Finland, Hong Kong and Singapore are odd choices as sources of evidence to boost bilingual education as a useful approach for the U.S. The U.S. is a transcontinental nation with the fourth largest national land area in the world and a growing population in excess of 300 million. Singapore is a tiny city-state. Until legal reunification with mainland China 10 years ago, so was Hong Kong. Finland is physically larger, but has a tiny population. At 5.3 million, and shrinking, Finland’s headcount is just about exactly midway between the 2.5 million of Singapore and the 7 million of Hong Kong.

The populations of small countries – as measured by either geographic area or population – are nearly always more polylingual than the citizens of larger nations. I have observed this effect personally as I worked in Western Europe for a couple of years. In Belgium, The Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, typical citizens – at least the city-dwellers – were quite likely to speak English and at least one of the other European languages in addition to their native languages. When you are part of a small linguistic population living in a physically small country, you literally cannot take a trip of any great length without crossing someone else’s border. People from such countries learn second, third and even more foreign languages as matters of significant personal and economic convenience to themselves. Citizens of larger nations (Germany, France) and/or of nations in which foreign travel is less a routine part of everyday life (Spain, Italy) are much less likely to speak languages other than their native tongues.

Americans are not mostly unilingual because we are ignorant philistines – however much the Euro-philic Anerican Left may prefer to imagine otherwise – but because we have no significant economic or personal incentives to be even bilingual, let along polyglot. An American on the West Coast can drive east for a week and be understood everywhere along the way by speaking just English. A Dane or a Dutchman might need as many as a half-dozen languages to manage well on a journey of similar length. Finland’s educational/linguistic policies, thus, hold no useful lessons for America.

Your Finnish example is doubly wrongheaded because it confuses bilingual education with what is, mainly, foreign language instruction. Finnish schools do indeed offer classroom instruction in many subjects in languages other than Finnish, but the list of languages on offer – English, Russian, German, Arabic and Spanish being the main ones – all share one characteristic; they are all spoken by many more people in the world than there are speakers of the Finns’ own native language. The Finnish government is not, with the notable exception of Arabic, targeting non-Finnish instruction at immigrants, but at native citizens it wishes to provide with maximized opportunities to make their ways in a world that mainly does not speak Finnish and isn’t about to start.

As to the Arabic instruction – which is the medium of Finnish bilingual education in the American sense of the phrase – the results have been similar to the dismal outcomes we have experienced here in America, but made even worse by the tribal jihadist arrogance and hostility that have become the norm in the resolutely non-assimilating Islamic minorities that now afflict every European country. Once again, quite emphatically, there is nothing in this experience that America would be avantaged by emulating. Quite the contrary.

Hong Kong and Singapore, as even you have acknowledged, are not teaching in multiple languages because they wish to increase linguistic diversity, but are doing so as a transitional measure that is part of a long-term policy of reducing or eliminating linguistic diversity. Chinese is a language that has a common written form, but dozens of mutually incomprehensible dialects in spoken forms. The leaders of Singapore are attempting to parallel the far larger effort that has long been underway in mainland China to advance Mandarin at the expense of other dialects with a view to eventually rendering “Chinese” and “Mandarin” into synonyms. How the Hong Kongers long-time efforts to do likewise with the majority (in Hong Kong) Cantonese dialect will fare, given that such efforts fly directly in the face of Beijing’s Mandarin uber alles push, will be interesting to observe. I expect a lot of linguistic friction on this front. Yet again, one looks in vain for usable lessons applicable to American education.

Bottom line? Bilingual education is a failure educationally and is contrary to the preservation and future health of American culture and national identity. For both reasons it should be abandoned everywhere it remains in place in these United States and replaced with intensive ESL and cultural assimilation instruction for immigrants and their children.

As to other matters:

I rather suspect that it will take some time before we are fully acquainted with the degree to which such actions (rounding up citizens based on heritage) have taken place during the current war-time condition.

What? You think there are tens of thousands of disappeared Arabian immigrants who’ve been snatched off the streets in the dead of night and sent to languish in secret prison camps inside, say, Area 51? Your history of posts on this site marks you plainly as a Woman of the Left, but I’ll confess to no particuarly accurate impression of how far into the Neo-Marxian fever swamp you have wandered. Do you think GWB “stole” the 2000 election? Are you a “9/11 Truther?”

Meanwhile, one of the conditions that has placed us at risk to be victimized by terrorists has been our lack of knowledge and understanding of other languages and cultures.

On the contrary. Those of us concerned with preserving and protecting the United States of America are pretty well informed about a lot of foreign languages and cultures – especially those that have announced their intentions to destroy us. With some things – the myriad dysfunctions and pathologies that characterize Islamic “culture” in general, and Arabian “culture” in particular – the more you truly understand, the more you are galvanized to oppose and, indeed, to seek to extinguish.

It is, in my experience, people of your ideologocal bent who tend to be jaw-droppingly ignorant of the history and viewpoints of other nations. To an American leftist about the only important piece of information about a foreign culture is whether or not its citizens are darker complected than the average American. If so, then whatever they do and think – regardless of how aggressive and barbaric – is taken to be axiomatically justifiable. White/American = Bad. Non-White/Foreign = Good. Simple, really. From this premise, the leap to supporting American public subsidy of foreign cultural practices – including the preservation and promotion of the speaking of non-Englsh languages – by recent immigrants to these shores follows more or less automatically.

