POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism. Kenji Hakuta. Basic Books, $18.95. Bilingual education has been denounced by so many people for so many years that it's come...
...Why should our hardearned tax dollars support enclaves of instruction in Hmong and Cape Verdeian and Kreol...
...In political speeches and barroom conversations, "biingual" has come to imply somebody from Cuba or Mexico who doesn't know English...
...The latest studies, Hakuta says, "suggest the following conclusion: take any group of bilinguals who [can speak both languages with about the same skill] and match them with a monolingual group for age, socioeconomic level, and whatever other variables you think might confound your results...
...Hakuta is a young psychologist at Yale who specializes in the linguistic aspects of bilingualism...
...If you disagree, then this book will seem like a long fly ball that lands just outside the foul pole: impressive, but no score...
...There is a stage at which children cannot distinguish between the two languages they hear and use...
...Congress, under the Articles, was so puerile that John Hancock, elected its president in 1785, took the title but not the trouble to attend any sessions...
...His results are heartening to those of us over age 12...
...Hakuta focuses on the real, literal meaning of the word, asking what happens when people learn to speak, use, and think in a second language...
...The powerful, natural tendency of societies is toward a common language, he says...
...That is, they have more to do with basic prejudices than with history or fact or observation of the way the programs actually work...
...That large story, so often obscured by the relative itsy-bitsies of the Constitution, needs anew telling for a new age...
...Since then, brilliant and blundering politicians, their efforts significantly supplemented by brilliant and blundering judges, have shaped and reshaped those boundaries, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but nearly always without much help from the letter of that law...
...Now, choose a measure of cognitive flexibility and administer it to both groups...
...One of the left's great failings in the eighties has been an inability to explain convincingly why Ronald Reagan is so popular—at this point, the most popular second-term president in the history of polling...
...For example, Spanish used in the household, English in public and in school...
...Surely, though, there's more to it than that...
...What's really going on, though, Harrington says, is a series of great clashes over money and power between three groups: localists (farmers and small businessmen), majoritarians (industrial workers), and functionalists (corporate managers...
...The anarchy spread...
...Too often the arguments are presented in such truncated form as to suggest that their mere formulation or statement carried the day, like some epigram of King Solomon...
...Characters such as Benjamin Franklin and George Mason, Morris's account suggests, may have had a good deal to do with seeing to it that America did not wind up as a jumble of Lichtensteins and Czechoslovakias...
...We over and over convince ourselves that installing some simple, fair process will exorcise the demon and return the country to its natural, conflict-free, everybody-wins condition...
...The accounts of Hamilton's sex life, Jay's "conspicuously aquiline nose," and Madison's erudition in the classics are left unlinked to their arguments in The Federalist and elsewhere...
...Think of Kissinger and Brzezinski, adult learners both...
...Far from rushing into English, most of America's previous immigrants clung to Polish or Italian or German, leaving the linguistic shift to their children...
...it helps the nation deal with the world...
...Far more intriguing is Morris's peek at the bigger picture...
...No prophet was on hand...
...The main problem is that Harrington's whole elaborate argument rests on the premise, which she presents as so obvious that it doesn't need to be argued, that only through economic planning can our problems really be solved...
...we're not a nation of idiots...
...Is this grounds for a. Quebec-like wave of concern...
...Why, with the example of Quebec before us, should we deliberately "maintain" people in Spanish rather than move them full-speed into English...
...The seeming bilingualism of modern America—the signs and advertisements and notices in Spanish— reflects mainly the surge of new immigrants from Latin America, not the persistence of Spanish over the generations...
...it istoo short to develop what it suggests...
...Despots took American hostages without fear of retaliation...
...For all its glamor and glory, the Constitution did not prevent repeated violations of the right of free speech, invasion by the British, mayhem and murder on the frontier, hideous war within the federation, deep and wide corruption of government by corporate power, the wounding and scarring of generations of blacks, fantastic government irresponsiblity in managing the economy, subversion from within the White House itself, or the failure to institutionalize peace—just to touch on the lowlights...
