By Kathryn Harris

Staff Writer

Imagine that tomorrow you decide to move to a foreign country where English is not the first language of most of the people. You have two children, one of which will enter school next year and the other who is in his second year of primary school. You yourself do not speak the language of the country to which you are emigrating. You are going there because there are job opportunities unlike those you will find in this country. You decide that it is better to move to a strange country and be able to feed your family than to stay here and struggle to survive. You have the proper immigration documents for the country you are moving to; you are a legal immigrant.

It is hard to imagine this situation in the United States, but it is a reality in many countries of the world. Just across our borders in South America are people who long for such an opportunity. When they get it, they come to the United States with great hope for their future. They see this country as a land of opportunity like many before them have. However, they have a problem. They speak no English, so consequently their children do not learn to speak it either. Then they go to school, where they are expected to perform academically in a language that is completely foreign to them. To approximate this to our own experience, imagine trying to learn nuclear physics from a German textbook (assuming you have never studied German). You are going to be tested on these new concepts of nuclear physics and you will be expected to write the test in German.

It is easy to see the problem here. Not only do you have new concepts, but you have a language that you can't understand. All your time will be spent trying to decipher the language, not learning nuclear physics. And of course, you won't be able to write the test in German, so you will automatically fail. This will not be because you don't know how to learn, but because you don't know German. Therefore, after failing this and many more tests on nuclear physics, you become discouraged and you decide quite naturally that it is not worth your effort in trying to succeed in the endeavor. You still want to learn German, but you have given up on learning physics. Unfortunately, this causes your instructors to label you as a failure, unwilling to try. Due to this injustice, you go home from school each day utterly dejected.

This is exactly how immigrant students feel when they have no access to bilingual help in school here in the United States. They aren't learning nuclear physics in elementary school, but the concepts are just as new to them. Additionally, they are expected to learn those new concepts in English. Until a student has mastered English, this is impossible. The question is, how do we keep these students wanting to learn English and the new concepts presented to them? The apparent answer seems to be some form of bilingual education.

But wait, you say, millions of immigrants have come to the United States and succeeded without the benefit of bilingual education! Why should today's immigrants be treated differently? According to ``Rethinking Schools Online,'' this is not exactly the case. An article titled ``History of Bilingual Education'' cites enrollment surveys at the turn of the twentieth century that reveal that ``at least 600,000 primary school students (public and parochial) were receiving part or all of their instruction in the German language - about 4 percent of all American children in elementary grades.'' The article adds this is actually a greater number of students proportionally than the number of students who today receive Spanish-English bilingual education. Immigrants from other countries also benefited from these types of programs, including French speakers in Louisiana beginning in 1847 and speakers of Spanish in New Mexico in 1850. This tapered off in the 1920s, but after years of frustration on the part of immigrants, the idea was revisited with the Bilingual Education Act of 1968.

Finally, our country realized that our affirmation of public education for all really meant that all should be able to benefit from it. In the case of Lau v. Nichols, the Supreme Court ruled that schools should make education available to all, including those who spoke a first language other than English. Backing up this principle was the Equal Educational Opportunity Act of 1974.

So how do we interpret those laws? How do we give students appropriate help in learning English while not making them forever dependent on the help that bilingual education provides? We want students to be proficient speakers and writers of English; that is the goal of bilingual education programs. How do we accomplish this goal?

It is my opinion that the time spent away from the English classroom should be minimal for these students. They should be separated from their peers as little as possible. To that end, I propose two options: completely bilingual schools in areas where there is a strong representation of one language other than English or the bulk of bilingual education occuring outside of the regular school day, either after school or during the summer. In this case, an alternative system of evaluation for students in the first one or two years of the program could be utilized so as not to doom them to failure until they master English.

In the first option of completely bilingual schools, the interests of the immigrant students and the native students are served. Both groups become bilingual, which is a tremendous advantage to both. This means students are taught part-time in one language and part-time in the other. Their ability to communicate with each other and with other people in their community is increased. It also serves the goal of public education: providing for an educated populace able to compete in a global society. After all, we are one of the few developed nations where bilingualism isn't a requirement. So why don't we stop looking at ``bilingual'' as another dirty word representing a political agenda and start looking at it as a an opportunity to produce real world citizens? Let's stop thinking of an ``English-only'' society as a good thing!

In the second option, immigrant students could receive education in their native language as a supplement to attending English-taught classes. Perhaps some in-school time could be utilized for this, but this should be minimal. Language is learned by hearing it, and so they should spend as much time with their English-speaking peers as possible. After school programs and summer school programs would be an extra commitment for these students, but one that I am sure most of them (and their parents) would be happy to make. As these students gained proficiency in English, they would be phased out of such programs.