Salt Lake Tribune

June 11, 1998

Vote to Abolish Bilingual Ed Looks Good Even From Afar

By Georgie Anne Geyer UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE

MOSCOW -- Oddly enough, even as Russia is going through a profound national restructuring, from this vantage point I see some important ``restructuring'' going on in the United States as well.

The immediate cause for such musings is the recent vote in California to abolish bilingual education in favor of English immersion. Proposition 227, to abolish the bilingual education programs that were foisted on the country in the '60s and that have served only the cause of separatism in America, was passed by at least 60 percent of the voters, including a high percentage of Latino parents.

Just as here in Russia the fight for reason and sanity has only begun in terms of carrying her from communism to some kind of democracy, so in America the fight begins to assure that ours remains a coherent and united country.

-- First, consider the peculiarity of a proposition -- a special referendum taken to the people of California -- to decide such an important, emotionally charged issue. Should this question not have been decided through the traditional system of the citizens' elected representatives pondering and resolving it through the appropriate institutions of our country?

Of course, it should have. Except that a group of ``multiculturalists'' and utopian Marxist advocates in the universities, in the law, and in the foundation-supported ethnic lobbies have created an entire new method of ``resolution'' in America.

And in the past 40 years, they have created what is, in effect, an alternative system for resolving social problems. They work through those busy handmaidens of advocacy and separatist groups, the courts; state or national regulation that few know about until it is too late; and laws such as the one on bilingual education, which sound fashionable and progressive until the damage they've done becomes evident.

California's repeated answer to such new structures of power in America -- the proposition, which goes directly to the voters on single, emotionally charged issues -- is one of the worst ways for a country to handle these issues. The problem is it's the only way left for the majority to bypass the deviltry and damage this busy minority has done.

-- Second, this California vote begins the enormously important process of culling out what works in helping people get ahead and what is actually self-interested, social engineering gobbledygook.

It is clear by now to almost any intelligent person that bilingual education not only is a failure, but that it was always destined to be a failure. You don't teach a child in English for 20 minutes a day, as most bilingual classes do, and expect him and her to become fluent in English.

Yet I suspect that most Californians voted mostly for visceral reasons: They ``knew'' this was wrong. So the next step must be to unmask and dismantle those structures that the multiculturalists have so officiously erected.

That means understanding intellectually that many of these advocates essentially want to isolate America's Hispanic community, to create Spanish as a second official language, and to break America down even further in terms of ``group rights,'' thus step-by-step dissolving the unity of this country.

-- Third, this California vote may inspire, if we're lucky and if we're persistent, Americans of all stripes and stars to once again help individual citizens not by separating them into closed and cloying ethnic groups, but by giving them every advantage to become free, responsible Americans.

In a way, it is appropriate that I should be in Russia when that important vote was taken in California. This is where, particularly under Joseph Stalin, ethnic group was pitted against ethnic group in order to protect the center of power in Moscow, and where languages have been cynically used for hundreds of years to invoke hatred and slaughter.

History might well stand as a warning.