Learning that Opposes Opportunity
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For many Americans, the idea of memorization as the basis of education brings up queasy recollections of elementary school geography competitions and the anxiety of mumbling over the verses of ancient poems moments prior to graded recitations. From Talib hafizes in Afghani madrasahs, who commit themselves to learn the Qu’ran by heart to more familiar examples like the “automatons” of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the images we associate with rote learning are, while not outright negative, at the very least uneasy ones. Still, without a doubt, rote learning serves a vital purpose to the development of the mind, and by shifting the primary focus of American education away from such methods, we also shift away from equity in schools.
Specifically, the equity that a system of exclusively “free” learning betrays pertains to the contemporary debate on immigration. Children of undocumented workers face the daily challenge of learning to be bilingual in school. In California, Proposition 227 mandates that all public school education be conducted in English with the reasoning being that:
“Bilingual education is the reason for low levels of English proficiency among immigrant students, especially Latinos who are the group served by the vast majority of the bilingual programs. Bilingual education slows down the English language acquisition process or prevents English language learners from becoming fully proficient in English. Therefore, bilingual education contributes to the high dropout rates among Latinos. Since bilingual education is THE PROBLEM, getting rid of it is the solution.”
The rationale behind the measure seems sound enough, but when we consider the implementation, new problems arise. Disregarding separate controversies regarding the vote to approve Prop 227 (72% of California’s voters are White whereas only 52% of its residents are White), we have to consider how struggling to become proficient in English, within the context of America’s present curricular philosophy, is a race against the clock for children who must already cope with significant pressures in their lives outside of school.
In order to understand just how much pressure Prop 227 implies, it is necessary to analyze its structure. English language learners (ELLs) are identified and segregated at the beginning of each term into structured English immersion (SEI) classes. There, they spend the whole school year receiving English instruction using a modified curriculum designed for children learning the language. Once the students have attained a “working knowledge” they are trans-ferred into mainstream classes, the hope being that they will gradually “pick up” subtleties from fluent classmates.
Proposition 227 passed in January of 2000, so statistics concerning its effectiveness have not been aggregated to the point where they are completely trustworthy. Still, even in its early years, the proposition has proven to be relatively unsuccessful in ushering underprivileged children towards English aptitude. In fact, in California the achievement gap between English language learners and English speakers has widened since 2000. We might then reason that Prop 227 is unrealistic, and that a better approach likely entails an entire spectrum of the elementary grades as the range in which students acquire ability.
But even this solution neglects the initial issue at hand: America’s modern phobia of rote memorization learning. For even if language assimilation is turned into a more gradual process, ELLs still start the race with a deficit. Learning a foreign language is based very much on repetition and recall. In this respect, Prop 227’s approach to the topic of bilingual education gets it right: the track to proficiency is rooted in mundane skill and drill. When this skill and drill is coupled with a separate curriculum that abhors simple memorization though, the tension along the margins makes for quite a burden. It is fine that native English speakers exercise their creativity in class projects that stimulate original thinking, but for the ELL student, the same project means working to be creative while simultaneously continuing to go through the standard algorithms of linguistic acquisition. Thus, where one student’s diorama is an invigorating exercise for the Right-Brain, it is his classmate’s scrape to avoid succu-mbing to the frustrations of Dual-Brain thought.
The obvious answer to this predicament it to divest elementary education of some measure of its artistic flair. Of course, this brings up an equally legitimate objection: Why should Americans revamp their education system to accom-modate a minority that may not even be entitled to American services, including free schooling, in the first place? The answer that the children of undocumented workers should not be punished for decisions they did not make will not suffice. What will however suffice is to demonstrate that a rote-memory education benefits native speakers just as much as it benefits ELLs. In light of history, this fact is relatively easy to support.
Take, for instance, William Shakespeare, a product of a sixteenth-century English Humanist education. Surely Shakespeare had a natural proclivity for the English language, but no one can deny that education played a significant role in unleashing these inherent abilities. When we look, though, to education in the Elizabethan era, we find that study consisted largely of reading aloud, reciting, translating and memorizing. In grammar school, sources indicate that Shakespeare spent eleven hours a day, six days a week for up to ten years honing his prodigious aural memory through repetition. Moreover, imitation was a focus in Shakespeare’s school, and it was not uncommon for him to internalize great writing of the past through reproduction and plain analysis.
Art does not necessarily suffer from reiteration. Rightly, many of us in modern America are concerned that standard English has started to deteriorate and we rightly recognize that the issue of undocumented immigration presents a significant challenge to our native tongue. That said, it is unethical and ineffective to subject vulnerable children to either overly regimented crash courses in language learning or to release them into a program of loosely defined creative expression. From recent reports in Holland of municipal governments forbidding the use of Arabic in mosques for fear the language could be used as a “weapon against the Netherlands” to a growing wave of monolingualism in Bavaria right down to anxieties in Malta that should foreign languages continue to thrive, Maltese culture may disappear as a result, it is clear that linguistic heritage is perceived to be on the chopping block at an international level. It is vital to understand, though, that these languages are not necessarily suffering due to the influx of foreign idioms.
Admittedly, each outside language influences a given country’s national tongue to some extent, but this level of influence is insignificant next to internal change. The real change is founded on the baseness of culture that is not rooted in systematic thought. Yes, Americans have learned to be freethinkers but many of us have achieved this at the cost of traditional categorical learning. The result is a burgeoning pop culture, the expression of our imaginative will, which is devoid of the substance that accompanies experience. Whether education will choose to emphasize it or not, humans have a natural capacity for memorization, imitation, internalization and improvement. Separate from the tricky politics of illegal immigration, we must amend early-age education in America to help the children of immigrants. In the process, we help native-speaking children, for when education shifts so too do the efforts of a young person’s memory. At an undeniable level, even if this level seems at first small, the young native speaker will spend less time committing the names of Pokemons, the lyrics to Snoop Dogg songs and the melodies of McDonald’s commercials to his memory and more time applying himself to ideas that he can in turn apply later in his life.
