[lg policy] Obama Administration Looks to Cement Ethnic Divides With Language Mandate

Thu Jun 9 15:00:43 UTC 2016

Obama Administration Looks to Cement Ethnic Divides With Language Mandate

Mike Gonzalez <http://dailysignal.com/author/mgonzalez/> / @Gundisalvus
<http://twitter.com/Gundisalvus> / June 08, 2016 / 78 comments
<http://dailysignal.com/2016/06/08/obama-administration-looks-to-cement-ethnic-divides-with-language-mandate/#comments>

   -
   <https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Obama+Administration+Looks+to+Cement+Ethnic+Divides+With+Language+Mandate%20http://dailysign.al/218slBT%20via%20@Gundisalvus%20@DailySignal>
   -
   <https://www.facebook.com/dialog/share?app_id=772296266137346&href=http://dailysignal.com/2016/06/08/obama-administration-looks-to-cement-ethnic-divides-with-language-mandate/&display=page&redirect_uri=http://facebook.com>
   430
   -
   <https://plus.google.com/share?url=http://dailysign.al/218slBT&h1=en-US>
   -
   <http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http://dailysign.al/218slBT&title=Obama+Administration+Looks+to+Cement+Ethnic+Divides+With+Language+Mandate&summary=Check%20out%20this%20heritage%20article>
   -
   <?subject=Obama%20Administration%20Looks%20to%20Cement%20Ethnic%20Divides&body=http://dailysignal.com/2016/06/08/obama-administration-looks-to-cement-ethnic-divides-with-language-mandate/>
   - <http://dailysignal.com//print?post_id=269346>

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)
Commentary By
[image: Portrait of Mike Gonzalez]
<http://dailysignal.com/author/mgonzalez/>

Mike Gonzalez <http://dailysignal.com/author/mgonzalez/> @Gundisalvus
<http://twitter.com/Gundisalvus>

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 Race for the Future:
How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic Americans,"
<http://www.randomhouse.com/book/228486/a-race-for-the-future-by-mike-gonzalez>
. Read his research. <http://www.heritage.org/about/staff/g/mike-gonzalez>

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?

Its latest policy statement
<https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/ecd/dll_policy_statement_final.pdf>,
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.

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.

The answer is to celebrate and preserve the differences of dual language
learners, or children who speak a different language at home.

*The Daily Signal is the multimedia news organization of The Heritage
Foundation.  We’ll respect your inbox and keep you informed. *

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.”

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.”

“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.”

Tolerance and respect are not sufficient—early childhood programs must
“embrace and celebrate their diversity.”

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.

In a Heritage Foundation issue brief published this week
<http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2016/06/new-white-house-policy-promotes-ethnic-separationcongress-should-reject-it>,
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.

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.”

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.

*>>>To Read Mike Gonzalez’s Full Issue Brief: “New White House Policy
Promotes Ethnic Separation—Congress Should Reject It
<http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2016/06/new-white-house-policy-promotes-ethnic-separationcongress-should-reject-it>“*

The administration disregards a whole field of academic research that finds
a high correlation between ethnic stratification and conflict.

One of the papers
<https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4553003/alesinassrn_fractionalization.pdf?sequence=2>,
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.

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”).

If Harvard studies or Revealed Truth don’t convince you, here’s what
liberals have said on the matter.

More than a century ago, John Stuart Mill warned
<https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_stuart/m645r/chapter16.html>
that:

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.

And closer still to our time, the historian and eminent public intellectual
Arthur Schlesinger, also a liberal, asked
<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>
in 1991, “In the century darkly ahead, civilization faces a critical
question: What is it that holds a nation together?”

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.”

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.

America has seen higher rates of foreign born
<http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0081/twps0081.html>
and of globalization
<http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/misc/globalization/>, and its
leaders had hitherto stuck to their desire for E Pluribus Unum.

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.

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.

Perhaps Congress can take a look at this new Tower of Babel and ask some
questions.

http://dailysignal.com/2016/06/08/obama-administration-looks-to-cement-ethnic-divides-with-language-mandate/

-- 
**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its
members
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)

For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to
https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/
listinfo/lgpolicy-list
*******************************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20160609/e8813efe/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list