Posted on 10/13/2014 5:34:40 PM PDT by detective
New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña and Milady Baez, the chief for “English-language learners,” are looking to increase dual-language programs, in which students receive instruction in both English and a second language.
This is bad news for the kids and for New York City. I know from personal experience.
Start with the big picture: Multilingualism in a person is a great asset — but a society with no common language is cursed. This holds double for New York, the ultimate city of immigrants.
Without English holding it together, New York would soon cease to work.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailysignal.com ...
Allowing people to operate with different languages is not doing them any favors. Let’s say I decided to move to France. I know no French. How far will I get in the French economy? Maybe I could get an entry level job washing dishes, but if I refused to learn the language of the land I chose to live in I would never even get to head dish washer.
We lived in Germany for a couple of years, and our children attended the US schools on base. But we learned that children without that privilege were put straight into the German schools and coupled with a bi-lingual German student for the first semester. By Christmas they could all speak German and were a great help to their families.
Apparently, this really does work!
So does everyone else who is aware that assimilation is the only path out of a low wage future.
“The purpose of mandating different languages is the create confusion, disunity and jobs for foreign language speakers.”
Not quite. Hispanics have a BIG PROBLEM as far as Democrats are concerned - if they learn English well, they’re usually able to do very well for themselves and think for themselves, and they realize just who the Democrats are...and they don’t like it. At least that’s true with the Hispanics that I work with in Texas.
Blacks will never be a problem, as all they have to do is look in the mirror and realize (at least to themselves) that they will always be victims.
But Democrats DESPERATELY NEED to replace their FDR/JFK Democrat supporters, which are the elderly white people that simply can NEVER pull the lever for a Republican (my parents included)...and unless they can bring Hispanics in, it will be game over for them.
So bilingual education persists, DESPITE the fact that virtually no one other than Democrat leaders want it around.
We must not allow any more Hispanics to do what this person did.
My grandparents on my mother’s side were German.
My mother couldn’t speak English when she started school and picked up English almost immediately simply because she had to. Once my mother started school my grandmother wouldn’t pay attention to her unless she spoke English.
When I was real young, 3 maybe 4, I could understand German but I couldn’t speak it.
Same in my family, only it was Czech. I only heard my grandparents speak it to each other, and even then, only when they were arguing about something that I assumed was private. Growing up, my mother was a stickler for us using nearly perfect English grammar. She corrected us until we saw it her way. No laziness allowed!
As an aside, we recently had some renovation work done in our kitchen. Two of the workers were legal Mexicans. (Yes, I asked our general contractor.) One of them had only been here for 7 years, and he spoke beautiful English. I was surprised at his command of our language. So I asked him how he learned, and he said that his former girlfriend spoke English only, and if he wanted to speak to her, that English was all she understood. She didn’t attempt to learn Spanish. He proudly told me that he is preparing to become a US citizen as soon as he can.
Then I asked him about the other worker, who spoke English only a little. Very basic words (please, thank you, bathroom, etc.) He told me that Nicky has been here for 10 years, but lives around other Mexicans, so has little need to learn the language. He just gets by, and most people let him use Spanish.
I knew a Czech girl, her family came to the US when she was about 1-2 years old.
They had Americanized their last name, it was still Czech sounding even without half the letters, and she couldn’t pronounce her real Czech name only her Americanized name.
I taught ESL for 30 years, and all the research shows that intensive English-only classes work the best and the fastest in getting students to be fluent and literate in English. However, because this entails putting the kids in separate classes and makes them about a year older than their classmates, schools said the social problems caused by that weren’t worth it. This led to having kids who never learn the language well doing poorly in regular classes and lower graduation and college rates.
But they feel good about themselves and the school has fewer social problems.
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