With the increasing growth of globalization and multiculturalism in America, the United States recognized that they had to integrate many different world societies within their education system by making education accessible to all. This global movement intended to put a stop on school segregation against women and immigrants and pushed towards equal education opportunities. While Chapter 14 touches on topics like the civil rights movement, school desegregation, bilingual education and the struggle for equal education among immigrants and women, the incorporation of bilingual education remains a problem today within the American education system.
In 1960, the Convention against Discrimination in Education banned discrimination based on the language of a student and also declared it a right for national minorities to conduct schools in their own languages and cultural traditions (pg 402). From my understanding, bilingual education involves the use of two languages as mediums of instruction. Two popular program models are one in which the native language is used only as an oral medium until the national language can be learned and another where a full range of skills is developed for both languages. Do cultural and socioeconomic factors play a larger part than their native language in students’ academic success? It must be remembered that a person does not qualify to teach merely because he speaks a particular language.
For many years, I’ve seen unqualified teachers teach Spanish merely because they took a few courses at a beginner’s level. What happens when an incompetent teacher cannot respond to their students’ simple questions or when the student cannot understand a teacher due to the cultural differences in language where in one country a word means one thing but in another country the word means something completely different? Also, what happens if the under-skilled worker’s words get lost in translation due to their poor training? These are issues that commonly occur today yet it seems as though desperate measures aren’t being taken, not only with Spanish speakers, but with other foreign language speakers. Linguists and anthropologists should play a larger role in organizing bilingual education programs, developing materials, and training teachers. Bilingual education is not simply teaching English as a second language, but a more inclusive concept which insures for all of our children the opportunity to participate fully in the benefits of American life without having to sacrifice part of themselves to do it.
