National Language
Recently the United States Congress has been debating whether or not to declare that English is the national language of the United States and that all instruction in public schools is in English. There is no question what the language of this country is, it is irrefutably English, it was the language of our Founding Fathers and the language that the Declaration of Independence was written in, as well as the United States Constitution. I resolutely believe that the United States Congress should make this declaration. There are of course other matters at hand with teaching English to non-English speaking people. As we have seen in countries like Belgium and Canada, opposing language-speaking sides argue over what the official language should be. This has lead to enormous divisiveness in those countries and could lead to their splitting up into separate countries. This is particularly true of Canada where the French-speaking population of the province of Quebec is considering seceding from the rest of Canada, where most people speak English. The government of Canada has spent millions of dollars on bilingual education, which nevertheless has caused the polarization of society. According to a Canadian commentato
r, Fred Hamilton, it costs with about 30 million people 350 million dollars a year to maintain a satisfactory bilingual education system. This is what bilingual education is doing to our children, segregating the country. Only after the non-speaking person can fluently read, write and speak English they will have the opportunity to go to good Colleges and get good jobs. We will not have problems like Canada and Belgium over our country's language. The only problem is teaching everybody English. The best way to do this is by learning English half the day and taking normal classes like math and history, but in English, for the other half. The only way to handle this is by working harder on teacher English, not studies in their native language. What is going to happen to the relationship between different ethnic groups? They will just become farther and farther apart. If Congress finally declares that English be the official language, the country will become closer and racial discrimination will lessen, because everyone will be able to speak the same language. We should avoid dumbing-down our citizenship standards and sustain the English proficiency. These are all bilingual education classes. This is in part because the Spanish-speaking children did not have as much education before as the Chinese and Russian did. I hope you find my argument compelling. In Luisa Martinez's Spanish-speaking class, the children don't learn much English, but learn elementary studies in their own language. 7 million school children were classified as LEP, or "Low English Proficiency," out of a school population of 51.
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Acceptance Essays
