Multilingual Education: Comparative Rhetoric Versus Linguistic Elitism and Assimilation

For more than 500 years, a debate has raged in America over whether immigrants’ cultures and languages should be allowed to exist alongside the “native” culture and language of the “host” country to which the immigrants have emigrated, whether they should be subordinated or replaced by the “host” culture and language, or whether they should be allowed to dominate and replace the “native” culture and language. Growing out of this debate, this essay deals with the cultural, linguistic, and social alienation that occurs when one is set aside, ostracized, or made an outsider because of one’s culture, language, or skin color. Specifically, it covers multilingual education and the surrounding social issues in terms of cultural identity versus assimilation. I suggest a balance between the common language and comparative rhetoric in education, a balance between monolingual education and a multilingual society.