Language preservation funds misdirected
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Editor,
The latest news flash that 80 percent of those graduating from NYC high schools can’t read or write and need to develop those skills before entering college is just slightly disconcerting to those of us who spent hours fixing heavily red-marked papers we created for “English” class with Ds or Fs on them back in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
We’ve stood by and watched the bar be lowered, year after year, as though that would fix the problem – apparently it hasn’t. We’ve watched the tests be reconfigured to take into account ethnic and cultural differences in a liberal effort to level the playing field and that would fix the problem – apparently it hasn’t.
Now, we’re cranking out illiteracy by the tons, instead of ounces or pounds, and what’s the new-age fix? Don’t seem to know, do we? I doubt we’ve run out of “things just need a little adjusting or tweaking” solutions yet; it should be very entertaining to see what is offered next. The only certainty is that curing a symptom will never cure the disease or problem — of that we can be absolutely certain; we’ve proved it time and again, to any blind man’s satisfaction.
All of this has been accomplished at taxpayer and societal expense. Have we gotten our money’s worth yet? Sixty-five percent of my property tax bill is for “education.” How about yours? Will throwing more of our hard-earned tax dollars at the problem fix it (yes, that’s a rhetorical question)? How about the $2 million more that our new Governor Bullock is requesting to help the Indian nations in Montana preserve their native languages? We’re still in a huge inflationary recession; we can’t seem to maintain the common English language; and now we’re going to use our precious tax monies to preserve cultural languages.
Yep, sounds reasonable to me.
How about we redirect the funds to something we could actually have a positive effect on, like our sewage treatment facilities or our pitiful roads or our ability to grow food products in this valley and leave the native language instruction to the families?
Michael Gale
Ronan
