“English Only” cramps English learning for kids

Especially kids from non-English cultures. 

Mr Eschleman’s "simple biases" in the Big Horn County News almost always have insightful credibility, based on evidence. And his “join the melting pot” is welcoming in a way to all us immigrants­–or our immigrant grandparents.  But wait, he missed a crucial evidence step: the value of other languages in learning English well. Every child deserves the benefit and right to be learning at least two languages by age 6.  Almost every other nation’s parents now relish the educational foundation built by two languages early in life–something we’re improving on in Big Horn County as well with new immersion programs.

In the two years I lived in China, all kindergartens nationwide there were required to have English along with Chinese. This reversed a Chinese Communist edict where only the one dominant language was allowed in schools. I cannot forget visiting a tiny stone hut in western Sichuan guided by an old Buddhist monk. It was a school, looking like a child’s play temple. He showed me chinks in the mortar where children had hid their Tibetan language lessons from the Communist Red Guards 50 years ago. The current emphasis on two languages immersed in Kindergarten ended that bias for all children in China. He had been their secret teacher, and early advocate for two languages.

For the evidence missing in Mr. Eshchleman’s “Simply Biased,” look up “two language learning” studies and any of these authors: Lindholm-Leary, Saunders, Comeau, Mendelson, Genesee, Bialystok, Martin, Mechelli, McBride-Chang, Luk, Snow, Kang, Whitehurst, Lonigan. Also check out the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989.

Carnage and community healing

The shock and outrage of Las Vegas is simmering down to a useful conversation in Montana, even Big Horn County. If any regulation of ordnance weaponry happens, it will accompany a recovery of an old civics class concept I learned in my one-room country school in the early 50’s: “…That government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” The rise of military ordnance weaponry in citizen hands in the United States has been accompanied by a morphing of our nation’s proud principle into something sinister: our government gone awry. With alarming increase in mass shootings nationwide, our collective awareness has grown that we people have a government out of our control. Control of our government is at the center of many of us who would love to see America great again. What’s getting in the way?

I remember a hunting season in the 50’s when my father used proceeds from our custom sheep shearing to buy lifetime membership in a national citizen gun-owner group. My brothers and I got benefits: discount coupons for ammo, mailings on gun safety family promotion, a subscription to the American Rifleman magazine, and (get this) piles of targets on paper. I quickly graduated from a Benjamin BB gun to a single shot 22, and practiced as much as my dad’s dribble of coins to me allowed me to buy 22 shorts ammo at the Trenton General Store.

A few years later Dad revoked his life-time membership. It happened like this: One snow-bright December Sunday morning on the way to church, he had stopped our Studebaker at a bend in the gravel road. There in the snow beside the road was a large area of dark grey. A pile of dead rabbits and quail. “See that?” he asked. “Someone was using guns to go crazy. Guns have a purpose: to provide for the family table.” He alluded to our neighbor friend who had one of the new semi-automatic rifles and a Winchester revolver advertised in our magazine. “Guns like this lead away from God. We shouldn’t buy guns made to kill people. These guns are built not for good, but for evil.”  He didn’t know we had partially succeeded converting our friend’s automatic 22 into fully automatic. We had enough success to track the puffs in the snow right into a running rabbit until the gun jammed and we couldn’t fix it. This didn’t end my gun ownership, but it ended our fun shooting spree, and our fascination with that citizen gun ownership group. That group became a guns-for-people-killing industry in our nation. With it’s world record rise in citizen weaponry sales revenue has come our nation’s most rapidly rising incidents of mass shootings. 

Way back then, in the fifty’s, did my Dad know what he was talking about when ending his lifetime membership with the National Rifle Association? I suspect his only surprise would be how long it has taken to get to Las Vegas. When will we have the sanity to apply similarly sensible regulations for other lethal man-made materials like cars, pharmaceuticals, explosives, pocket knives, etc, to guns? A big difference is this: none of these other materials are specifically designed for mass killing of other human beings. How could our cognitive disconnect get so huge? How much money was poured into this disconnect over the last decades for whose profit?

What was predictable then was and still is preventable. But it takes all of us citizens to return to our nation’s greatness, repeating the words of Abraham Lincoln, “… government of the people, by the people, and for the people...”