The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
President Biden has chosen as his new secretary of education Miguel Cardona, whose parents were born in Puerto Rico. Cardona himself was born in 1975 in Meriden, Connecticut. Spanish was spoken at home. When Cardona started elementary school, he was, in educational parlance, an “English learner.”
Today, America’s public schools have more English learners as students than when Cardona was in school. According to Kevin Casey in the Washington Post, 30% of students 8 or under are now English learners. Some were born outside the U.S., some weren’t. A significant number speak Vietnamese, Chinese and Arabic. “Nearly every language spoken on Earth can be found among the nation’s K-12 students,” writes Casey. I wonder how many countries can claim that?
Here’s a little joke teachers of other languages know. Q: What do you call someone who speaks two languages? A: Bilingual. Q: What do you call someone who speaks one language? A: American.
In the private elementary schools to which some people are able to send their children, schools of the sort championed by the outgoing education secretary, teaching a “foreign” language is common, maybe even the norm. My stepdaughter has a friend whose daughter studied both Mandarin and Spanish. In her elementary school.
On a trip they all took to Cuba, the 10-year-old acted as their translator.
I saw a sign once on the door of a professor of Russian: “Whoever doesn’t know another language doesn’t know his own.” Could learning another language make us better at English?
Our increasingly underfunded public schools are being criticized these days for not doing more to teach civics. Our response to noticing a deficit in our behavior is frequently to want the schools to fix it.
While we are pondering what we want our public schools to be able do better, we might wish schools could do a better job of helping students get beyond cultural limitations.
We must remember that schools can’t be faulted for what they aren’t doing if they aren’t being given the means to do it.
Racism and white supremacy have many causes, no doubt, among which has been mentioned a decline in social status. Both are clearly enabled, in any case, by ignorance and a lack of experience. Which may not be the fault of the racist. There is no shame in ignorance, the saying goes. The shame is in not doing anything about it.
What’s to be done? This is a big challenge, but we could begin by expecting the students who speak only English also to become language learners.
Learning another language, any other language, could serve the purpose of, among other things, opening the door to dealing with cultural difference.
Every school can’t offer every language, of course. We’d need to develop opportunities for collaboration. Perhaps what we are having to learn these days about collaboration online has an upside here.
Might we also begin to be able to appreciate the English learners in our schools who already speak other languages for the knowledge they have and the help they can offer those of us who may not?
In the 1960s, teachers from Pueblo High School in Tucson blazed the trail in bilingual education for speakers of Spanish (more on this in my book “Tucson: A Drama in Time”).
Maybe TUSD could now blaze a trail in bilingual education for speakers of English.
