Cambridgeshire, UK: A school in Peterborough became the first in the UK not to have a single pupil who speaks English as their first language. The 440 children at Gladstone Primary have 20 mother tongues between them, including Czech, Portuguese and several African languages. However, teachers have devised a number of strategies to cope with the challenge – including a “buddy” system with English-speaking children at nearby schools – and they seem to be working: the school received a “good” Ofsted rating (rating by school inspectors) this year, up from “inadequate” less than two years ago. (The Week, Dec 25)
A pre-condition for nationhood has to be a common language. This is not a nationalist statement, simply a matter of common sense.
I have nothing against the American Latino community; on the contrary, I find Latinos to be courteous, intelligent, hard-working and often funny. Thank goodness they are there, ready and willing, to do the work that other Americans cannot or will not do.
However, it is not in the national interest to have swathes of the country where Spanish is spoken exclusively, and command of English is spotty. The demand for cheap labor is driven by businesses, whose priorities don’t include keeping the one thing that all Americans had, at one time, in common: a common language. There is a more important issue: social cohesion.
Epicurus would probably have supported offering a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants on the principle that their happiness was the highest cause. But he would also have made them learn the local language (English! Remember?) before allowing any further concessions. If we cannot understand one another we cannot have a community or a nation.
Many years ago ( the early 1960s) I traveled through Mexico, studying the way the Mexican government was trying to raise the living standards of poor pueblo villagers, using cultural missions composed of teachers and health workers.
What struck me was the huge number of tiny children, everywhere. I asked a professor from Mexico City, who was directing one of the missions, how the country was proposing to employ this huge addition to the population. It turned out that he was a fervent Mexican nationalist. (you don’t immediately associate Mexico with nationalism). “We will send them north of the border to de facto take back the lands of stolen by the Yanquis from Mexico in 19th Century colonialist wars “, he told me. Truly. And here they are!