...It's an intriguing theory, and it leads Harrington over all sorts of interesting ground, from the Federalist papers to populism to the formation of Carter's cabinet...
...Now a piece of paper may endure, but how it "functions" is mysterious...
...With warnings about linguistic separatism ever in the air, Hakuta's most surprising evidence concerns the fragility of bilingualism...
...That scared the creditor class -into law-and-order action in Philadelphia...
...He is amazed that any real national government was constructed...
...Well after the victory at Yorktown, John Adams wrote from London that he was "regarded by the British court as a cipher'.' In 1786, postwar depression hit hard...
...The most remarkable trend in American linguistic history, Hakuta says, is the rapid disappearance and disuse of non-English languages...
...Why not more bilingual training for everyone, not just Bennington students...
...they sound pretty televisiony...
...The general assumption that children always learn languages better is too crude, Hakuta says...
...Anyone who wants the story of the argument about this or that provision of the Constitution should read another book...
...Indeed, because adults are more familiar with the abstract principles of language, they initially will learn languages more rapidly than children...
...The discussion is aimed at the layman, but it is demanding and not to be read with a beer in hand...
...The New Deal was a popular success because it identified a villain— corporate power...
...no Teddy Roosevelt was •there to whip up nationalism...
...Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $16.95...
...And when we call Hamilton, Madison and Jay "lawgivers," the ghost of Moses appears...
...Bilingual schools, mainly German, were commonplace in the U.S...
...The Constitution "has functioned and endured longer than any other written constitution of the modern era...a living functioning reality touching every person's life...
...Everyone recognizes this when it means a junior year in Paris or Milan...
...The official line is that he's "personally popular" because he's so good on television but most people disagree with his policies...
...Bilingual education has been denounced by so many people for so many years that it's come to be seen as little more than Hispanic America's slice of the special-interest pie...
...That the original Constitution was born flawed is obvious...
...James David Barber...
...James Fallows The Dream of Deliverance in American Politics...
...It was not the Constitution but a series of living leaders and followers who plunged us down and dragged us up through the checkered terrain of American history...
...The arguments against it sound so good that they've been generally accepted at face value...
...Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were mainly majoritarians, Carter was a functionalist, and Reagan a localist, though every successful national politician has to draw from at least one of the other two groups...
...Today's challenge is analagous but enormously more complex and intractable: nothing less than institutionalizing peace with justice in a world in which the depth of political chaos matches the height of technical kill-capacity...
...The first two-thirds of the book is a review of the experimental and historical evidence about the bilingual mind...
...What actually happened was that leading politicians of the day agreed to act within certain boundaries they specified...
...The debate among the Framers themselves is barely dealt with...
...But the larger point is that democracy is not established or sustained by some sacred gimmick, but by people...
...The book's strength is stimulation rather than demonstration...
...As it turns out, most of these complaints fall into the welfareCadillac category of policy analysis...
...Even .so, it is hard to explain why the folks back home were willing to buy into this novel scheme, even with its appended Bill of Rights...
...Desperate debtors in Massachusetts shut down courts and burned up records...
...It is hard to tell whether certain unfootnoted passages of dialogue were written by the authors or the subjects...
...Nicholas Lemann Witness at the Creation: Hamilton, Madison, Jay and the Constitution...
...What is being witnessed in the title of this book is a prophetic vision of what we are about to experience in the celebration of the Constitution's two hundredth birthday, namely the Founders as collective God and their product as the organization of Eden...
...Reagan has a clear villain too, big government at home and communism abroad, and that's why he is so popular...
...Mona Harrington's book is a serious, careful, intellectually honest attempt at a comprehensive theory about why, now and forever, left politics have never caught on in this country...
...For years, Hakuta says, children raised in duallanguage environments were thought to be confused and even retarded...
...The second problem follows from the first: if God made the Constitution, as Morris seems to believe, then it must be holy— maybe even omnipotent...
