Editor's introduction: Bilingual education as a moral imperative

Bilingual Research Journal, Spring 1998 by Benavides, Alfredo H

Returning from the NABE Conference this year, I reflected on the changes that have taken place in our field over the past quarter century. Attending this conference in recent years I have noticed that many familiar faces in the crowd slowly and imperceptibly changed. The faces are much younger now and I don't recognize as many of them as before. It seems only recently that the nation took note of the rights of children to equal educational opportunities and of bilingual education as an important aspect of providing those opportunities. While many of us started our academic careers with little knowledge about bilingual education, we quickly embraced it as a truly viable weapon in this fight. Although research was virtually non-existent, we nevertheless believed in the basic right of people to self determination-including their choice of language. A corollary of this was that children were entitled to comprehensible instruction. Arguably, for the first time in the history of American public education language minority children have acquired a substantial number of advocates who argue on their behalf in the public policy arena. Those of us who attended the birth of Title VII of ESEA had precious little research to support our conviction that bilingual education was a clear means to provide instruction in the many languages that kids in the public schools spoke in their families and communities. The Bilingual Research Journal (then the NABE journal) did not arrive on the scene until eight years later. Given the absence of our knowledge base in those early years, it is somewhat surprising that we were able to consolidate this field into a genuine specialty in American education and subsequently, in research.

As I thought about the last three decades I could not help but wonder what the next thirty years would bring. Will they be as contentious and exhilarating as the first thirty? Will the fresh new faces attending the NABE conferences of the future be up to the ominous challenge now looming over the field like storm clouds? Will the new generation of scholars, teachers, and other bilingual education professionals, enjoy the challenges of course correction as much as those of us who helped to create this field at the outset? These are questions that only time and others can answer. Important parts of the knowledge base have been created although the need for more research in new areas seems as strong as ever. We are much less naive now about the ways in which education must be improved if we are to succeed more often in the quest to educate immigrant children. At the millennium, the question of education rights-for all children-seems to have been submerged in talk of accountability and high stakes testing. Regrettably, much more accountability is now being demanded of students to learn rather than stressing their rights to quality education. Things shift. The nation as a whole is concerned with remaining competitive with respect to the work force rather than the less tangible aspects of education for civic duty for personal fulfillment and the examined life. The value of learning human languages has taken a back seat to learning computer languages. In that context, the challenges to our field are clear: to move into the new millennium with a clear vision of what we stand for today, as compared to where we stood thirty years ago.

The college years are a time when a young person is expected to experiment with life. It is expected that young people will go forth and in a Quixotic sense to tilt at the various windmills of life. Every generation of college students seems to do that with their own brand of energy and exuberance. For the first generation of bilingual educators, rooted in the 1960s, an important era faded. After tilting at those windmills of inequality and warmongering that characterized our generation we tried to incorporate some of our idealism into our lives as we joined the `real world.' We worked, paid taxes, and attempted to play by the rules. The elements for a fulfilling life were all there. We had college degrees. We spoke English. We were young. We were ready to contribute.

Making a commitment to the field of bilingual education and the children that are helped in this process would insure,that our lives would never be dull. The moral outrages which we had fought with great conviction never ended. Students and young activists continued to follow us into adulthood, and we continued to fight. With bilingual education becoming a career for many of us, it has at times felt as if someone else is in control of our lives. No matter how many studies on the effectiveness of bilingual education make it into print, the media wars are being won by cultural and linguistic zealots who can only see the world one way-theirs. No matter how much suffering is put upon English language learners, it seems that the relentless and bigoted attacks will never cease. And the general education community does little to alter or suppress these moral deficiencies.