roachboy

i wanted to say what mm said above.
the name of the political position that generates this kind of hysteria and which tries to benefit from it politically is neofascism.
newt gringrich is attempting to capitalize on a few years of exactly this kind of hysteria and would like to benefit from it politically.
therefore...

seaver: doesn't your argument assume a kind of monolingual education, really: you seem assume that the communities that you are looking at in holland do not learn dutch at all. that seems kinda strange. i dont think it is true. what you might have is the reproduction of heavily accented dutch across generations--in which case the issue really would be accent as one of a series of social markers, and the problem would really be less the possibility of communication than it would be the interconnectedness of accent as social marker with other dimensions of racism directed against these communities.

much of the "debate" above seems to operate on really reductive assumptions that have little to do with reality: the assumption that bilingual education means that folk from immigrant or migrant labor communities do not learn english at all is goofy--people adapt to their environments and being able to function in english is an adaptation to the us context. what might well be true is what i noted with reference to seaver's paper: that it is POSSIBLE BUT NOT INEVITABLE that a bilingual education would result in maintaining accented english--and the problem there is much more about american racism and xenophobia than it is about any of the banalities concerning english as linked somehow to a fixed, immutable americanness that is somehow being threatened by a Contaminant (and again welcome to the world of neofascist "logic"--you folks repeat it without really questioning it, so what does that make you insofar as this non-issue is concerned?)

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite