I fear. have been lost in the rush as the educational bureaucracy grows and grows and competes with itself to find even more grandiose ways to challenge the cultural and linguistic unity of the country. Professor West declares that the solution to this anomaly is relatively simple: We should. he contends. end Federal support to bilingual and bicultural programs and return to an infinitely cheaper and infinitely more practical system of teaching English as a language to Englishdeficient and nonnative schoolchildren. without all the mischievous interference of "biculturalism." He declares: In California. a large number of educators have long argued my same point. that kids learn a foreign language quickly enough. given patient tutoring by specialIsts in teaching. not in cultural propaganda. A case in point right now: The thousands of Vietnamese refugee children are enJoying no such "biculturai" malarkey. for the most part. they go right into the public school system and quickly learn English. Children do this much better than adults. and without all the traumas that some softheaded sociologists insist occur to the youngsters. The reason that the Vietnamese do it easily is obviousmotivation. Instead of being propagandized steadily against the American culture and the American language. they are urged by their parents to learn as quickly as possible. To those who would charge that such a proposal is "cultural genocide." he points out that almost all of us are the descendants of immigrants. None of my neighbors in North Carolina. he contends. ever broke out in a xash because they were not taught in Scots or Irish or German dialects. nor claimed that they had been robbed of their culture. One of .the staples of Fourth of July oratory used to be the image of this country as the melting pot. which miraculously transformed individuals of many nations and races into a distinctly American type.
Keywords matched
immigrants refugee