A lot of “anti-Muslim hate crimes” are faked outright.  There was zero evidence of a crime in the much-ballyhooed Dayton mosque incident, and other purported hate crimes are hoaxes.

I did not suggest the scale–in fact I said that we would likely not know the scale for a good many years. But we could start by talking about the extralegal detainees at Guantanamo and others in various other countries who don’t ban torture. Or we could think about the million or so names on the FBI anti-terrorism list. Or, if you are not disturbed by reading something produced by people who are Muslim, you might want to read reports of the Council on American-Islamic Relations: http://www.cair.com/CivilRights/CivilRightsReports/2004Report.aspx

I’m not sure what “officially and nearly universally renounced” means since the people doing the renouncing had the luxury of doing that renouncing from a safe historical remove. Reparations are certainly justifiable the internees having been deprived of both liberty and property without due process but as you know a state of war existed and national survival was at stake. It’s easy to tut-tut now at the injustice of the internment but observing the niceties when a gun’s to your head really is asking a lot of people.

We could have done more and sooner but in the sweep of human history I rather doubt that in other nations during other wars internees would’ve fared better or even as well.

Momof4 got there ahead of me with regard to Canadian bilingualism, a subject with which I have some familiarity.

Canada provides a nice case in point of the dangers of bilingualism inasmuch as the mandatory instruction and use of French creates a “tyranny of the minority” – the majority is saddled with the task of helping to maintain a culture which necessarily means little to them. Is French culture and language sufficiently worthwhile to mandate its use? I don’t think so.

> I rather suspect that it will take some time before we are fully acquainted with the degree to which such actions (rounding up citizens based on heritage) have taken place during the current war-time condition.

Oh, do you have any information that such internments have occurred at all let alone on the scale or using criteria similar to those used during WWII? Please, provide some information.

> Meanwhile, one of the conditions that has placed us at risk to be victimized by terrorists has been our lack of knowledge and understanding of other languages and cultures.

No, a lack of understanding of other languages and cultures hasn’t placed us at risk. Being a democracy has placed us at risk. I’d expand on my feelings about the type of person who’d invoke terrorism to justify support for their own, unrelated political cause but it’s late, I’m tired and if I get too worked up I’ll have trouble getting to sleep.

You might want to look into Finland, Hong Kong and Singapore–all of which have a good bit to say about bilingualism in education, and the role of mother tongue in teaching. One of the lessons from Hong Kong is that the quality of the bilingual education matters quite a bit. In their case the government spent several decades moving instruction away from poorly taught (mixed codes) English instruction (a language with international currency) to an emphasis on “mother tongue” or Cantonese for most students. English or bilinugal instruction survives but with a much higher quality.

Singapore has had to deal with a multi-lingual population–and in fact has worked to encourage the unification of the various Chinese dialects–urging parents to adopt Mandarin as their home language so that students will have a home experience in one of the two “school language,” the other being English (selected as being fairly neutral amongst the other three language groups populating the country–and for its utility in science and industry).

Finland is officially a bilingual country (as is Canada) and aims for bilingual fluency at an early age–teaching in the “mother tongue,” and adopting a second national language. What is interesting is that they have applied this when possible to recent immigrant groups–again, with the understanding of the efficiency of teaching content in the mother tongue, but with early, consistent and ongoing instruction in the second language.

BTW–”the incidents that occurred under the conditions of war in which our national survival was in doubt” have been officially and nearly universally renounced, and official reparations legislated. I rather suspect that it will take some time before we are fully acquainted with the degree to which such actions (rounding up citizens based on heritage) have taken place during the current war-time condition. Meanwhile, one of the conditions that has placed us at risk to be victimized by terrorists has been our lack of knowledge and understanding of other languages and cultures.

By the way, internment wasn’t just visited on Japanese immigrants and Americans of Japanese descent. Turns out that American civilians of Italian and German descent were also interned.

My only point of disagreement with Dick is in the advisability of making assimilation a distinct policy.

I believe the “policy” of benign neglect, of simply ignoring languages other then English in any tax-supported setting, is the best policy. Such a policy calls for no decisions on the part of government bureaucracy, no legislative clarification and requires no tax money.

If your particular culture is important to you then you should carry the burden of maintaining it.

The FBI’s New York office in October 2001 asked a local charity that works with Arab Jews to submit applications for the linguist jobs, which are crucial to anti-terrorism investigations.

But not one of the more than 90 applicants was hired, even though some had helped translate Arabic for Israeli radio and TV news stations and the Israeli army before coming to America, the charity’s director says.

This is not just worrisome but outrageous if it is also true that Arab translators cheered the 9/11 attacks.

Could you provide a link supporting this? If so, it’s deeply worrisome and highly counter-productive. It’s my understanding that there are now significantly more Arab Christians in the US (mostly Maronite Catholics from Lebanon and Orthodox Copts from Egypt, but substantial groups from Syria and Iraq as well) than are left in the Middle East, and if that’s a talent pool being turned away, something is going very wrong.