Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Bilingual Education 271the number of academics, professors of education, who supportbilingual education outnumbers those who oppose bilingual educationby probably about a thousand to one... When I attended publicforums... usually the audience was 95% against [the Unz proposition],sometimes it was 98%, sometimes 100%. And that’s simplybecause the people who are most motivated to attend public forumsdealing with bilingual education tend to be advocates of bilingualeducation, including a lot of bilingual teachers and bilingualadministrators and bilingual academics. (Unz & Snow, 2002)There are many intriguing threads that could be followed up here, notleast of which are the likely correlations between typical academicpolitical postures left of center, broadly speaking and support forsuch things as bilingualism, pluralism, the plight of the educationallydisadvantaged and so on. It is worth noting, however, that Unz’sobservations are not his alone and that, indeed, they are corroboratedby those views that are quite antithetical to his. Grinberg and Saavedra(2000) point out, for instance, that the empowering possibilities ofbilingual education have been lost in a welter of bureaucracies andcompeting interests, all intertwined with the allocation of substantialamounts of money. Indeed, new ‘fields of expertise’ have emerged thathave little to do with the legitimate beneficiaries of bilingual initiatives.Theoretical exercises and disembodied analyses of program effectivenesshave become incestuous academic exercises. All of this means that, whileeducators and researchers may congratulate themselves on their activities,there now exists only ‘the illusion that the needs of displaced andsubjugated ‘‘others’’ have been addressed’ (Grinberg & Saavedra, 2000:433). Furthermore, if we put aside the contemporary polemics of Unz,and the jargon-ridden discussion of Grinberg and Saavedra, we find thatclearer and more dispassionate expressions have existed for a long time.Only three years after the passage of the original enabling legislation forAmerican bilingual education, Robert Roeming (1971: 7879), a linguist,language teacher and editor of The Modern Language Journal, pointed to:the interest of a professional group of second language teachers whomay find it advantageous to perpetuate support for language study.This is not an unwarranted suspicion. It is supported by colleaguesand laymen who find the funding of the Bilingual Education Act veryprovidential at the point where the support of the National DefenseEducation Act was diminishing.