A Voice Against Bilingual Schooling
GOTTLIEB, FREEMA
A Voice Against Bilingual Schooling Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez By Richard Rodriguez David R. Godine. 195 pp. $13.95. Reviewed by Freema Gottlieb THIS book is an example...
...While his parents encouraged him to speak English, he came to share less with them...
...He therefore contends that bilingual schooling is a misguided attempt to retain the magical closeness of childhood and postpone the coming to terms with impersonal realities, which puts the minority student at a disadvantage...
...Rodriguez was lucky enough to be tutored by nuns he respected, and who revealed to him that his solitude might be assuaged by the relationship between writer and reader...
...One may disagree with Rodriguez' opinions on the subject, and yet be entranced by his own story...
...This style of learning has lately been eroded by audiovisual gimmicks replacing people as teachers, to the utter impoverishment of our society...
...And there is no way to deny it...
...In dwelling on gradations in human communication from the most private to the most public, Rodriguez takes music for his metaphor...
...And in writing his book, he says, he repeated the childhood ordeal: Companionship was again banished...
...Lacking anyone to communicate with, Rodriguez softly whispered the words he read to himself as a consolation...
...Besides, it is the nature of intimacy to be fleeting: "The truth is that intimates leave the room...
...He maintained the same stance when seeking employment, spurning many choice job offers that were prompted by his ethnic background...
...Narrative forays into ethnicity are less prevalent as the book moves along because they play a diminishing role in the author's life...
...Doors close...
...choices have to be made...
...For the young Rodriguez, each step toward maturity was a step away from his family...
...Reviewed by Freema Gottlieb THIS book is an example of that very modern phenomenon—a treatise, in this case by a Mexican-American opposed to bilingual education, combined with a memoir that reverberates beyond the polemical point...
...On the basis of his personal success, he recommends a national literacy campaign for children of the poor and otherwise hobbled as the beginning of a nationwide educational plan...
...Instead of an affirmative action-approach that he is convinced thrusts ill-equipped students into colleges and thereby merely lowers those institutions' general standards, Rodriguez would revolutionize learning at the primary level, in school and at home...
...it is created by intimates...
...Nevertheless from his own past he is convinced that one cannot be equally open to everything...
...he recognizes the power of certain chants, of childish noises, of a "song without words" to stir us as pure outpourings of the heart...
...Time passes...
...As one of them put it, "There ought to be more ethnic color, more grandma...
...Many of Rodriguez' views certainly do clash with popular radical ideology...
...His memoir reaches beyond a mere love of language to an appreciation of preverbal modalities...
...He further argues against bilingual education because he believes most young people cannot master two languages with equal success at the same time...
...But as Rodriguez viewed matters, once he was able to respond in English in the classroom he no longer shared the fate of a disadvantaged minority...
...Although Rodriguez is painfully honest in his confrontation with the alienations and guilts that have led to his mature position, he has been denounced for identifying with white society, as well as for betraying his roots by the very public act of writing about them...
...His teachers emerged as his new authority figures?in the eyes of today's Chicano consciousness-raisers, a betrayal indeed...
...Given the choice between English and Spanish, Rodriguezopts for accommodation to the Anglo world, declaring that citizens can exploit their rights and opportunities only when they are comfortable in the language of the majority...
...No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one'sfamily language...
...The real trauma, he suggests, is not so much linguistic as social—leaving home for impersonal city life—and it occurs no less in an American than in an ethnic context...
...Facesmove away from the window...
...To add to Rodriguez' troubles, the attitudes that he developed as a consequence of his rich experience were seized upon by Right-wing politicians to buttress their positions...
...The point is not well taken, though...
...Acting on his convictions, he subsequently rejected the fruits of affirmative action so abundantly lavished upon him in the form of fellowships, grants, teaching assistantships...
...Death finally quiets the voice...
...Rodriguez' education was thoroughly classical, deeply civilized, humane, and based on an oral tradition—the ancient method for conveying wisdom...
...The nonprogressive, nonper-missive Rodriguez says that education should hardly be a "natural and delightful nurturing process": Schools must prepare students for the marketplace...
...Rodriguez senses the deeper meaning behind the loss of what he calls his "family language": "Intimacy is not created by a particular language...
...He cites the example of the Catholic Church managing to unite the private and public worlds—to give deeply held feelings of worship formal expression—through its musical liturgy...
...But the author's life contains a drama that has been completed—an education that remade his whole identity, taking him from an ethnic childhood to an adulthood in the mainstream of Western culture...
...Eight editors rejected Rodriguez' manuscript, finding its polemical aspects dominating at the expense of the reminiscences...
...More important, it is not ethnic color that gives The Education of Richard Rodriguez its value: In exploring his own past, he lays bare a situation that confronts everyone who becomes an adult in modern America...
...Even as a child, when his every advance in English was seen as a loss of familiarity with Spanish, some relatives referred to him as pocho or pochito?colorless, bland, on the hygienic Anglo-Saxon model...
...He points out that people born into the indigenous culture do not appreciate the sheer loneliness involved in an outsider's cultivating habits of reading and writing...
...Not many writers have the audacity to undertake an autobiography in their mid-30s...
...Later, others accused him of having made himself into what whites would like all Hispanics to become...
...He graphically describes the ebbing of ease at home, comparing the achievement of literacy in these circumstances to speaking to oneself in a room newly emptied of furniture...
...Voices recede into the dark...
...The merits of his scheme aside, what Rodriguez does exceptionally well is convey the pain of the sort of transformation he would encourage...
...In other words, here form corresponds to content...
Vol. 65 • May 1982 • No. 9
