Bilingual by Choice; D. McCaffery

Shortly before, I had seen a report on television about a conference at which Latin American Indians had met to discuss their mutual problems. Interestingly, the confer ence was conducted in Spanish (with some Portuguese), the lingua franca among Indi~ ans from Mexico to Patagonia, whose native languages may be as mutually unintelligible as German is to Chinese. Even some Indian languages that are seen as being a single tongue (Quechua, for example) have dia lects that vary as much as Latin-based Spanish and Latin-based French do from each other. In rural markets I have seen Indians, who are speaking an Indian lan guage within their group, start speaking Spanish with another Indian from a different tribe. Mr. McCaffery resides in New Orleans and is considered a great guide to Mardi Gras. I put the paper down and went to my class, where I tried an experiment with my students, the children of the nation's elite.

When I asked what they thought of bilingual education, I got some very enthusiastic answers ~ All of them thought that learning to read, write, and speak in English was very important. Few knew no English; most had at least a reading knowledge of English; two or three spoke it as well as I did (showing a great effort on the part of their parents). All ofthe students wanted their children to learn English. They realized that their children would need English to succeed in the world beyond Latin America. When I mentioned to the students that I was talking about bilingualism of Spanish speaking learning an Indian language, the students started to laugh. They figured that this was a strange form of gringo humor, like that of the American law professor who had come the year before to lecture on animal rights in a country that has starving children in the streets of some cities. However, when I insisted that there must be some benefit they could derive from knowing an Indian language, one young lady suggested that this might be useful since one could then have Indian maids who spoke no Spanish, rather than Spanish-speaking Indian maids who command higher wages. Their contempt for the idea could not have been more patent.

Later that evening, I spoke with our teenage Indian maid about this subject. Although I did not notice an accent in the girl's Spanish, my wife assured me that the maid had an "Indian" accent. The young girl said that her family spoke an Indian 313 314 THE FREEMAN • MAY 1995 language both at home and with their neigh bors in her village far from the capital. But she had learned Spanish from radio, televi sion, the movies, and of course, in school. She was now working for a while in the city to improve her Spanish, to see the world, and to save up money for a dowry to better her marriage prospects when she returned home. Her brother had been drafted (will ingly) into the Army, where young Indian men who were deficient in Spanish were put into Spanish immersion classes. Those who already spoke Spanish improved their gram mar and pronunciation. The Indian girl said that her parents were happy that she was perfecting her Spanish in the big city and that her brother was being schooled in Spanish in the Army. Indian parents wanted their children to get the best possible edu cation, which meant speaking, reading, and writing good Spanish: exactly how the elite viewed English for their children.

Thus, both the rich parents of the ruling elite of the capital, who send their children to law school and make sure they learn English, and the poor Indian parents of a small villagein a remote province, who want their children to master Spanish, have made rational choices about their sons' and daughters' language preparation. For gov ernment officialsto override such decisions against the best interest of children and the wishes of the parents is an abuse. In Latin America and in the United States it is an increasing problem. Governmental Meddling Consider the bizarre experience I had recently. I received notice that my six-year old son was being removed from his normal French classes, to be put in ESL (English as a Second Language) classes-without my permission-because my wife and I had truthfully told the school system that Span ish is the language we normally use at home. There was no suggestion that his English was in any way deficient.

How this came about is a story of how mindless governmental meddling extends today even to the learning of language, which used to be guided by the normal laws of economics, common sense, and parental choice. As a young boy I grew up in the inner city of one of the great northern urban areas of the United States. The immigrant flotsam and jetsam of Eastern Europe, speaking dozens of languages, ebbed and flowed into that city after World War II. The Catholic Church across the street had all but one Sunday service in Croatian. (The last time I visited, all but one service was in English, showing the natural evolution of language choice.) My family attended the English language Catholic Church several blocks away, which had been founded a century before by Irish immigrants (my father's people) and later inherited by German and Polish immigrants (my mother's grandpar ents). Although my mother spoke Polish and German at home, she attended school to tally in English without any ill effect. I attended grade school with children who spoke German, Polish, Croatian, Hungar ian, Romanian, Czech, and a dozen other languages or dialects at home. These boys and girls all achieved native ability in Eng lish without any special government pro grams to teach them the national language, now practically the world's language.

