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Mexico teaches English and India, Spanish

Something interesting is happening around the world regarding languages. In Mexico, so strong is the need to study English that last month Tamaulipas become the first Mexican state to be officially bilingual. At the same time, one of the largest universities in India decided to teach Spanish before teaching other languages.

The fact that Mexican children are learning conversational English at school and Indian college students are learning Spanish before learning other languages clearly shows the level of globalization and interconnection in our world and the importance of these two languages in world affairs.

In Tamaulipas, Governor Eugenio Hernandez said the new bilingual education program will provide a better and more competitive education to local students, because most of the new technological developments happen in English.

Hernandez also spoke about the need to know English as a way to facilitate international trade (half of the trade between Mexico and the United States passes through the Tamaulipas/Texas border) and to promote the tourism industry, due to the large number of English-speaking visitors to Tamaulipas.

In India, Renu Bhardwaj, director of the School of Humanities of the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), said Spanish will be taught at that university thanks to an agreement with Instituto Cervantes, an international non-profit organization dedicated to promote the teaching of Spanish.

IGNOU’s goal, according to Bhardwaj, is to reach the same standard of foreign-language knowledge already implemented by the European Union and by Brazil.

Thanks for this initiatives, 320.000 public school students in Tamaulipas will learn both Spanish and English and hundreds and even thousands of college students in India will learn first Spanish and then French, German, or Japanese.

These examples show that three important regions of the world, Latin America, Asia, and Europe, are intensifying their bilingual programs in all levels of education, due to economic, education, and technological reasons, in addition to regional and global integration. What is then happening in the United States?

According to a report recently released by the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA, every year since 2003 there have been more than 5,400 direct verbal attacks against Spanish-speaking immigrants by English-speaking hosts at commercial radio stations in the United States.

According to the same report, in one instance there were 334 attacks during an 80-minute radio program, including “negative statements, prejudice false facts, flawed argumentation, divisive language, and dehumanizing metaphors.” For details, visit

www.nhmc.org.)

 

So often those verbal attacks against Spanish-speakers are repeated and so internalized they are in the mind of the listeners that it is not at surprise that some of those listeners go from verbal aggression to physical aggression.

That’s what happened in San Jose, California, on January 27, 2009, when a Latino man assaulted by another man at noon on the street because the aggressor heard the victim speaking Spanish on the phone. The attacker, a white person, said his based his actions in “the Right-wing media.” (Source: CBS 5 CrimeWatch.)

The options are clear and unavoidable. The decision is exclusively ours.

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