A rare social policy success over the last generation was the 1998 rollback of "bilingual" education in California when Proposition 227 passed with 59% of the vote. The problem with "bilingual" education was that it worked to keep the children of immigrants monolingual in the language of their homes until after they'd passed the time period when they can most easily learn a new language. Ron Unz's initiative has made English dominant in the schools, and the kids like it. English is cool.
Therefore, the Democrats in Sacramento want to repeal it.
Calif. Senate panel advances bill to restore bilingual education
By Patrick McGreevy April 30, 2014, 8:11 p.m.
SACRAMENTO -- The state Senate Education Committee recommended Wednesday that California voters be asked to repeal Proposition 227, the 1998 initiative that requires public school instruction in English.
The proposal to restore bilingual education programs in the state was made by Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens), who said the ballot measure has stifled the ability of students to become multilingual.
Uh, no, the old bilingual education kept immigrants' children monolingual by teaching them at school in the same language as they heard at home. In contrast, Proposition 227 makes the school language different from the home language.
“The top educational systems around the world all require students to learn multiple languages,” Lara told the panel.
In English, the global dominant language, which is what they weren't learning well under Proposition 227.
“New research has shown that children have an innate ability to absorb multiple languages at once, where previously it was thought to confuse them.”
Which is why they need to be taught in English, when they can still learn English easily.
The committee voted 4 to 1 to approve SB 1174. Lara is proposing that the measure be placed on the 2016 ballot.
Sen. Mark Wyland (R-Escondido), a former school board member, voted against the bill, saying he saw bilingual education at work before Proposition 227 at a school of Spanish-speaking students. When they were tested, “they couldn’t speak or read or write English,” Wyland said, adding he is concerned that such students “are going to be relegated to jobs where they don’t have the English-speaking skills they need.”
Unz's Proposition 227 always got pretty fair coverage from the English language press, who aren't so stupid they couldn't see which side their bread was buttered upon.
However, Sen. Ben Hueso (D-Logan Heights) said the world is changing and California schools should adapt. “Not everybody doing business internationally or globally speaks English,” Hueso said.
More and more do.
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34 comments:
http://blog.heritage.org/2014/05/01/sean-hannity-believes-smoking-gun-benghazi-video/
This is almost like reverse psychology...
Do "we" really want these "immigrants" to learn English (why?) as though real assimilation was around the corner? Or do "we" want to make sure they remain linguistically isolated but still able to legitimize an even greater public school bureaucracy?
I say neither, really..
In English, the global dominant language...
Here is a short essay by a Japanese professor, in English of course, about why the Japanese need to learn English. It can can be applied to any non-English speaking group. If you are going to write a defense about why English is special and should be taught, then this essay will give you some good ammunition. In fact the California Senate should be required to read it.
Excerpt:
The importance of English is not just in how many people speak it but in what it is used for. English is the major language of news and information in the world. It is the language of business and government even in some countries where it is a minority language. It is the language of maritime communication and international air traffic control, and it is used even for internal air traffic control in countries where it is not a native language.
Some people want Hispanics as consumers but not competitors for their kids.
Is it so hard to understand?
This is hilarious. Around here in super affluent and super white+Asian Northern Virginia, parents go crazy trying to place their kids at desirable public schools with total immersion in a foreign language.
CA Democrats want Hispanics to stay monolingual, instead of a completely cost-free (to them and to the public) total immersion program in a language other than their own, i.e. English.
Wow. You almost think that Democrats don't want Hispanics to become successful and assimilate into the economic and social mainstream. Viva La Raza, I guess.
What an ass. After years of predicting that Americans would have to learn other languages in order to "compete" the opposite happened. The world (minus immigrants from Mexico) learned English.
The only demand we make of tens of millions of illegal invaders is that they speak English? Letting them stay here is okay?
Talk about a low bar. At least before when Whites and Latinos spoke different languages, it served as a barrier to to miscegenation.
At least before when Whites and Latinos spoke different languages, it served as a barrier to to miscegenation.
Miscegenation requires no common language.
Miscegenation requires no common language.
True, miscegenation can occur between deaf/mutes. But cultural barriers are real. Language can be a cultural barrier.
I'm not arguing for bilingualism, but I am noticing that a lot of Culture-Only Conservatives ONLY seem to care about language/culture/religion.
They are devoted to rather superficial manifestations of a people, but not the people themselves. Truly, most modern day "conservatives" couldn't care less if every White person went extinct, as long as whoever was left spoke English and went to the right Church.
I love how Latino pols pretend that their language is so important when more and more young people in Latin America are learning English every year. These old race hustlers and their white liberal masters are totally out of touch with the global reality.
