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Bilingual Education
History & Rationale. As children of the lower class were failing in school and in life, bilingual education (originally) was not meant to rescue them. On the contrary, it was designed to catch up with the Soviets after their launching of the Sputnik, the first manned satellite (Cazabon, 1993). Through the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), the United States Government hoped to be competitive scientifically and technologically while being sophisticated in languages and cultures. As waves of immigrants kept crashing onto our shores, the Federal government passed a series of legislations and decisions to deal with the problem among which the 1965 Elementary & Secondary Education Act (to attack poverty), the 1967 Bilingual Education, the 1974 Lau vs. Nichols (special aid to non-English speaking pupils) and the 1980 Department of Education regulation (mandated Transitional Bilingual Education nationwide for limited English proficient students). Despite all those efforts, Lambert held that there were two faces of Bilingualism; one for language minorities and the other for the mainstream Americans (Cazabon, 1993). To such conservative politicians as former Senator Hayakawa, Bilingual Education would hinder the English development of immigrants (Minami & Kennedy, 1991). To those critics, Jim Cummings replied that students who experienced a preschool program in which: a) their cultural identity was reinforced, b) their was active collaboration with parents; and c) meaningful use of language was integrated into every aspect of daily activities; these pupils were developing high level of conceptual and linguistic skills in both language. Supportively, Krashen (1983) indicated that all languages are acquired the same way through four development stages, namely silent period or comprehension, early production, speech emergence, and intermediate fluency. Given time, a comprehensible input, and a lower affective filter (anxiety-free) the young immigrant will excel.
The situation of bilingual education let to believe that the authorities either want to assimilate every child into the main culture or to create bad cases of bilingual programs for the minorities where they would be proficient in neither language. In reply Skutnabb-Kangas (1986) had put forward the Declaration of Linguistic Human Rights (the rights to identify with, to learn, and to choose when to use ones mother tongue), especially in relation to small children, where it is close to criminal, real psychological torture to use monolingual teachers who do not understand what the child has to say in her mother tongue (Skutnabb-Kangas & Cummins, 1986) p.28. Nonetheless, they registered many cases of positive as well as negative bilingual programs. The additive (positive) Bilingualism has been mostly experienced abroad, whereas most of the subtractive ones have been found in the United States.
Models of Bilingual Programs. When Lau vs. Nichols was settled, it left the establishment too much leeway even though it cited the school districts for violations of the fourteenth Amendment and the Title VI of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964. According to Lyons (1990), the law did not seek any specific remedy, but only that the Board of Education apply its expertise to the problems and rectify the situation. Therefore, in its implementation worldwide, Bilingualism had two faces depending on whom it was called to serve. It could be implemented and verified as the best form of education (for the elite, the middle/upper class) or the worst case of educational formation (for the minorities, the working/lower class).
