Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

Educational and political dimensions of bilingual education 63
presented – for convenience of exposition – as taking place between two opposing
camps, assimilationists and pluralists (e.g. Schmidt 2000).
Institutionally, the assimilationist position is most obviously articulated by the
lobby group US English, founded in 1983, which campaigns against bilingual
education, against multilingual ballots and in favour of a federal constitutional
amendment to make English the sole official language of the United States. Speaking
for the pluralist position, meanwhile, is English Plus, an advocacy coalition founded
to combat the successes of US English in the court of public opinion. Broadly, this
supports genuinely bilingual education, the extension of the rights of ethnolinguistic
minorities and the maintenance and learning of minority languages alongside
English – hence ‘English Plus’.
Our purpose here, however, is not to rehearse the origins and institutional history
of these two movements (see Crawford 1999, 2000 for further detail) but to discuss
the ideologies of assimilationism and pluralism that animate them. All that one
might add here by way of historical analysis is that it is no accident that the rise
of US English coincides with an era when mass immigration is reshaping the
demographic structure of US society in such a way as to pose an apparent threat to
the dominance of the English-speaking, Euro-American culture so long assumed to
be the core of, if not coterminous with, the American national identity.
The mention here of identity signals what lies at the root of the conflict between
assimilationists and pluralists. At one level, certainly, it is a dispute about the role of
English and other languages in the civic realm, but, more fundamentally still, it is
not about language per se but contrasting understandings of the nature of US society
and its identity.
Thus, assimilationists, broadly speaking, adhere to a vision of the United States
as a national community in which cohesion and social equality is best promoted
by forsaking ethnolinguistic attachments in favour of allegiance to a single unifying
language and culture. Traditionally encapsulated in the refrain E pluribus unum (one
out of many) this solution is, assimilationists argue, the only one that can sustain the
equitable, long-term functioning of a polyethnic society. Pluralists, on the other
hand, emphasise ethnolinguistic diversity as inherent to the identity of the United
States, point to a long and continuing history of racialised ethnolinguistic discrimination
and argue that the goals of democracy and social justice, so conducive
to national unity in the long term, are best served by policies (e.g. maintenanceoriented
BE) that enhance the status of minority languages and cultures.
As the values of social justice and national unity are central to the arguments of
both camps, with pluralists resting their case more heavily on the former, it may be
convenient to organise our discussion around these two reference points.
First, however, following Schmidt (2000), we need to acknowledge the extent to
which the arguments of either side are informed by quite different understandings of
the origins of linguistic/cultural diversity in the United States. Thus, for assimilationists
(Schmidt 2000: 119), the United States is – notwithstanding episodes of
conquest and domination – first and foremost a nation of immigrants, willing to
surrender old ethnic loyalties for integration into a society of opportunity, one in