A friend of mine, now a prominent sur geon, grew up living with his parents and both pairs of grandparents. His mother and her family spoke Lithuanian; his father and his family spoke Hungarian; the two sides of the family communicated in German. All five children knew these languages, yet spoke English as their primary tongue as a natural consequence of living in the United States. Nobody had to convince the kids to learn English; it was self-evident. No gov ernment program was needed to help them learn English. Common sense and self interest did the job. Several years ago I read through a book of short biographies of Americans who had won the Nobel Prize, looking for any com mon linguistic pattern. The only conclusion I reached was that speaking Yiddish as a child seems to be a good indicator for winning a Nobel Prize. Can it be seriously argued that Yiddish-speaking students would have won more Nobel Prizes had they not been put in English immersion but instead had spent years in Yiddish classes to ease their "transition" to English?

The great historic lesson from our past that immigrant parents prefer, for good reason, to have their children educated in English immersion in school while preserv ing their native language at home or at church or synagogue-is ignored by the politicized public education apparatchik. Immigrant parents today face increasing coercion as they stubbornly try to avoid bilingual or multicultural schemes. These parents understand that their children's fu ture lies with ability in English, not Bengali or Vietnamese. The multicultural bureau cracy demands that immigrant children not evade their instructional clutches since there can be no funding for the "problem" of bilingualism if there are no children suf fering from lack of native-language instruc tion. Perversely, the funding for bilingual education seems to come off the top of the education budget, not the bottom, reducing the funds going into real education.

Recently I met a couple who had moved to Louisiana from another state. They told me that they had been required by their previous school district to execute affidavits that they spoke English at home. Parents who admitted that they spoke a foreign language at home could not avoid being hassled and pressured by the multicultural programmers. Father and Mother evidently do not know best-the educational estab lishment does. The parents most harmed are those with the least education and at the lowest economic rung since parents who are professionals are better able to fend off the bureaucrats. Significantly, the federal government does not practice the sort of bilingualism it preaches. The Department of Defense and the State Department employ' 'total immer sion" to train their people in foreign lan guages, just the way immigrant children used to learn English. There is nothing wrong with teaching children other languages. On the contrary, it is an excellent idea ifdone properly, by the BILINGUAL BY CHOICE 315 parents, or at least with active parental support. My own children speak English, Spanish, and French (in approximately that order). However, this is a result of a con scious and reasoned decision by my wife (a native speaker of Spanish) and me, given the particular circumstances of our family and the unique resources available in New Or leans. No bureaucrat, no matter how well intentioned (most are-I am one myself), could possibly weigh these factors as well as we, the children's parents can.

Our children attend a French-language school (grades K through 8) in New Orleans established by the French government, in cooperation with the state of Louisiana and the Orleans Parish School Board. They are taught by teachers from France, using the same textbooks used in France. Except for the children of French citizens, entry to the school is on a first-come, first-serve basis, with a line forming several days before registration. Thus, I spent a day waiting (and a night sleeping) in line to register my child in French Immersion Kin dergarten six years ago. Since siblings of students in the program are automatically admitted, all of us in the line were there for the first time. My fellow parents in line were a mixed lot-racially, ethnically, linguistically, and economically. The first in line was a poorly dressed black woman, seemingly without much formal education, who had been in line several days. She said that she had given up several days' pay (obviously a great sacrificefor her) to be sure that her child got into the program since it was her daughter's only chance to get a quality education (her child is one of the best students in her grade, American or French). Many of the other parents in line were immigrants or foreign exchange students who spoke languages other than French or English at home: German, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Polish, and Vietnamese, to men tion a few. For them, like my wife and me, French would be a third language for their children, a responsibility all seemed to take quite seriously. There were doctors, labor ers, lawyers, waitresses, civil servants, ac316 THE FREEMAN • MAY 1995 tive duty military, and truck drivers in line that night.