Official English

[Peter A. McGraw]

Apparently I need to make it clear that if there are "respondents to this
list who are unwilling to even consider professional and scientific
results," I am most emphatically not one of them.  My reason for mentioning
these press reports was that I had been astounded to read them and had
never heard the "professional and scientific results" that would make it
understandable to me why Hispanics would oppose bilingual education.  I
hoped someone on this list could refer me to precisely the "professional
and scientific results" that would make such opposition make sense.

My own opinion on the need for bilingual education was formed years ago
when I read an obscure dissertation from the 1930s that still had the power
to make me mad in the 1960s.  Titled "Problems of Education among the
Pennsylvania Germans," it was a study of the consequences of a policy that
consisted simply of forbidding Pennsylvania German kids to speak the only
language they knew at the time they started school.  "Immersion indeed in
which the students never surface. Drowning would be the better label," as
DInIs puts it, was exactly the result: kids who lagged behind their
English-speaking contemporaries in all subjects and didn't catch up for
years, if ever.

Peter Mc.

--On Monday, June 4, 2001 5:52 PM -0400 "Dennis R. Preston"
<preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU> wrote:

> immersion
> indeed in which the students never surface. Drowning would be the
> better label.
>
> It's too bad that repspondents to this list who have only public
> rpress and hearsay information are unwilling to even consider
> professional and scientific results,



****************************************************************************
                               Peter A. McGraw
                   Linfield College   *   McMinnville, OR
                            pmcgraw at linfield.edu