...Hamilton described the years 1784 to 1789 as "almost the last stage of national humiliation!' George Washington was still there as the nation's hero, but he was a strong, silent type...
...Knopf, $19.95...
...Hakuta concludes this book with what is, to me, the first plausible case for a "maintenance" approach to bilingual education— continuing to keep children fluent in Spanish or another language, while ensuring that they are competent in English...
...But the biological clock does not run out on language-learning by the teenage years...
...But not even Moses, as he delivered his stony constitution, claimed to have been there at the Creation...
...Richard B. Morris...
...The bilinguals will do better . " Although most research in bilingualism involves children, Hakuta also describes the way adults learn language...
...Today, because the long period of economic growth that helped paper over the struggle between the three groups is over, we may be forced to abandon the dream of deliverance and get down to some serious and explicit pieslicing...
...Statesmen of today could well study these three men—but as uncles roughly like themselves, not as deified grandpas...
...Jerome and the Fathers of the Church...
...Mona Harrington...
...The two main alternatives are "mainstreaming," familiarly known as sink or swim, and giving students an hour or two of intensive English each day while sending them to mainstream classes in math, history, and so forth...
...It helps the students with their cognitive skills...
...She argues that Americans have always held so dear the idea that there are no irreconcilable conflicts here (especially economic ones) that when such conflicts make themselves evident, we find a mythic scapegoat instead...
...For example, the procedure for electing presidents never worked as designed, and the procedure for choosing vice presidents was ridiculous from the start...
...We are used to "The Founding Fathers," whose title echoes St...
...At the Creation...
...Their progress into English is all but inevitable, he says...
...The conflicts are resolved, but by brute strength, and in a way that's terribly injurious to the losers—all because we can't talk about them openly...
...until their popularity plummeted during World War I. From the enormous mound of professional studies of bilingual classrooms, the worst conclusion that can be drawn is that, in some cases, bilingual programs may not move the children into English any faster than other, more conventional approaches...
...What's so special about today's immigrants that they can't learn through the total-immersion process, like everybody else's grandparents did...
...Morris's trio comes through, in his 'account, not as public leaders but as wheeler-dealers continually tap dancing around their own convictions as they sensed what was possible in the shuttered-up sauna of the summer convention...
...the benefits of real bilingual competence should not be cast off casually...
...And certainly the role of myth in politics, though hard to get at, is an important subject—if you don't believe me, ask your family next Thanksgiving dinner what they think the federal government spends more on, welfare or social security...
...Bilingualism persists only in conditions of diglossia—that is, when different languages are used in distinctly different situations...
...Two things are wrong with that...
...Even in Miami, where America's assimilative powers have been put to the sternest test, Cubans who came over in the 1950s and 1960s now complain that their children are not interested in liberating the motherland and instead are concentrating on getting their MBAs...
...Sanctifying the two-legged landholders who marked out the Constitution tends to diminish by comparison the politicians of today who struggle to create broader unities than they were born into...
...But that passes quickly, and it now seems that the rigors of learning two styles of thought leave the children with more adaptable and creative casts of mind...
...Kenji Hakuta's Mirror of Language is a powerful and enlightening political document precisely because it has no obvious axe to grind...
...Someone who starts learning another language as a child and sticks with it has a chance to attain a higher ultimate level of mastery, especially in accent...
...They were pragmatists...
...The "Nation" had been at war against a common .enemy for years when, in 1781, the Articles of Confederation set up what amounted to not much more than a diplomatic conclave...
...The simple answer may be the right one...
...The lesson for aspiring democracies is that if you get your constitution right, the rest will work out...
...The war in Vietnam is an example of the flaw in our approach: we believed that if we could only get the crooks and the com-symps out of the South Vietnamese government, our side would prevail...
...Today's Spanishspeaking immigrants also are clinging to their language, but by all indications, their children are taking up English at least as rapidly as in the past...
Vol. 18 • March 1986 • No. 2
