Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

212 Language Diversity in the Classroomphoenix-like, a new culture in which the threads of all the earlier oneswould be seamlessly and invisibly interwoven.From the beginning, however, it was the tension surrounding diversityand unity that animated those thinkers who were neither so naïve as tothink that the melting pot was a democratic cauldron with room foreveryone, nor motivated by a crude nativism. An early proponent of anenduring multiculturalism was Horace Kallen (1915, 1924), who arguedthat there was no overarching American nationality but, rather, acollection of distinct groups who could perpetuate themselves indefinitely.Kallen’s ideal was a harmonious diversity, a stable culturalpluralism. He made provision in his model for some assimilationthrough consensus, allowing for the unum in the national motto whileemphasising the pluribus. (Part of the unum, incidentally, would beEnglish as the common language.)Most scholars, however, believed and hoped that the assimilation ofimmigrants would proceed in what was called ‘straight-line’ fashion,although a roaring and insensitive melting-pot was rarely what theyhad in mind. Thus, the prominent sociologist, Robert Park, consideredthat assimilation was not something to be forced upon immigrants;they should, rather, be helped towards full participation in nationallife. A natural progression was perceived, from competition and conflictto accommodation and incorporation (assimilation): the famous‘race-relations cycle’. Recent interpretations strongly suggest that Parkand his fellow scholars were liberals (some were romantics) caught in adilemma. Park himself felt that civilization subverts attractive andegalitarian ‘small’ cultures with their ‘redemptive’ solidarity and hewas, in many ways, a champion of what he termed ‘parochial culture’ (seeLal, 1990). At the same time, he did not wish to repudiate larger society,whose attractions and advantages were clear. He and his colleagues wereboth progressive and pragmatic, but they also wished to incorporateearlier and ‘smaller’ group values in a broader society that was, itself, stilldeveloping. They struggled, as liberals often do, with the competingattractions of past and present, rural and urban, diversity and unity.In most contexts, however, some sort of assimilationist model prevailed,either officially or more powerfully, in democratic societies unofficially;indeed it was really only in the 1960s that academic interest in theassimilation-pluralism equation revived. This was intertwined with whatlooked to some to be an ethnic-minority ‘revival’ or ‘resurgence’. Manycommentators suggested that this was surprising, that the recrudescenceof ethnic consciousness was a reaction to ‘straight-line’ assimilation thathad somehow crept up unseen. Speaking for many, an apologist for