Mirror of language: the debate on bilingualism.

• Author: Fallows, James

Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism.

Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism. Kenji Hakuta. Basic Books, $18.95. Bilingual education has been denounced by so many people for so many years that it's come to be seen as little more than Hispanic America's slice of the special-interest pie. The arguments against it sound so good that they've been generally accepted at face value. Why should our hard-earned tax dollars support enclaves of instruction in Hmong and Cape Verdeian and Kreol? Why, with the example of Quebec before us, should we deliberately "maintain' people in Spanish rather than move them full-speed into English? What's so special about today's immigrants that they can't learn through the total-immersion process, like everybody else's grandparents did?

As it turns out, most of these complaints fall into the welfare-Cadillac category of policy analysis. That is, they have more to do with basic prejudices than with history or fact or observation of the way the programs actually work. Far from rushing into English, most of America's previous immigrants clung to Polish or Italian or German, leaving the linguistic shift to their children. Today's Spanish-speaking immigrants also are clinging to their language, but by all indications, their children are taking up English at least as rapidly as in the past. Even in Miami, where America's assimilative powers have been put to the sternest test, Cubans who came over in the 1950s and 1960s now complain that their children are not interested in liberating the motherland and instead are concentrating on getting their MBAs.

Bilingual schools, mainly German, were commonplace in the U.S. until their popularity plummeted during World War I. From the enormous mound of professional studies of bilingual classrooms, the worst conclusion that can be drawn is that, in some cases, bilingual programs may not move the children into English any faster than other, more conventional approaches. (The two main alternatives are "mainstreaming,' familiarly known as sink or swim, and giving students an hour or two of intensive English each day while sending them to mainstream classes in math, history, and so forth.) Is this grounds for a Quebec-like wave of concern?

Kenji Hakuta's Mirror of Language is a powerful and enlightening political document precisely because it has no obvious axe to grind. Hakuta is a young psychologist at Yale who specializes in the linguistic aspects of bilingualism. In...