Transcript Quotes  “This autobiography is about language” (p. 6).  “Bilingual education – a scheme proposed in the late 1960s by Hispanic-American activists,

Quotes
 “This autobiography is about language” (p. 6).
 “Bilingual education – a scheme proposed in the late
1960s by Hispanic-American activists, later endorsed
by a congressional vote. It is a program that seeks to
permit non-English speaking children, many from
lower-class homes, to use their family language as the
language of school” (p. 10).
Quotes
 “Today I hear bilingual educators say that children lose
a degree of ‘individuality’ by becoming assimilated
into public society” (p. 26).
 “Supporters of bilingual education today imply that
students like me miss a great deal by not being taught
in their family’s language” (p. 17).
Quotes
 “It was unsettling to hear my parents struggle with English.
Hearing them, I’d grow nervous, my clutching trust in their
protection and power weakened” (p. 13).
 “I intended to hurt my mother and father…for having
encouraged me toward classroom English” (p. 53).
 “It’s 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 trivialize
the nature of intimate life – a family’s ‘language’ ” (p. 10).
Quotes
 “I remember the black political activists who have
argued in favor of using black English in schools” (p.
34).
 “I have heard ‘radical’ linguists make the point that
black English is a complex and intricate version of
English” (p. 34).
Quotes on culture
 “In the late 1960s nonwhite American clamored for access
to higher education, and I became a principal beneficiary
of the academy’s response, its programs of affirmative
action.”
 “I was recognized on campus: an Hispanic-American, a
Latino, a Mexican-American, a Chicano.”
 “The poor have neither the inclination nor the skill to
imagine their lives so abstractly. They remain strangers to
the way of life the academic constructs so well on paper.”
Questions
 Do you agree with Rodriguez’s notion of public vs.
private language?
 Do you agree with Rodriguez’s notion of the
scholarship boy who become alienated from the “less
educated” including parents?
 What is your opinion about bilingual education?