Transcript
John Phillip Santos
Writer/Producer
It's staggering that well into this era in which we've sought to address issues
of social justice in the Latino community and the larger national community
that we are still stuck in these debates about bilingual education. It's
a canard, it's a 40-year old trap and the brother really points out where
we need to go. The difficulties with bilingual education are that it's
not trilingual or quadrilingual education -- that Americans aren't becoming
global citizens by learning to speak the languages of others. I grew up
on the Texas-Mexico border, I couldn't imagine ever needing a language
other than Spanish and English. The old Romans language of Europe seemed
very distant and useless to me, and I learned later that I could have
made very great use of French or German or Japanese or Arabic in these
troubled times. But we are still stuck in these anxieties about our monolingual
past when we are becoming a nation of many languages and many cultures.
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