Sunday, October 16, 2005
multilingual education vs English language tyranny
This is pretty sad. This past week, the NW Asian Weekly ran a cover story about a Chinese American woman named Joyce Shui being ordered by a court arbitrator to remove her daughter from a preschool with a Japanese language immersion program (click here for the story). Though the Japanese school (Megumi Pre-School) is an established school and meets state requirements, the court ruled against her because of litigation taken by the woman's white ex-husband, Shawn Rose. From the article:
Shui is appealing the case, but as she noted, the US legal system hasn't always done what's best for families in cases of culture and ethnicity - since much of family law is subjective in judgement, case rulings can end up extrememly biased (anyone else remember the horrible case of the He family?) Personally speaking, I think it's sad that popular American culture still frowns upon people being multilingual, especially in regards to non-European languages. Even today, our country has vastly failed to recruit enough fluent speakers of Arabic, Mandarin, Persian-Farsi, Korean, etc. to serve in government and military positions. History has shown that language is a powerful tool in both warfare and diplomacy (Nisei in the MIS during WW2 being a great example), but is it any surprise that the efforts have been largely ineffective, given the ill treatment most Americans inflict on people who are multilingual? People need to speak out against the stupidity and racism of the American "English-only" mindset. Another excellent quote from the article:
I couldn't have said it any better... it bears merit in repeating, I think. "To rob a child of his or her language is to rob that child of part of his or her identity, and to separate him or her from the culture and stories of his or her people." .:. rock on In happier news, I just got back home from watching my friend's band, The Audiobiography, rock the house at the EMP Liquid Lounge. Even though they didn't take the stage until midnight, it was a packed house and a great performance. The band's popularity continues to grow. The only downer of the night: the computer network malfunctioned and rendered the cash registers lifeless, making the bar unable to sell anymore drinks... ouch. Apple lovers will probably take delight in the fact that yes, ex-Microsoft founder and millionaire Paul Allen runs and owns EMP: all the computers are Windows-running PCs. |
Comments:
Wow, I thought that the thinking that denied me my Chinese language was at least waning in the face of real science.
Guess not, is it just me or is our whole criminal justice system completely uninterested in the realities unearthed by scientific inquiry? Basically, it's just a bunch of old white people making shit up...
Angela- I think I remember reading about the prof. you're talking about back when I was in Japan. He's written some books on the subject, right?
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Yung- word. Xian- scary, huh? |
in?scrip?tion (n-skrip-shun)n.
the facts.
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