Truly, most modern day "conservatives" couldn't care less if every White person went extinct, as long as whoever was left spoke English and went to the right Church.
That's a bit over the top. Most white conservatives, including mainstream ones, are not okay with total population replacement or extinction of the white race on North America. But that's not exactly a likely scenario either.
I would say many mainstream white conservatives have made peace with the idea that whites may be a sizable minority provided that whites continued to be the politico-economically dominant or at least significant ethnic group. I also think a large chunk of them hold a genuine belief in the assimilative capacity of the traditional Anglo-American way of life. Of course, they are not entirely right, but I do not think they are completely wrong either, as the future is not preordained. Many white nationalist types seem utterly convinced that we are headed to Brazil or South Africa.
They seem not to realize that historical trends only appear to be trends in retrospect and history is, in reality, highly stochastic (people wouldn't lose money in the securities market otherwise).
A weird notion of sympathetic magic seems to be behind the belief that bilingual education makes bilingual children. As you point out, it's obviously the opposite when you stop to think for a moment, but "bilingual" is a word with good educationy associations, so bilingual education we must have.
Is the true motivation to secure jobs for Spanish speaking teachers, whom I assume are disproportionately Hispanic?
I would say many mainstream white conservatives have made peace with the idea that whites may be a sizable minority provided that whites continued to be the politico-economically dominant or at least significant ethnic group.
Yes they have ... but imagine if Japanese "conservatives" had made peace with the idea of ethnic Japanese living as a minority inside Japan!
Now, when Whites do become a minority (which will happen fairly soon for the under 25 crowd), will the same subset of Whites who have been the most dominant among Whites still be "our" leaders and elites? Browns and Blacks are demanding their own leaders more and more. Our elite structure is likely to change.
The Whites who are able to get top political control when Whites are a majority (and feel safe) may not be able to maintain that position when Whites become a minority.
I'm all for the old bilingualism. It will make them less likely to vote, and easier to send the illegals back. Recall all the people who insist we can't send the illegals who came here as young children back because they don't speak the language. I have no problem with them failing, and remaining poor (here in the US, anyway). The more people around us who don't speak English, the more readily people will realize that our immigration rates are too excessive.
"Is the true motivation to secure jobs for Spanish speaking teachers, whom I assume are disproportionately Hispanic?"
And to provide a good reason for getting rid of black teachers.
I would say many mainstream white conservatives have made peace with the idea that whites may be a sizable minority provided that whites continued to be the politico-economically dominant or at least significant ethnic group.
This was the sanguine view of Syrian Alawites and Christians regarding their rapidly growing Sunni hoi polloi. Now, they're wishing they'd had more children. Same in Lebanon.
Well I guess since it's so important that "Not everybody doing business internationally or globally speaks English," then we ought to make the sensible choice and teach those Mestizo kids Chinese. I mean forget English. They can speak their local argot at home and then learn to speak Chinese, because of course these children all go pouring into the international business world when they get older.
Is the true motivation to secure jobs for Spanish speaking teachers, whom I assume are disproportionately Hispanic?
Of course. That is ALWAYS the true motivation of education "reform." More teachers = more union members = more money funneled to Democrat campaigns, so who is in favor of more teachers? Democrats.
We used to call that "graft," now we call it "education policy."
"However, Sen. Ben Hueso (D-Logan Heights) said the world is changing and California schools should adapt. “Not everybody doing business internationally or globally speaks English,” Hueso said."
Wow, powerful argument there Ben. Refute an absolute: "Not everybody". Using his logic you could just as easily oppose the bill because "not everybody" is in the opposite camp. Generally speaking, being for or against a given policy because "not everybody" on the entire planet fits neatly on one side of it
According to his bio, Ben graduated with a degree in "Sociology/Urban Planning" and owns a "small business". So I'm not sure how much international business travel he has done, but having done extensive business in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, China, Germany, Netherlands, and Brazil I can attest that you can get by just fine speaking only English. In the places where a language other than English would be useful, it is most definitely not going to be Spanish.
if its going to torpedo their children's competitors, then this is a rational move by said democrats.
The bureaucrats hope to pander, in part, to elderly white voters. (Lara is 39.) They will insultingly count on their assuming two things:
1. English is naturally spoken in every home because we're in America.
2. The only exposure to a foreign language that a young shaver is going to get is at school, in a special educational program.
Unfortunately, Lara et al. may not have miscalculated. I hope our elderly are better than that.
Sen. Hueso sounds pretty bone-headed.
