Bilingual education debate
Bilingual Education: Don't shut the doors of knowledge In The United States, foreign students from various minority groups are often placed at a disadvantage in schooling because their Native Language is not English. As a result a Bilingual education system was devised by the government to help the "disadvantaged" in 1968 under the Bilingual Education Act. In an essay written by Diane Ravitch called "Does Bilingual Education Make Sense?" she argues that Bilingual Education in the United States has been a dismal failure. In addition, she also believes that a new system of "structured immersion" would better suit the needs of these foreign students. I disagree with Ravitch for several reasons. To begin with I feel that Bilingual education is needed to help students keep up with others who are not disadvantaged. Another reason is that I believe that the current bilingual education system gives sufficient opportunity for students who want to learn English. Finally I feel that the immersion system would only be useful to stud!ents who are exposed to English on a regular bases after attending the immersion program. The major disadvantage for foreign students can be illustrated by a simple exercise. Try picking up a gr
The base for these programs is simple: Stress the learning of English and te!ach other subjects in there native language until they are able to learn fully in English. There are two problems with this statistic. If bilingual education was erradicated foreign students would be forced to walk through the door of the english language before given the chance to walk through any other door. Therefore I do not feel that the bilingual education system should be eliminated since the importance of the english language can only be decided by the individual student and his environment. Scientific studies have shown that it is easier to learn a new language at a young age. I am a strong believer in the saying "Language is not taught in the classroom". Therefore I feel that not teaching foreign students in their own native language will only hinder them, because those who are not familiar with english will fall behind other areas of education. This saying means that the only way to truly learn a language is to live in a society which speaks that language. As one can imagine this has a great effect on the ability for one to become fluent in the English language. If he/she does not want to communicate with a certain group than learning that language or tool would be of no practical use to him/her. One reason that I feel this way is that the age group that was surveyed was too high. Many get frustrated because of this and end up losing a lot of confidence. In her essay Ravitch points to a statistic which says that the drop out rate of Hispanics ages 16 - 24 was 30 percent, which is more than double the dropout rate for blacks and white in the same age group. An example of this is East Harlem in Manhattan where the predominant language there is arguably Spanish.
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Acceptance Essays
