Gutter education was the norm for the majority of children growing up under the rule of apartheid. South Africa's 1961 constitution identified Afrikaans and English as official languages, but it wasn't until late 1975 that the government declared Afrikaans--the Dutch Creole that the white Afrikaners reclaimed as part of their national identity--as the medium of instruction for Black students.
Didn't matter if you were a 16-year-old already fluent in several languages but that neither you nor your teacher spoke Afrikaans. Didn't matter that it takes five to seven years to become academically proficient in a new language.
Several months into the school year, on June 16, 1976, tens of thousands of students gathered peacefully in Johannesburg's largest township to protest the decision. The South African police rushed the children with tear gas and live bullets, claiming hundreds of lives.
The New South Africa remembers the old regime. Now there are eleven official languages. Today, Youth Day, is a national holiday to commemorate the Soweto uprisings and the memories of children like 13-year-old Hector Peterson. Samuel Nzima's photograph of Peterson's body carried by his friend resonated with the world, and the young sister seen running alongside the boys now works at the Hector Peterson Museuem.
But South Africa doesn't have any special claim on its history. We are also free to learn lessons from mistakes made there long ago.
Yet, last month, the US Senate roundly approved James M. Inhofe's (R-OK) amendment to the immigration bill to "preserve and enhance the role of English as the national language." Semantic debates over the impact or significance of "national" rather than the originally-suggested "official" designation are beside the point. If the conservative national agenda were merely symbolic, they wouldn't bother making this legislation in the first place.
A number of states have already beaten the Feds to the punch, recognizing English in their state constitutions. Arizona, where a quarter of the population is Hispanic, is one of those states--and also has strict English-only education laws. Public school teachers are prohibited from using spoken or written words other than English. Doesn't matter if the teacher is bilingual and the child has just arrived from Mexico. Doesn't matter if the child misses years of concepts in science and social studies.
California, which educates about a third of English Language Learners nationwide, recently received the results of a five-year, state-sponsored study of Proposition 227. In short, it finds the state's anti-bilingual pedagogy does not benefit the students it ostensibly helps.
Anybody in this country with serious academic, financial, social, or political ambitions will need to master English. But insisting that a child be up to speed academically in 180 days, as Massachusetts' anti-bilingual education law mandates, sets up kids and teachers for failure.
About one out of five people living in the United States speaks a language other than English at home. Violence hasn't erupted in the recent immigration-rights rallies across the country from migrants nor the police. We're at a critical juncture with the possibility of learning from the mistakes of history.
Creating a single national language sets an expectation for policies to impose that language. In a multicultural society, youth should have the opportunity to learn the dominant language, but not at the expense of learning content in other subjects.