Talking points: Richard Rodriquez, Hunger of Memory.

 "It is not possible for a child--any child--ever to use his family's language in school.  Not to understand this is to misunderstand the public uses of schooling and to trivialize the nature of intimate life--a family's `language'." (P. 10)

I don't see why this should be the case.  It seems to me that lots of children do use their family's language in school.  I feel that no matter what language or dialect you speak, there will always be elements of private, intimate language spoken in families away from a school setting.  So, if Spanish were taught in public schools at an early age, I don't think it would have to detract from the language that families speak at home.

"An accident of geography sent me to a school where all my classmates were white, many the children of doctors and lawyers and business executives." (P. 9)

Today, in a lot of classrooms in a lot of cities, like, for example, Providence, the experience of many children is very different from the one Rodriquez grew up with.  Providence Public Schools are over 60% Hispanic.  Many of these children often let their "private language" of Spanish intersect with the public language of school.  When I was working with the bi-lingual 6th grade class that I was assigned to through VIPS, I noticed that the kids felt comfortable speaking with each other in both Spanish and English.  They could easily make the transition from their speech with each other to the speech they used with myself and the school librarian who I was working with.

"What I needed to learn in school was that I had the right--and the obligation--to speak the language of  los gringos." (P. 18)

This relates back to what Delpit was referring to in The Silenced Dialogue.  All children need to learn the language of power to be able to participate in it and have a voice.  The current structure will never change if everybody is not receiving the same kind of education in reading and writing in formal English.  I think this can be accomplished while at the same time acknowledging and even teaching other languages in schools.




I think it would be a great idea if all children were taught English and Spanish from pre-school or kindergarten on through high school.  We are increasingly turning into a bi-lingual society.  In many places, there are more students in the schools who speak Spanish than those who don't.  Why not utilize this fact to start truly making our country bilingual?  It seems to me that the ability to speak more than one language should be viewed as a positive thing, a skill with real value.  If young children had classes in both Spanish and English, it would benefit the students who speak Spanish at home as well as the students who speak English at home.  The Spanish students could learn that Spanish is not only a "private language", but it's a very important public language, as well.  In turn, the English speaking students would begin to learn this second public language.
It seems like a clear win-win to me.

While I disagreed with Richard Rodriquez' overall premise that his private language should never be used as a public language or taught in the schools, I did enjoy reading the piece.  As someone who grew up bilingual myself, I identified with some of his descriptions of what it was like growing up with two languages.  Although my experiences were very different, I found myself relating to his descriptions of what it was like to have a private, intimate, family language.