak English. Those gringo sounds they uttered, startled me, pushed me away. In that moment of trivial misunderstanding and profound insight, I felt my throat twisted by unsounded grief. I think there's a price to pay for immigration, and the price is a certain amount of inevitable cultural loss, and there's a certain amount of pain associated with that, especially for the older generation. I'm afraid that's a price we all have to pay. I feel this very personally, I'm an immigrant myself, and it was certainly painful for me, but most especially it was painful for my parents to watch a certain distance evolve between us as I Americanized faster than my parents did, and that's painful.

It's unavoidable, however, and we cannot make exceptions. Carmen Perez, Chief Bureau of Bilingual Education for the State of New York. It is so sad that so many of our citizens, so many Americans came with the ability to speak another language, and how many of them refused to give this wonderful gift to their children. And now when I speak to these children who are adults, and they tell me, oh, if only I could have learned how to speak Italian when I was young, it's so hard to know how to speak another language. If only my parents had really let me speak French or had let me speak Yiddish or Russian or Polish, if only they had, and sometimes you know, you can only stay with that if only because it gets to a point where it's almost too late. Hi, this is Smokey Robinson. I really love Spanish. I love the song Better in Spanish than I did in English, you know, because the words are

so beautiful. You know what I'm saying? The way you pronounce the words and the rolling of the R and so on and so forth. And it was a great thrill for me to do the song in Spanish, you know? I've really enjoyed it, I enjoyed it so much and I'm going to do all of my single records in Spanish probably from now on. Within the next 30 years, it is estimated that Hispanics, Latinos, will constitute majorities in California, in Arizona, and New Mexico, in Texas. And numerous cities across the country, the at Miami, Chicago, or New York, Latinos have achieved or will achieve a kind of critical mass. And this reality has been greeted by some with alarm and suspicion.

This center of this concern has been in our schools, and particularly with bilingual education. I want to see more and more Mexican kids go up in the world and get scholarships and become valedictorians at our high schools and get scholarships into Berkeley and Harvard, et cetera around the country and become a success. Ideally, the Mexican leaders should want that. English language scholar Dr. S.I. Hayakawa. But they are seeing to it through their push for bilingual education, they are handicapping those children for our life in the United States. Secretary of Education William Bennett, speaking before the Association for a Better New York, September 1985. After 17 years of federal involvement and after $1.7 billion federal funding, we have no evidence that the children we sought to help, that the children who deserve our help have benefited.

Dr. Jose Cardinas, Director of the International Development and Research Association, San Antonio, Texas. Now why would the Secretary of Education go out there and say five times in one evening in one presentation five times that bilingual programs teach the native language and do not teach English. I met with Secretary Bennett and Chicago and I asked Secretary Bennett to name one school district in the whole country, one school in the whole country where there is a program of bilingual education that does not teach the English language. He does not have the names of those school districts. He just says that I am distorting his perceptions of bilingual education. There is a technical aspect of the report that says that over 50% of the teachers in bilingual programs do not even speak any language other than English. So how can those 50% of the programs be in any language other than English? Dr. Joe Bernal, former elected representative for the state of Texas. I don't think that I have ever lost sight or any teacher that I have associated with in

all the years that I have been a principal and a classroom teacher. I don't think that I have ever heard anyone in this entire community and all my life say that they would want to be a detriment to a child's learning of English. And I think that the only thing you can conclude is that if you take a bunch of teachers that don't speak any language other than English, give them no training whatsoever, and then you see what happens to the kids in their classrooms and you look at the data and say, well bilingual programs are not very effective. I think that you are just fooling yourself in accepting this type of research. My own impression is that yes it is working very well. When you have adequately trained teachers, you have the language facility and you have administrative support and you have good instructional materials, yes they work very, very well. That people still continue to criticize bilingual education for not teaching English is just a sign that something else is bugging them, that they have other aggravations, that they have other frustrations, that the research evidence just will not get through to them.

What about things like bilingual education and other things like that that this is going to affect? What do you think about that? Well, there's too much money being expended on all types of languages being printed up, there's too much time being expended in our high schools, our junior eyes, for kids who come up to this country that's being taken away from our children who are natural citizens and I think our natural citizens have better rights or more rights than the aliens that come up. They're saying that they learn faster in their own language, but they haven't proven that yet. I haven't seen any studies out and I read the times in the register every day. I think we are creating a situation, we're placing the child into a situation in which estrangement is inevitable. You know, many of our citizens in the future, any of the young Americans, the next generation coming up, our children who were born, are people who were born somewhere else, or at least grew up in households where English was not the common language and what they need is more exposure to American values, not less.

Dr. Gloria Zamora of the Intercultural Development Research Association, San Antonio, Texas. We have some marvelous research that we can point to, Dr. Jim Cummins from Canada has done some marvelous research in the area of language acquisition. So his Dr. Merrill Swain, Dr. Wallace Lambert, these are Canadians. So has Steve Krashen from California, so has Lee Wang Philmoor from California. Homeless research about how we acquire language and the role that the first language plays in the acquisition of other languages. One of the concerns of a lot of policymakers, administrators, editorial writers, and just the general public in the United States is that bilingual education makes very little sense because if children are deficient in English, if they have problems in acquiring English academic skills in school, then surely the way to resolve these problems is to teach children

through English and give them as much intense exposure to English as possible. Dr. James Cummins, Associate Professor, Modern Language Center of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. This is a very intuitively appealing point of view, but unfortunately the data from virtually every evaluation of any bilingual program anywhere in the world totally refutes this view. In actual fact, exposure is just one of the things that children need, what's equally important for acquiring academic skills in the language is the extent which they have a foundation in their first language for making sense of the input they're getting in the second language. So that when we talk about bilingual education, the rationale behind bilingual education is that it's providing that foundation, that conceptual basis in children's first language which allows them to assimilate the academic content they're getting in English. Henry Cisneros, Mayor of San Antonio.

