Now It's Ethnic Studies in AZ

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37112122/ns/us_news-life/

They sure are looking to push the immigration issues. I will give them credit for getting the ball rolling, though I wonder when all is said and done, if anything changes while Tax dollars get waste.

 

This has been a problem for many years. I always thought the point of the civil rights movement was to make everyone equal. Now it seems like all the civil rights movement did was allow minorities to segregate themselves voluntarily.

 

Do you see anything wrong with this?

These kinds of studies are often broken up by culture, history and language: French, Italian, German, etc. I don't see anthing wrong with it and welcome it. However, that said, I still remember opposing a plan to require all the profs at U of H take a special class in "Hispanic sensitivity," which I thought was nothing more than total BS PCism.

 

I thought that was true though .

 

From everything I've heard on this, from MSNBC and CNN, I think the bill uses a claymore to do the job of a scalpel. It also sounds like the 'doctors' with the 'scalpels' refused to use them.

In other words, it's a bad solution to a bad problem, and the people who should be responsable (those in charge of the schools) aren't.

 

In theory no, in practice yes. Our culture is one of assimilation (the great melting pot). There is something wrong with our schools teaching everyone everything that is wrong with our European (White) heritage and then only praising everyone else's heritage. Wouldn't it be fantastic if in the Latino courses a major part of the curriculum was about poverty because they can't speak English?

 

Is it really all about assimilation? There were German language schools in America (iirc Milwaukee, Ohio?) and newspapers until popular pressure became large enough to conform during WW-I under dual loyalty accusations. Mennonite communities still speak some odd variant of German. Melting pot, schmelting pot, America always has had ethnic enclaves. The pertinent question is: To be a good American, do you need to speak English?

I have always seen that as being consistent with an America's tradition of individualism. I mean, freedom of association is the basic idea underlying the concept of largely ethnic homogeneous gated communities (like where my cousin lives in near Houston). Individualism is the idea underlying home schooling. It can be argued that just as much the choice of language is an exercise of individualism i.e. freedom.

That's a point that cannot be easily dismissed, and that's coming from a guy saying that immigrants ought to assimilate, living in a part of the city where a lot of Turkish, Italian and Russian immigrants live. And I agree that the ability of speaking the official language in a country is an economical and practical benefit. But then, there are multilingual countries that prosper. See Switzerland. The key is education I think.

 

My personal opinion is to be a "good American" you should be proficient in English. Although we have many of our forms and instructions in other languages (and spend far too much on them, we should charge for non-English government documents), there are so many other places where only English is used. I think people put themselves at a significant disadvantage if they are not proficient in English.

 

If that were the criteria, I think there would be a grand total of about 50 "good Americans".

 

I don't know if you need it to be a good American (although I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that), but you probably need it to be a successful American.

As I'm sure you're aware, in just about every major American city, there are enclaves where you can be born, live your entire life, and die, without learning a stitch of English, because the insular community in which you lived is fluent in another language. Chinatown in NYC is an excellent example of this. You don't need to know English, provided you speak one of the major Chinese dialects.

You can do this, but there is a distinct opportunity cost - you're bound to your very insular community. If you want to go to college, learn a trade that isn't taught in your community, or want the freedom to live elsewhere in the country, having some basic proficiency in English is mandatory.

Your English doesn't have to be perfect. As I have mentioned, my grandparents were not born in the US, all were bilingual, and while some of my family members spoke broken English their entire lives, they were able to fully understand forms written in English, and were able to speak and write it well enough that they could be understood. Proficient doesn't mean perfect.

And that ties back into your comment about education. It is one thing for an immigrant to not learn English - it is an entirely different matter if your American born children do not. My father is an excellent example of this. While neither of his parents learned English as their first language, the only language my father speaks is English. He knows a bit of Italian from some of his family members, but my grandparents didn't see the point of him learning anything other than English when he was growing up. (Note - my grandparents came to the US when they were chidlren/teenagers, and so by the time my father was born, they already had learned English.) Same thing with me. I can speak a bit of Italian and a bit of German that I studied in high school, but I'm not good enough at either one that I could go to one of those nations and converse with the people there.

The point of all this rambling is if your kids don't learn English, it's probably because you didn't allow them to do so, or at the very least didn't make it a priority when they were growing up. We have public schools in this country, and I cannot imagine you can attend one for 1st-12th grade and not be at least semi-fluent in English.

 

I have heard it stated by some talking heads on TV that these courses were anti white, anti-English, and were unfairly critical of the United States -- to the degree that people were being taught that the US is "occupying" what should be a part of Mexico. Now such ideas may be legally expressible, but I do not think that they have a place in the public school curriculum. Schools should of course foster a search for the truth and inquiry, but they should also teach that which unifies and brings the country together. A course that unfairly bashed any other group would be quickly quashed, and rightly so, but one that bashes White Europeans? Oh, fair game!

Now perhaps the talking heads were wrong or overstating things, but my central point remains -- public education should strive to bring people together and emphasize our similarities, not divide us and make us POd at each other. If these courses are causing more harm than good and tending to separate people along ethnic lines, then a different approach must be taken. Now that's a big fizzy if. But the one fellow I saw on the news this morning who was integral in drafting the law did not strike me as a minority hating racist white honkie KKK puppet. He struck me as someone who really believes that all people are the same underneath and he really believes that these courses are exacerbating racism rather than helping kids learn about their own culture.

 

The quote I've heard most is one teacher declaring, in the middle of a related lecture, that "Republicans hate Latinos". Like LKD said, such expressions are matters of free speech, but the teacher wasn't hired to exercise free speech, and public funds going to such hatefully partisan teachings is reprehensible. Again, though, this should have been handled with firings and re-taskings through (or possibly in) the administration. It shouldn't have needed a friggin' law.

 

Sadly, that is true. My wife is a school teacher, and she has said that no matter how bad you are at your job (and there are a few lousy teachers in almost every school), so long as you don't do anything illegal, it's almost impossible to get fired.

 

Kinda sounds like any union here in the US as well. You can get rehab for just about any offense you make before they dump you. Instead of having to actually own up to your actions... it is definitely sad.

 

The upside is that it protects employees from abuse by the employers and really awful people tend to find their way away one way or another.

 

This is election politics. Horne, the author of the anti-ethnic-studies bill, is running for Arizona Attorney General against Andrew Thomas, an Arpaio aide, who has what American press calls 'strong anti-immigration' credentials. The law gives Horne an easy way to score points in that race. It is Horne's answer to Thomas' immigration record.

More here.