<div dir="ltr"><h1 id="post-title entry-title">Obama Administration Looks to Cement Ethnic Divides With Language Mandate</h1>
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Mike Gonzalez </a>
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<a href="http://twitter.com/Gundisalvus" class="">@Gundisalvus</a>
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June 08, 2016
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<p class="">The administration warns that “not recognizing
children’s cultures and languages as assets” may be hurting them with
school work. (Photo: Pete Souza/ZUMA Press/Newscom)</p>
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<h2 class="">Commentary By</h2>
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<a href="http://dailysignal.com/author/mgonzalez/" class="">
<img src="http://dailysignal.com/wp-content/uploads/Gonzalez_Mike_TDS_lo.jpg" alt="Portrait of Mike Gonzalez" height="175" width="175">
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<p class="">
<a href="http://dailysignal.com/author/mgonzalez/" class="">Mike Gonzalez</a>
<a href="http://twitter.com/Gundisalvus" class="">@Gundisalvus</a>
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<p class="">Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage
Foundation, is a widely experienced international correspondent,
commentator and editor who has reported from Asia, Europe and Latin
America. He served in the George W. Bush Administration first at the
Securities and Exchange Commission and then at the State Department, and
is the author of, <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/book/228486/a-race-for-the-future-by-mike-gonzalez">"A Race for the Future: How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic Americans,"</a> .<a href="http://www.heritage.org/about/staff/g/mike-gonzalez"> Read his research.</a></p>
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<p>The Obama administration seems to live in a parallel reality,
oblivious to the racial animus that has become the hallmark of
late-stage Obama and to the ethnic strife that wreaks havoc on the rest
of the world. Inside its own Platonic cave, the thinking is: Over half
the world is polyglot, so why not us?</p>
<p>Its latest <a href="https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/ecd/dll_policy_statement_final.pdf">policy statement</a>,
issued jointly late last week by the departments of Education and
Health and Human Services, advises states to instruct early childhood
students in home languages different from English, and to help them
retain separate cultural attachments.</p>
<p>The administration warns that “not recognizing children’s cultures
and languages as assets” may be hurting them with school work. “Over
half the world’s population is estimated to be bilingual or
multilingual,” the statement lectures almost plaintively.</p>
<p>The answer is to celebrate and preserve the differences of dual
language learners, or children who speak a different language at home.</p><div id="InArticleEmailForm" style="display:block"><div class="">
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<p>The policy statement calls for a range of practices, from creating
curricula and educational systems that “support children’s home language
development,” to urging states to hire more teachers who “speak the
language and/or share the cultural background of children who are DLLs
[dual language learners] in the community.”</p>
<p>States must move with alacrity because these children will soon make
up a “sizable proportion of the workforce” and their linguistic and
cultural assets will be needed in an “evolving global economy.”</p>
<p>“The growing diversity of our nation’s children requires that we
shift the status quo,” says the statement, in order to “build a future
workforce that is rich in diversity, heritage, cultural tradition, and
language.”</p>
<p>Tolerance and respect are not sufficient—early childhood programs must “embrace and celebrate their diversity.”</p>
<p>If this last bit of compulsive affirmation finally perks up your
ears, it should. So should hearing for the umpteenth time about this
administration’s zest for shifting the status quo.</p>
<p>In a Heritage Foundation issue brief published this <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2016/06/new-white-house-policy-promotes-ethnic-separationcongress-should-reject-it">week</a>,
I argue that policy statements of this sort raise generalized concerns
because they may be deemed coercive and intrusive into areas of primary
state and local jurisdiction.</p>
<p>The administration has no authority under the federal statutes
governing education, such as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
and the implementing regulations, to require bilingual education or
retention of “cultural assets.”</p>
<p>But the problems with this policy approach are much more fundamental.
Speaking a second, third, or more foreign languages is indubitably a
bonus for an individual, but it is far less clear that societal
bilingualism or multilingualism helps cohesion or economic success.</p>
<p><strong>>>>To Read Mike Gonzalez’s Full Issue Brief: “<a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2016/06/new-white-house-policy-promotes-ethnic-separationcongress-should-reject-it">New White House Policy Promotes Ethnic Separation—Congress Should Reject It</a>“</strong></p>
<p>The administration disregards a whole field of academic research that
finds a high correlation between ethnic stratification and conflict.</p>
<p>One of the <a href="https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4553003/alesinassrn_fractionalization.pdf?sequence=2">papers</a>,
by Alberto Alesina and others at Harvard, considered the gold standard
study in the field of ethnic fractionalization, finds that countries
with high linguistic and ethnic divisions have many societal
dysfunctions.</p>
<p>Well before Harvard, the ancients (or if you’re a believer, a Higher
Authority) drew a distinction between individual wisdom (which Proverbs
8:11 rightly says is “better than rubies”) and fracturing society
linguistically, which was the punishment for the hubristic planners of
the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:7—“let us go down and there confound
their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech”).</p>
<p>If Harvard studies or Revealed Truth don’t convince you, here’s what liberals have said on the matter.</p>
<p>More than a century ago, John Stuart Mill <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_stuart/m645r/chapter16.html">warned</a> that:</p>
<blockquote><p>Free institutions are next to impossible in a country
made up of different nationalities. Among a people without
fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages,
the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative
government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide
political acts are different in the different sections of the country.</p></blockquote>
<p>And closer still to our time, the historian and eminent public intellectual Arthur Schlesinger, also a liberal, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=8zqPoZG2UYUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+disuniting+of+america&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjX4amMn4zNAhWMOz4KHbR9BVcQ6AEIJjAC#v=onepage&q=the%20disuniting%20of%20america&f=false">asked</a> in 1991, “In the century darkly ahead, civilization faces a critical question: What is it that holds a nation together?”</p>
<p>A few questions later, Schlesinger answered himself: “If separatist
tendencies go on unchecked, the result can only be the fragmentation,
resegregation, and tribalization of American life.”</p>
<p>This is why American leaders from the time of the founding, in
recognition that it was even then a land with a high number of
immigrants, have pursued an approach that is actually more inclusive
than what the administration proposes today: It encouraged the foreign
born to feel as though they were natives. They knew that a polity needs a
single language.</p>
<p>America has seen higher rates of <a href="http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0081/twps0081.html">foreign born</a> and of <a href="http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/misc/globalization/">globalization</a>, and its leaders had hitherto stuck to their desire for E Pluribus Unum.</p>
<p>This administration, always seeking in haste to “shift the status
quo,” is only too happy to overlook the carnage that divisions between
so many Hutus and Tutsis, Serbs and Croats and Pashtuns and Hazaras have
created.</p>
<p>Even in industrialized allied nations like Belgium and Spain, or our
northern neighbor Canada—which are high gross domestic product per
capita societies with concomitant high levels of education, health, and
other advantages—official bilingualism has pitted region against region,
neighbor against neighbor.</p>
<p>Perhaps Congress can take a look at this new Tower of Babel and ask some questions.</p><p><a href="http://dailysignal.com/2016/06/08/obama-administration-looks-to-cement-ethnic-divides-with-language-mandate/">http://dailysignal.com/2016/06/08/obama-administration-looks-to-cement-ethnic-divides-with-language-mandate/</a><br></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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