Education, Not Litigation: Government, Employers, Citizens, All Should Promote English

Category Business, Education | Permalink | 27. March 2007

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Unquestionably any individual fluent in English and living in this country, the language of which is English (whether fluent in one or more other languages, such as Spanish), will have a greater chance at a successful life, culturally and economically, than one lacking English fluency. A successful impetus to learn English necessarily must comprise two elements: opportunity and self-recognized need.

More and more educational programs offer English as a second language. Yet unquantifiable millions of Latino or Hispanic immigrants, lawful and unlawful, cannot make their way in English. Thus, more education is required.

Further, governments at every level - Federal, State, local - should eliminate the dual use of English and Spanish. The more superficially facile it appears to be for a person knowing only or mostly Spanish to function in Spanish the greater the number who will attempt to do so.

Litigation now has insinuated itself. A recent Georgia case, brought by a “Mexican - American” organization, was settled in favor of the Latina plaintiffs (housekeepers or charwomen) against their employer, a small private university. The message of the case, to the extent there is a message, is that an employer should avoid a mandatory English requirement for lower-wage jobs the performance of which does not absolutely require English. One readily can understand why an organization would not want the likely reduced efficiency and more trying supervision of workers who spoke only Spanish. Our ancestors did not expect, however mundane their jobs, to work in only German, French, Italian, Polish or whatever their native language may have been. The enveloping political phenomenon unfortunately has retrogressed to the point at which that historic level of common sense often no longer prevails. Thus, employers must avoid English-language-only requirements which arguably are discriminatory and/or penal.

That necessity adds another, if perhaps less sweeping, argument to the proposition that to the extent reasonably possible everyone must be accorded the opportunity to learn English and all governmental levels must cease catering to those who have not learned English. That masterfully keen 19th Century French observer of American life, M. Alexis de Tocqueville, could not have known the extent to which his prescient observation would become nearly all-encompassing: We Americans often resort to litigation to resolve problems.

Our May 5, 2006 column, which follows, discusses further aspects of this largely unresolved English-language deficiency - a deficiency which adversely affects our national unity and our culture and which as to some millions of Latinos also adversely affects their economic opportunity.

Marion Edwyn Harrison is President of, and Counsel to, the Free Congress Foundation

By Marion Edwyn Harrison, Esq.

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Source : www.nationalledger.com

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