From America's Classrooms to the World's Stage - Op-ed

My 5th grade class visiting a local school to teach English and learn Malagasy with our peers.

To be born into this world is to become a citizen of it. In this day and age where transnationalism is as common as a viral cat video, we, as worldly citizens, are responsible for the safe development of our multiculturalism.

At 8 years old, I went to an American school in which all classes were taught in English, despite residing in Madagascar, where French and Malagasy are the national languages. This intentional enforcement of English was the reason my non-American friends chose to attend this school. Using it as a stepping stone, they were willing to pay the huge price difference from the French school and risk belonging to the cultural minority. Whereas my white monolingual American body saw this as a “safe zone” in a country I hadn’t begun to understand.

Not unlike my classroom in Antananarivo, classrooms across America are sold to families as stepping stones for students looking to excel in their English. In choosing this and believing in the promise of English for the Children, these families have fallen for a ruthless trap. One that will forever leave their children culturally divided and left to pick up the pieces in the future.

Rather than English as a tool for connection, non white students are faced with racial bias no matter their level of English. Thrust into the monolinguistic school system, transnational students spend more time keeping themselves afloat linguistically than participating in their education. Reducing the promise of English progress, to a promise of inadequacy. English instead becomes an agent of colonial assertion techniques that ultimately keep non white students, regardless of their English linguistic abilities, at a disadvantage throughout their educational career.

Classrooms with linguistic and cultural diversity like mine in Madagascar, can be wrought with emotional and exclusionary behaviors. Typically from a white majority who “assume that a study of minority perspectives is geared toward blaming them for something they didn’t do.” This

particular study describes college level courses in which professors looked to expand course

work to be more culturally inclusive. As we look at moments like this, I can’t help but recall the extreme benefit I had growing up in a transnational classroom with transnational students.

Despite initial linguistic boundaries, I found myself and others accommodating and learning different ways to understand people regardless of our common or not common linguistic skills, cultural backgrounds, and economic status. Research has shown that being surrounded by different cultural and linguistic understandings has improved individuals cognitive and critical thinking abilities.

This all functions due to the shared variation of linguistic abilities across every person in a classroom. Importantly, transnational and immigrant students who enter American elementary classrooms typically come with a baseline of a non-prestigious variety of their heritage language. One taught or used at home learned through vocal communication.

This baseline is crucial in the process of acquiring a new language as the skills learned from a foundational language form an understanding of language altogether. Looking at where I started in Elementary school, I had a spoken and literate foundation in my heritage language, that was then incorporated in my understanding of learning French.

American curriculums are devised to teach using the efficient subtractive “only English” method so as to encourage the successful acquisition of only English. Through this students should be able to acquire English at a faster rate similar to that of their Native speaking counterparts. However, this ignores the experience and knowledge of their multilingual students who may already understand a concept but have no way of communicating in the ways the curriculum demands.

By the time transnational students graduate high school, their family goal to gain English has been successful but at the cost of developing a proficiency in the appropriate variety of their home language. This translates to a group of students in all American classrooms that have a varying level of proficiency in two or more languages rather than fully developing either. I now have the privilege to say while I still speak English fluently, I also have some French I can notably impress people with. In this country, the white speaker is given the grace, power, and patience to be successful in multiple languages should they choose. But the emphasis on language acquisition is not on me, it’s on those who don’t look like me. Those whose linguistic abilities range larger than mine and who deserve to be heard in whatever way they want to shout. It is up to us as world citizens to feel and uplift the value of our transnational community as they are our future.