By Paul Weiser
Many reasons have been adduced for bilingual education - and on nearly all it has proved a hated and unqualified failure. There is, however, one never-spoken reason for the practice... and to that end it has at least some prospects of success.
“Bilingual education,” teaching conventional subjects such as history and arithmetic to schoolchildren in their mother-tongue (almost always Spanish) rather than teaching basic English and then integrating the children into regular classes, has been variously rationalized. English is something additional, so the children will start behind their peers, old for their grade when they begin regular classes if they learn English first, hence vulnerable to shame.
Of course the whole thing is a farce, mere pandering to the Hispanic and teacher lobbies: the children learn neither English, math, nor classical Spanish and leave school illiterate and innumerate in all languages. It is a disgrace, but has its advantages from one standpoint.
The 1986 immigration amnesty is now twenty years in the past. Were it not for “bilingual education,” we would know beyond reasonable doubt that any working-age person in America who speaks broken or no English and fluent but uncultured Spanish is here illegally, bogus papers to the contrary notwithstanding. “Bilingual education” thus provides a semi-plausible rationale aiding any young monoglot Mexican campesino who’s sneaked across the border to evade arrest and instant expulsion.
In short, “bilingual education” replenishes what Mao Zedong, speaking of guerillas, called the ocean in which the fish - Mexican illegals - swim. Of course it harms the children, who are damaged for life even worse than by ordinary bad public education (and anyone who cares to can spot the illegals regardless, by any of a dozen signs). Yet it provides another phony excuse for police and immigration agents to bewail and evade their responsibilities.
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