Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Is Bolivia Our Future?
NRO's John Derbyshire recommended "The Last Days of Bolivia?" today "for the light it sheds on current issues of race, nationality, globalization, and the drug war." He is spot-on.
Change a few details in the following excerpt and it could be a leaflet on an American college campus or even a party platform plank:
More important still, are the links to what might be called Inca nationalism, a movement to repeal four hundred years of Bolivian history. In the new dispensation, Indian languages are to be given official status; the curriculum of schools is to be altered to provide indigenous content (to the point that the medical schools are to include native healing arts); even the name of the country is to be changed to Kollasuyo. While the Indians can rightly claim that they have received far less than their fair share of the nationĀ?s wealth and services over many centuries, they are hardly likely to improve their lot by turning their backs on modernity altogether.
I have been contemplating a longer take on this issue. The short version is that it does the minority in any society little good to insist on learning its own version of facts to the exclusion of facts accepted by all. All children in American schools need to know something of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR and Reagan if only to be better citizens and more informed voters when they take their turn running the country.
The reading for a degree in Chicano Studies certainly is more "affirming" for a Mexican-American student than, say, the reading for a degree in chemical engineering. But which degree will have greater value on pay day?
A family with millions in the bank need not fret if Junior decides to specialize in playing the sitar, to mention an actual case in the New York Times Magazine. But a child without such family support would do well to compare his or her interests with the market's valuation of them.
When asked the value of bilingual education, one advocate opined that its graduates would make fine bilingualeducationn teachers in the future. Graduates of an English immersion program, by contrast, enjoy far broader career options.
Once people are shunted tosociety'ss sidelines by education choices meant to preserve their self-esteem, they become a looming powder keg of insurrection. That is Bolivia's situation today and may well be America's unless we get our act together.
|posted by Jim on 7:03 PM|
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