Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know With New Commentary by Shirley Steinberg, Joe Kincheloe, and Peter McLaren by Donaldo Macedo

Author:Donaldo Macedo [Macedo, Donaldo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780429978807
Google: LnhQDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-03-09T10:43:43+00:00

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English Only: The Tongue-Tying of America

Monolingualism is a curable disease.

—Bumper Sticker

DURING THE PAST DECADE conservative educators such as the former secretary of education, William Bennett, and Diane Ravitch, among others, have mounted an unrelenting attack on bilingual and multicultural education. These conservative educators tend to recycle old assumptions about the “melting pot theory” and our so-called common culture, assumptions designed primarily to maintain the status quo. That status quo functions as a cultural reproduction mechanism that systematically does not allow other cultural subjects, who are considered outside of the mainstream, to be present in history. The cultural subjects who are profiled as the “other” are but palely represented in history within our purported democratic society in the form of Black History Month, Puerto Rican Day, and so forth. This historical constriction was elegantly captured by an eleventh-grade Vietnamese student in California: “I was so excited when my history teacher talked about the Vietnam War. Now at last, I thought, now we will study about my country. We didn’t really study it. Just for one day, though, my country was real again.”1

The incessant attack on bilingual education, which is based on the claim that bilingual education tongue-ties students in their native language, not only points to a xenophobic culture that blindly negates the multilingual and multicultural nature of U.S. society but also falsifies the empirical evidence in support of bilingual education, which has been amply documented. An example of a truly tongue-tied America materialized when the former foreign minister of the Soviet Union, Eduard Shevardnadze, began to deliver a speech in Russian during a recent commencement ceremony at Boston University. The silence that ensued was so overwhelming that one could hear a pin drop. Over 99 percent of the audience was saved from their monolingualism thanks to the intervention of an interpreter. In fact, the present overdose of monolingualism and Anglocentrism that dominates the current educational debate not only contributes to a type of mind-tied America, but also prevents the development of educators and leaders who can rethink what it means to prepare students to enter the ever-changing, multilingual, and multicultural world of the twenty-first century.

Simply pointing to some failures of bilingual education without examining the lack of success of linguistic-minority students within the larger context of the general failure of public education in major urban centers is both academically dishonest and misleading. Furthermore, the English Only Movement’s position points to a pedagogy of exclusion that views the learning of English as education itself. What they fail to question is under what conditions will English be taught and by whom. For example, insisting on immersing non-English-speaking students in English as a Second Language Programs taught by untrained music, art, and social science teachers (as is the case in Massachusetts with the grandfather clause in English as a Second Language [ESL] certification) will do very little to accomplish the very goal of the English Only Movement. In addition, the proponents of “English only” also fail to raise two fundamental questions: First, if

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