A teacher at Cliffside Park High School in Bergen County, N.J.—just across the Hudson River from Manhattan—is in hot water after telling students in her class to stop speaking to one another in Spanish. Video of the incident emerged on social media last Thursday.
The 26-second clip, which picks up in the middle of the teacher’s comments, catches the teacher saying: “… men and women are fighting. They are not fighting for your right to speak Spanish. They are fighting for your right to speak American.”
Various news outlets reported that the teacher had asked some students whispering in Spanish to stop doing so before she made the controversial remarks. At least one student can be seen in the video walking out of class in response to the teacher’s comments; a larger walk-out is planned for today.
The incident at Cliffside Park is just the most recent reminder that, in America, being multilingual is often considered more a liability than an asset. Forget not that John Kerry lost the 2004 U.S. presidential election to George W. Bush in part because he was painted as an elitist, with a “fondness for brie and Evian.” Kerry’s fluency in French worked against him, with multiple Republicans at the time saying he “looks French,” suggesting that Kerry didn’t sufficiently support the ever-expanding War on Terror and therefore wasn’t truly American.
The rest of the world seems to understand just how backward—and bizarre—this mentality is. More of something is usually a good thing, especially if that something is itself good. More money, more time, more knowledge, more love, more land, more languages—in all of these cases, it’s hard to argue that less is preferable. Nobody’s ever found himself better off by having his ability to communicate, and to think, limited to a single language.
Though many Americans are surprised to hear it, the United States has no official language. It never has. Some states have passed legislation designating one or more official language(s)—thirty states, starting with Nebraska in 1920, have declared English alone as their official language, while Hawaii and Alaska have recognized more than just English—but federal legislation on the issue has never been passed.
Not for want of trying, however. An amendment to the U.S. Constitution making English the nation’s official language was first introduced in 1981, by Sen. Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa of California, but it hasn’t been ratified. Earlier this year, Rep. Steve King of Iowa introduced H.R. 997—the “English Language Unity Act of 2017”—to establish English as the country’s official language, but it is unlikely to become law, even in Donald Trump’s America.
There are very good reasons that English isn’t, and shouldn’t be, America’s only official language. There are also very good reasons for Americans to learn languages beyond English.
More than 50 million people in the United States speak Spanish, which means that we are home to more Spanish speakers than any other country on the planet except Mexico. To make English the only official language of America would be a grave insult to many Americans, an act of hubris that ignores our past, present and future. The number of Spanish speakers here will more than double, to 133 million, by the year 2050, according to U.S. Census projections. We should celebrate, not decry, this likelihood. We should celebrate, not decry, a multilingual United States. That more of us cannot speak more than English should be a source of national shame.
The countless cognitive advantages of multilingualism are just beginning to be understood and appreciated. One intriguing finding from recent research suggests that those who speak multiple languages are less susceptible to Alzheimer’s disease than those who don’t. They also make for more desirable employees, with better attention spans, stronger spatial and verbal abilities, and superior social skills than their monolingual peers.
These facts suggest that the United States should invest heavily in teaching its children more than just English, and from the youngest of ages. The evidence is clear that learning languages is easiest earlier in life, when our brains are most malleable. And yet this is precisely not what most American public schools do. In the typical public school district, we first start teaching other languages in ninth grade. Students graduate from high school having studied, on average, just one language other than English, and only for 2-4 years at that. This is too little, too late.
In countries where it is common to speak multiple languages, children start learning two or three foreign languages in elementary school. They add additional languages in middle school and high school. It’s not unusual in continental Europe, for instance, to graduate from high school speaking four or five languages. There’s no real reason American children don’t master more than English, except that we don’t invest enough in education and we don’t believe learning other languages is important. And most politicians don’t want to go on record saying our children should be taught Spanish, or French, or Mandarin, because they fear being labeled anti-American or insufficiently patriotic—à la John Kerry in 2004. These are not good reasons.
In the Cliffside Park teacher’s rant, it is hard not to hear echoes of the disdain that marked President Trump’s words about Mexico (in his campaign) and Puerto Rico (as it recovers from Hurricane Maria). Trump speaks only English, and he seems to believe this is a strength, not a weakness. He is wrong. No one should take pride in a limited ability to think and communicate.
Imagine if Trump were fluent in Spanish and had gone to Puerto Rico with empathy in his heart. Imagine if he had delivered a sincere speech, in Spanish, to Puerto Ricans desperate for support from their federal government.
In our globalized age, it’s worth remembering that borders are human constructs; mountain ranges and rivers don’t respect them. Citizenship is a human construct, too. There’s nothing natural about borders or citizenship. Thousands of years of human history suggest there’s also nothing natural about speaking only one language. Our brains are more than capable of mastering multiple languages, if only we’d invest the requisite effort, time and money in the undertaking.
The book of Genesis teaches us that the world’s linguistic diversity was a punishment from an angry God, the result of humans striving to reach the heavens by building the Tower of Babel. Up until that point, everyone on earth spoke a single language; afterward, the Old Testament says, “the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”
That there are still over 7,000 languages spoken across the globe today is a blessing, not a curse—and Americans would do well to learn more of them.