“English Lessons”
14th December 2009
Steve Sailer is always worth reading.
I was visiting a typical Southern California public high school, one in which the student body is close to three-fourths Latino, when it dawned on me that virtually all the kids’ hallway conversations with friends were conducted in English. Indeed, most of the students spoke English without an accent. Well, to be pedantic, they had teen accents — it’s practically impossible for a high school girl to roll her eyes and exclaim “That is so gay” without sounding a little like Moon Unit Zappa in Valley Girl — but only a minority of the Hispanic students had Spanish accents.
I went home and read up on bilingual education. I quickly discovered the topic of educating “Limited English Proficient” (LEP) students is buried under a bureaucratic jargon that appears to consist of literal translations from some distant language unknown to Earthlings. For example, when an LEP child masters English, he becomes a Reclassified-Fluent English Proficient (R-FEP). His R-FEP status is tabulated at the federal Office of English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited-English-Proficient Students (OELALEAALEPS).
Unintended consequences predominate because the reigning dogma of the education industry—the intellectual equality of all students—is wrong. This obdurate refusal on the part of everybody who is anybody in the education business to admit publicly the manifold implications of some kids being smarter than others makes it difficult to get anything done in the real world.
Judith Rich Harris, author of the The Nurture Assumption, pointed out, “The problem with bilingual education is that these programs create peer groups of children who do not speak English well. They don’t have to learn English in order to communicate with the children they want to play with, and they don’t have to learn English in order to be accepted by their classmates. So, their motivation to learn English is no different from their motivation to learn the state capitals or the multiplication tables.”
Which leads to the inevitable question: That there exists a ‘black accent’ no one can doubt — and it’s not just a ‘Southern accent’, as anybody who has listened to black Southerners and white Southerners in the same conversation is aware. Is the whole meme of denigrating (no pun intended) black kids who ‘talk white’ promoted to keep blacks an isolated and thus more easily manipulated cultural minority? In that respect, I highly recommend the book He Talk Like a White Boy by Joseph C. Philips.