I remember reading a WSJ article a while ago about how Chile was going to start requiring its students to learn English, because it s the international language of business.
I remember back in the 90s, this seemed like it was going to the most important issue for the future of the country and this state, and 227 felt like such a victory.
Now, it just seems like such a sideshow. Even if they're successful, so what? A few thousand kids in Pico Rivera or Montebello are going to fill out their unemployment applications in bad Spanish instead of bad English. Even if we could force these kids to learn English and graduate from HS, so what? They won't ever have the human capital to be net contributors to this permanently terrible economy.
A handful of tiny, really crappy school districts might love this, but they're not filled with budding geniuses. I suppose one less tough class for below-average mestizo students might mean the average student drops out in the eighth grade instead of the seventh. Hooray?
I see the return of bilingual education as splitting Mexican political clout in California. The second and third generation Mexican-Americans I know in the Inland Empire don't care about making their kids learn better Spanish, nor do they care about getting their kids into Cal Tech. More common is a desire to see their sons graduate from HS with good enough skills to qualify for a secure career in the military or government work. These people want nothing to do with the bilingual education advocates in academia or politics.
Mexican schools do not offer bilingual education for English-speaking hispanic kids from the US returning to Mexico.
These remain uneducated.
without leland yee, the east asians on the board do not have the votes to sink this. not that they probably would anyway. their ethnic veto extends to one issue and one issue only. and the chinese might want bilingual instruction in chinese anyway. whenever they move into new areas, they specifically set up chinese language schools. wonder if they would be interested in the prospect of moving that into the public school curriculum so it happened automatically, at taxpayer expense, or do they prefer to keep ethnically separate chinese language schools the way catholics prefer to keep their schools.
i've posted many times about how totally unimportant spanish is. nothing important happens in spanish and you're 100% safe never learning it. i didn't mind learning some, because i enjoyed exploring mexico and liked to be able to speak some. but it's unequivocally not important for the future of america, or any other nation, that the kids learn it in school. you will never have an important discussion in spanish on any topic. no industry happens in espanol, no tech comes out of spanish speaking countries, no important media comes out of spanish speaking countries or is published in spanish first. all the language translation goes in the other direction. from english to spanish.
if you want to know which culture is actually vibrant, figure out which direction the bulk of translation occurs. from the producing culture (english) to the consuming cultures (most of the rest). most material in most industries is originally produced in english, then translated to other languages for the people who don't produce, invent, or discover much, so they can read what happened in an important country.
sans geographic barriers, language barriers do prevent the majority of race mixing, it's true.
that's not the direction things are heading in though. a couple languages are becoming dominant, most of the very small languages on earth are dying out, and by 2100 there will probably only be 80 or 90 languages left, with 3 or 4 predominant ones due to total media saturation. even accents may be on their way out due to media saturation by then.
language agglomeration is the trend. the world's people are getting absorbed into the dominant languages and regionally isolated peoples, who have propagated their obscure old language spoken by only 1 million people or so in their area, will jettison those over the next century. or rather, their descendants will.
linguistics academics abhor this process and try to preserve obscure, complicated, old languages spoken by 100,000 backwards third worlders somewhere, but my opinion is, who cares. their language was never important and provided the world nothing that a dozen other languages didn't, does it matter if it goes away? not really.
even our robots will speak english, built on C, built on machine language. and that's all english too.
Jody, untrue in Europe, where the national identities are useless -- Ed Weston was arrested for quoting Churchill in the street (the River War to be exact, unflattering things about Islam). Meanwhile you can download Ubuntu and many other Linux distros in Catalan or Welsh or what have you. Catalan separatism is as much about the worthlessness of modern PC/Multicultural Spain as anything else, same with Scottish Separatism (why be British when that means a groveling posture for Muslims and Blacks). Same for the Welsh language and even ... CORNISH of all things which is finding a revival as Cornwall people find being British is about as useful as the Colors of Benetton.
And that offers a clue to the Colors of Benetton world the elites are constructing: failure and self-segregation. If Europeans are demanding separatism because their nations are basically useless and want something "theirs" not just a place on a map filled with the Third World they must bow down to (offensive in particular to men who get status deductions for servility to others in SMV) ... why not the US?
Why not Mexico simply taking most if not all of: California, Nevada, Texas, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and much of surrounding states? Why not various Black topias including Detroit, Atlanta, New Orleans, Charleston, Gary, etc.? And already you can see White self-segregation, by race and also "nation": NASCAR and Portlandia may be equally White but they equally hate each other.
