The thesis of this polemical book is that bilingual education doesn't work. The authors succumb to the temptation of a common failing of academics, the present writer included, oversimplification. There is no one best way to teach anything, no method or strategy that works with every student and every subject.
Members of the educational establishment, and especially those with administrative leanings or motivations, desperately desire to have a simple means of assuring that students learn what the system wishes to teach. Unfortunately, no such simple strategy has passed the acid test of universally successful teaching.
The authors, like many professional pedagogues, forget the natural variation in populations of students. Some arrive at school speaking one language, others two. Some learn to read without formal instruction, motivated by imitation of their parents. Others may have never seen a book or magazine up close because there were none at home. Some are well socialized, others have been isolated from other children. Some are active and athletic while others are confirmed couch potatoes at the age of four.
Some students learn best using their visual abilities, reading and observing. Others are excellent and attentive listeners. Still others learn best by manipulating concrete objects.
Teachers who attempt to use just one medium of communication will find some students left behind, no matter which simple strategy they implement. The only effective posture for a teacher is to be eclectic and pragmatic, imagining new classroom activities, trying them out, reading about someone else's ideas, trying them out, planning, trying out the plan, and correcting the inevitable mistakes.
Let me report on an informal experiment I witnessed many years ago in Ann Arbor. A colleage and neighbor, a German national who teaches Persian professionally and his wife, also German, adopted a strategy of early exposure to three languages for their three-year-old son. The mother used only German when speaking to the boy, the father only spoke Persian, and of course, the neighbor children, knowing neither language, were assumed to use English.
According to the theory of the committee of the Academia, the boy should have suffered at this treatment, learning none of the languages or at best some three-cornered "pidgin". The truth was quite different. He entertained himself in his crib at night with locutions such as "Daddy says (the Persian equivalent of 'night')", "Mommy says 'nacht'", "Johnny (my youngest son) says 'night'". By age five, before he entered school, he was able to speak all three languages fluently and had a good start on reading in both English and German.
Personally, I doubt that we really tax our children's capabilities if we both love and challenge them.
Our educational system suffers (as do many others under the control of dogmatic pedagogues) from "theorism", the uncritical adoption of pedagogical theories that have not been subjected to empirical testing, much as some people adopt fad diets to lose weight. A professor attempts to stimulate teachers-to-be with a theory about how children learn, but the students misinterpret it as a dogma. Too much memorization and insuficient critical analysis produce mental poverty. When you consider the domination of our public educational administration by unhampered political sectarianism, we can expect that no educational innovation is ever practiced long enough to bear fruit.
Education is a long term investment in the human infrastructure of society. We need to apply our best minds to it. We cannot expect to harvest good students when every four years the leadership (and therefore the support for a program) is subject to change. When the innovations are valuable, as some are, they are just as likely to be scrapped as when they are poorly conceived and executed.
No one is closer to the students than his or her teacher(s). No one understands a student's peculiar genius that sets him or her apart from the crowd except people who have continuous and intimate intellectual contact with the student. So why do we continue the myth that anyone in a central educational administration is competent to instruct a teacher? Frankly, I believe the answer has more to do with someone's ego and urge for power than anything else.
It is time we recognize publicly a number of facts that most of us only admit privately,
A real educational reform would begin with separation of the educational administration from the control of persons elected or selected by political processes dominated by parties and career politicians. Perhaps the best first step would be to recognize officially that the Council on Higher Education of the 1970's was afraid of Jaime Ben¡tez and drummed him out of office without the "evaluation" called for by law. Ever since that political act, led by the late Ramón Mellado, the University of Puerto Rico has been sliding down a steep slope towards academic mediocrity.
A real educational reform cannot be instituted by the legislature nor the Governor nor by the courts. Micromanagement by these bodies will prolong the decline. The university must be empowered (and required) to write its own organizational charter to be submitted to the Department of State like that of any corporation. The only law that should exist is one that makes resource assignments via a formula not subject to legislative nor executive manipulation.
The argument that the public university must respond to public concerns would be more convincing if the political parties were not so destructively competitive. My conclusion is that the so-called "representative" bodies in Puerto Rico are representative only of a social and economic elite, mostly lawyers, who make a career of elective office seeking. They only represent the public interest when it matches their private interests.
A real educational reform would set us on the pragmatic path of empowering teachers to plan and execute educational experiments in their classrooms and to publish their findings. In this way, every teacher could become a student of 'How Children Learn'.