An Education In Language
An Education in Language by R. RODRIGUEZ
Born in 1944 in San Francisco, California, Richard Rodriguez grew up in a home in which Spanish was the first language; consequently, like millions of Americans he learned English as his second language. As a child, Rodriguez experienced an oftimes painful struggle to master English, which he calls his “public” language. As an adult, he attended Stanford University in California and Columbia University in New York, following which he did graduate work at the Warburg Institute in London and the University of California at Berkeley. Best known as a writer and lecturer, Rodriguez currently lives in San Francisco.
Some educationists have recently told me that I received a very bad education. They are proponents of bilingual schooling, that remarkable innovation – the latest scheme – to improve education. They think it is a shame, a disgrace, that my earliest teachers never encouraged me to speak Spanish, ‘my family language’, when I entered the classroom. Those educators who tell me such things, however, do not understand very much about the nature of classroom language. Nor do they understand the kind of dilemma I faced when I started my schooling. A socially disadvantaged child, I desperately needed to be taught that I had the obligation – the right – to speak public language. (Until I was nearly seven years old, I had been almost always surrounded by the sounds of my family’s Spanish, which kept me safely at home and made me a stranger in public.) In school, I was initially terrified by the language of gringos. Silent, waiting for the bell to go home, dazed, diffident, I couldn 't believe that English concerned me. The teacher in the (Catholic) school I attended kept calling out my name, anglicizing it as Rich-heard Road-ree-guess, telling me with her sounds that I had a public identity. But I couldn’t believe her. I wouldn’t respond. Classroom words were used in ways very different from family words; they were
Born in 1944 in San Francisco, California, Richard Rodriguez grew up in a home in which Spanish was the first language; consequently, like millions of Americans he learned English as his second language. As a child, Rodriguez experienced an oftimes painful struggle to master English, which he calls his “public” language. As an adult, he attended Stanford University in California and Columbia University in New York, following which he did graduate work at the Warburg Institute in London and the University of California at Berkeley. Best known as a writer and lecturer, Rodriguez currently lives in San Francisco.
Some educationists have recently told me that I received a very bad education. They are proponents of bilingual schooling, that remarkable innovation – the latest scheme – to improve education. They think it is a shame, a disgrace, that my earliest teachers never encouraged me to speak Spanish, ‘my family language’, when I entered the classroom. Those educators who tell me such things, however, do not understand very much about the nature of classroom language. Nor do they understand the kind of dilemma I faced when I started my schooling. A socially disadvantaged child, I desperately needed to be taught that I had the obligation – the right – to speak public language. (Until I was nearly seven years old, I had been almost always surrounded by the sounds of my family’s Spanish, which kept me safely at home and made me a stranger in public.) In school, I was initially terrified by the language of gringos. Silent, waiting for the bell to go home, dazed, diffident, I couldn 't believe that English concerned me. The teacher in the (Catholic) school I attended kept calling out my name, anglicizing it as Rich-heard Road-ree-guess, telling me with her sounds that I had a public identity. But I couldn’t believe her. I wouldn’t respond. Classroom words were used in ways very different from family words; they were