I'm a supporter of bilingual education and I believe that it has worked. I see the evidence and human terms in my city as I go to schools where once young people were embarrassed by their heritage, hung their heads down, stared at the floor, made to feel a shame because of who they were. And the result was a people who ended up apathetic, unproductive, disillusioned by education, disillusioned by the political process, because it served them not at all. Today in a place of that, I see a entirely different dynamic. I go to the west side schools in my city and see little children with brown eyes who are excited about about school. They've learned what's in books because they were taught first in Spanish and easy language for them. They've learned what the library is for. They've learned the purpose of the teacher. They've learned the authority structure of the school. With enthusiasm and excitement, I think that's all positive. It's a very different era and bilingual education has been responsible for a good part of that difference.

It has been said that we are a tongue tied nation, neither studying nor fully grasping the importance of other languages. Not in government, not in business, and not in our cultural and personal lives. I suggest we ought to have a plaque or a sign saying, welcome to the United States. We don't speak your language. United States Senator Paul Simon of Illinois. We're the only nation on the face of the earth where you can go through grade school, high school, college, get a PhD, never have a year of a foreign language. And that era has to end. General Gordon Ambach, Commissioner of Education, New York. I think that the most important message to get across is a broad message that developing a truly bilingual population in this country is what our objective should be. And that means that we have to be concerned about not only the learning of English, but the maintenance of proficiency in the other languages.

And one cannot maintain the proficiency in the other languages unless a child studies in the other languages. I'm cutting past the issues of regulations or controls or rules. I'm going to what I think is the very essence of the issue. And that is whether we are genuinely concerned about having a truly bilingual population, which is proficient in English and at least one other language, or whether in fact we are talking about shifting over to the learning of English and leaving the other languages behind. Well a very fundamental rule in business and I used to be in business is that if you can buy in any language but if you want to sell you have to speak the language of your customer. After World War II we could for a period just sit over here and spend an economic isolation and if people wanted to buy they had to come over to us and speak in our language. Now we have to move to other countries and sell in their languages. I think it's becoming aware to anyone, even a person on the street, that we live in an international

economy. That what happens with a price of oil halfway around the world, that what happens with a famine, with a drought, with a labor strike, some whirls, does affect what we do, what we can buy, what we can't buy, what price we pay for them. Dr. Robert Hayes Bautista, Professor School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley. One of the ways to be not competitive in a foreign economy environment is to ignore these other countries, these other regions, not speak their language, not know what they're sensible to and offer products that simply will not move. That is we import more things because these other countries have taken the time to learn English, to learn about American culture, to know what consumers want, to know what they demand and what they expect. John Nesbitt, when he wrote Megatrans in 1982, talked in terms of Americans having to master at least three languages. May your Henry C. Snarrels, San Antonio? He said they would be English, Spanish, and computer to survive in the coming era. And I think with a little tongue in cheek acknowledgement, that is a valid point.

This is not only a technological era we're entering into, but it's also a language of complexity, of changing demographics, of new international relationships, of immigrant and refugee forces, and of attention to parts of the world that we have never been attentive to before. We should see the growing Latino, Asian, and even the slowly growing black population as a tremendous asset in this internationalized economy, not at all its liability. I think we are looking at bilingual education from the wrong end. I think we need to turn it on its head if we look towards the future and the need to be competitive in an international economic scene. We should look upon bilingualism as the mark of an educated person. Wouldn't Chinese speaking representatives have an advantage over English-only speaking ones? Wouldn't Japanese speaking ones have an advantage in Japan? Wouldn't Spanish-speaking ones have an advantage in Latin America? Wouldn't Russian-speaking ones have an advantage in Russia? Wouldn't Arabic-speaking ones have an advantage in the Arab-speaking world?

Of course they would. The primary concern is not whether this person will ultimately be bilingual, trialing or multilingual, but whether this person will be able to function in English. I think that should be the clear goal to make this person confident in English as soon as possible, as soon as possible. Time is of the essence. It's so interesting because we continue to spend so much money attempting to teach foreign languages, second languages, and yet at the same time we have this tremendous human resource in our schools and we're not capitalizing on that resource. And that's always been very, very baffling to me. Connie Williams, director of bilingual, multicultural training and education, Redwood City Unified School District, California. Someone put it quite succinctly one day when they said, if children learn Spanish at

school, it's considered an academic pursuit, an academic achievement. If children learn Spanish at home, it's an educational handicap. I'm an American first. I believe the English language is the official language of this country and I do believe every person here ought to attempt to try to learn English as a functioning person in the society. And I believe that that is not going to change. But I don't believe in smashing personality, diminishing creativity, eliminating the richness of diversity that is really what the All-America idea is. This program, bilingualism in America, Part 1, was produced by Santiago Casal of Unidad Productions.

Major funding for this series was provided by the California Council for the Humanities. Additional distribution funds were provided by the Florida Endowment for the Humanities, the Illinois Humanities Council, the Arizona Humanities Council, the New Mexico Humanities Council, the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, and the Texas Committee for the Humanities. All state affiliates of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The narration was provided by Brenda Wilson.