Apr/090
Must America be Monolingual?
I just finished reading Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman, and was rather intrigued by one of the points he makes regarding the duties of the public school system:
Great streams of immigrants were flooding the United States from all over the world, speaking different languages and observing diverse customs. The “melting pot” had to introduce some measure of conformity and loyalty to common values. The public school had an important function in this task, not least by imposing English as a common language.
The flow of immigrants and the need to integrate them is the same as in Friedman’s time, but public opinions of English being the only and primary language in education have changed. In several places across the southern US Spanish is used as a primary language in schools. The arguments for this are generally quite practical: most people in those areas simply don’t speak English, but will benefit greatly from better education. All true, but there are other issues as well that need to be addressed. Is this dangerous to national unity? Will fragmented communities arise that don’t share the American ideals if we allow cities and individual communities to break from the common language in their education?
I would argue that language probably a more important factor in the isolation of a specific community or culture than perhaps even their own cultural practices. If a family exclusively speaks Mandarin for example in the US and has no facility for English, it will stay a Chinese culture. However, at the point that English penetrates that family it introduces an entirely new paradigm. New vocabulary, new ideas, new metaphors, all with few exact equivalents in Chinese culture enter the family structure and begin to open it up to not just experiencing the external culture but allowing the family to genuinely interact with it. Or to put it another way, the Americanisms instilled in the everyday language begin to enter a person’s thoughts allowing understanding and true integration to occur.
This is exactly why education in English is important in the US if we want to retain loyalty to the core ideals of our founding. If we eventually have entire generations of Americans growing up without learning English and not having their reasoning and communication framed in the language in which our values are woven, America ceases to be the healthy conglomeration it historically prized and will become a loose grouping of parallel cultures.
This is a question that forces our ideas of freedom and individuality to conflict with the national community ideal of an American “melting pot” culture, and doesn’t have one easy answer. The solution is far from as easy as simply saying “Everything must be in English!!” That way lies Xenophobia and racism. Education in America needs to instill the common language but at the same time allow for the great variance of cultural expression that makes this country unique. So, should The United States be monolingual? Never. However, if Americans want to retain the beautiful thing that is the interweaving of cultures within the framework of American ideals, we absolutely must encourage English as the primary language of all citizens.