More likely that a massive tax revolt (the tax burden to support the Third World America would approach 70% of income for the White working/middle class) to survive (yes people fight over money) leads to secession and fracturing of the US. Russian strategists have predicted this for years, over the same issues: wealth transfers from Whites to non-Whites.
There is a lot of ruin in a nation, and like the USSR we might hang on for years out of inertia and brutality, but eventually the US will cease to exist as one nation and be many, including CA likely part of Mexico proper as a formality. It does not look good for Whites in the West south of Oregon for sure.
Occam's razor. The CA dems are a bunch of fools. Too PC and enstupidated to know what is best for their constituents. The pols limped thru college and law school via AA and then couldn't pass the bar so they got jobs as union hacks and govt apparatchiks. e.g. Antonio Villaraigosa
Given a choice between living in a society full of English-speaking Latin peasants or one full of Spanish-speaking Latin peasants, I suppose the former is indeed better for all concerned.
But my own choice would be neither of the above. Ideally, we would get around to deporting illegal aliens and buying out legal aliens. In such a scenario, it would probably be for the best if as many Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans as possible spoke Spanish and did not learn proper English. I'm not sure I want millions of campesinos considering themselves American. After all, I'd rather not have to reciprocate.
Why not Mexico simply taking most if not all of: California, Nevada, Texas, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and much of surrounding states?
Because those states include locations of strategic significance, resource concentration, and great natural beauty.
The slow-motion disintegration of the US is a tragedy, but it's also an opportunity. The sooner the nation proper takes ownership of this process, the better it can ensure that it (1) includes a maximal extent of desirable territory while (2) excluding as many of our ruling elites and their imported lumpenproles as possible.
Threading that needle in a decent and civilized way will be a challenge, admittedly, but we can surely do better than indiscriminately handing over the western US to some johnny-come-lately mass of warm bodies from abroad.
Yes they have ... but imagine if Japanese "conservatives" had made peace with the idea of ethnic Japanese living as a minority inside Japan!
I understand your point, but "Japanese" is not at the same level of analysis as "white."
Japanese want to exclude other Asians, not just non-Asians.
If we were to follow that comparison strictly, would you favor a policy of the total exclusion and deportation of all those Americans who do not derive strictly all or most of their ancestry from Britain?
Although one can make valid arguments that other European immigrants could assimilate more easily into an English culture (which brings up questions such as "Japanese vs. Albanians?"), the fact of the matter is that the door to immigration became open to "tribes" outside the initial settlers of this country and became an established pattern. This is not at all the situation in Japan.
>>Mexican schools do not offer bilingual education for English-speaking hispanic kids from the US returning to Mexico.
These remain uneducated.
Nonsense.
They quickly learn Spanish and participate in the school process. I live in Mexico, and actually see this happening. Kids are much smarter than many adults.
Also, I teach free English classes under my carport. At this time, six females 11 to 24 years old, one 15 year old lad. I could keep busy every day of the week if I wanted, but I don't.
Double nonsense on what the Mexican schools do. It is never a good idea to write about something you know absolutely nothing about.
All the public schools here are required to teach English. All of them. The only reason they aren't bilingual is because the teachers assigned to teach these courses usually can't actually speak English. And, their text books come from UK with British grammar and vocabulary.
>> you will never have an important discussion in spanish on any topic. no industry happens in espanol, no tech comes out of spanish speaking countries, (etcetera)
Historically, you are correct. In this last decade things are changing very fast here. There is a reason economists predict in another generation Mexico will be the economic powerhouse of the Western hemisphere. However, pay no attention; please carry on; all is well.
There are key opportunities available for ambitious people who use Spanish in their businesses, In fact, since so many are so sure there is no advantage for speaking Spanish, this helps those few who are willing to utilize those missed opportunities.
Hector, the barber in a small city near McAllen, has two children. One went to college and got a law degree. Which qualified him for a s**t job as parole supervisor at low pay. He moved temporarily to Mexico City for 1.5 years, to learn Spanish at UNAM.
When he came back to the States, he was hired by a large law firm in Dallas to work with Spanish speaking clients. Within a very short time, he was promoted to partner and is now making beau coup bucks.
There are plenty of business opportunities for doing business with Spanish speaking nations. Most people ignore those opportunities, which is a wide open gate for those few who are willing to take over.
Anonymous age 72
In this last decade things are changing very fast here. There is a reason economists predict in another generation Mexico will be the economic powerhouse of the Western hemisphere.
Which economists are these?
Sure, why can't the Mexicans do it too if Koreans and Taiwanese did it? I mean, we all know Korea and Taiwan too, just like Mexico, were in the grips of narco-cartels and kidnapping gangs. And they too grew out of that phase, right?
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