Learning English should not be mandatory to live in the U.S., but it certainly opens up a broad range of choices for those who take the time to maste the world’s primary language for discussing science and industry. If I was planning on relocating permanently to Costa Rica, I would bone up on my Spanish first. If I was planning on moving to Britain, I’d learn English. When in Rome, and all that.
In our system of publicly funded education, there is a raging debate over whether children should be educated in English or in their native language. The Christian Science Monitor discusses this in an article entitled Bilingualism issue rises again.
Arizona followed suit, and in 2002, Massachusetts became the third state to vote out bilingual education. Students who were once taught primarily in their native languages are now put in SEI classrooms where Spanish or Portuguese or other languages are used solely for clarification purposes.
But as educators analyze the results of the Massachusetts English Proficiency Assessment tests, which will be released to the public later this month, some doubt how well the new program is working.
The goal is to keep English learners separated from their peers for no more than a year. But in Lynn, where about 18 percent of students have limited English proficiency, the head of the district’s language program says most elementary students stay in SEI classrooms for about two years. It can take longer for older students.
I’m not sure what the best way to deal with the problem is. If I were supreme leader, I’d be tempted to require public school students to speak English first and learn everything else second. Then again, if I were supreme leader, there wouldn’t be public schools (not a good return on investment). The benefits of learning English should be obvious to anyone who reads this excerpt from Wikipedia:
English is currently one of the most widely spoken and written languages worldwide, with some 380 million native speakers. Only Chinese and Hindi have more native speakers while Spanish is similar in number. English is also the most widely spoken of the Germanic languages. It has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that of the United States from the Second World War to the present.
Through the global influence of native English speakers in cinema, music, broadcasting, science, and the Internet in recent decades, English is now the most widely learned second language in the world. It is often used as an international language of communication, and is now a common intermediary language.
Another important point (to me, since I produce more than I consume) is that the money that is used to pay for the teaching, whether bilingual or not, comes out of the pockets of English speaking American taxpayers, whether or not they have children. I want that money spent efficiently.
I don’t think we need to make English the “official” language of the nation though – common sense should tell you that if you have an opportunity to learn English, you should do so. In America’s public schools, you should learn English first, and progress to other subjects when you are judged ready. But that’s just my opinion. What’s yours?