Education and Bilingualism

There have been a decent number of posts here recently on the importance of quality education as the underpinning of an effective democracy.  Here’s an article readers may find interesting; it covers the value of growing up in a bilingual environment.

I’m not even close to fluent in Spanish, but I’m an effective tutor in the subject at the local high school.  What I notice is that, to a person, kids who struggle with Spanish have very weak commands of English grammar.  I’m referring to things like the person and number of personal pronouns in both the subjective and objective case, the subjunctive vs. indicative mood, the passive vs. active voice, the present perfect vs. the past perfect tense, and so on.  Since it’s impossible to learn Spanish without understanding these concepts, one can only surmise that learning the language at an early age would accelerate the learning of English.

Of course, there’s more to education than the acquisition of linguistic skills.  From the article:

In 1922, in “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” The words that we have at our disposal affect what we see—and the more words there are, the better our perception. When we learn to speak a different language, we learn to see a bigger world.