ENGLISH, IT'S THE NEW METRIC SYSTEM:

Learning in Their Native Tongue: Mexican Cities Join Experiment in Bilingual Education (Mary Jordan, May 11, 2004, Washington Post)

Jose Roberto Cleofas depends on red lights to make a living. As soon as cars brake for the stoplight in front of the Pizza Hut on Insurgentes Avenue, Cleofas, 14, moves in on dirty windshields and starts wiping.

"How else can I eat?" said the fifth-grader, one of the hundreds of thousands of indigenous people who have migrated to Mexican cities in search of work as agriculture has failed in their dying villages.

The federal government is struggling to educate migrant children here and in other Mexican cities. The Education Ministry has opened more than 2,000 bilingual schools for speakers of 62 indigenous languages in the past 10 years.

In part, the initiative is a response to the armed Zapatista movement in southern Mexico in the 1990s, which embarrassed the government by bringing worldwide attention to its neglect of indigenous people. Most of the new schools are in rural areas where indigenous children are in the majority. Now, the challenge is to accommodate their growing numbers in cities where they are a minority. [...]

The soaring number of indigenous children in urban Mexico is being compared by education officials to the situation in the United States. In both countries, the influx of migrant children is prompting schools to introduce native languages in the classroom. And in both countries, multicultural education is facing some resistance.

"Yes, there are parents who don't like it," said Nancy Miranda, head of the parents association at the Alfredo Correo school. She said some parents believe assimilation and speaking Spanish are the way to get ahead in Mexico.

Some parents said the cost of training teachers in indigenous languages and creating special bilingual textbooks was a wasteful expenditure for an already thin education budget. Rather than have their children learn Otomi, some parents interviewed said they would prefer their children learn English or French, the languages wealthier Mexicans study.

It's called "cutting to the chase."

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 11, 2004 9:36 AM