Prof Sommer highlighted the benefits children from bilingual families enjoy compared to children from mono-lingual families. These include, according to the research cited, greater empathy, a more egalitarian view of race, and, probably most importantly, an ability to view language and its use in a critical, almost philosophical way.
The point of bringing up these benefits, ostensibly, was to encourage a "sensitive education" geared at ridding ourselves from an obsolete, nationalistic view of language and adopt a multi-lingual, multi-cultural view, one which could be much informed by immigrants and their experience of language, as opposed to, in the current situation, threatened by it.
While I agree that there are inherent benefits in the immigrant experience and in the multi-lingual experience, benefits which, I think, could be said to contribute to a certain "philosophical" point of view, a gestalt shift of focus would could bring about a situation in which bilingual life experience and perception are seen as superior.
Importantly, not superior in a philosophical way, but in a political way, since it is a political change which Prof. Sommers advises. In fact, it could lead – through the use of empirical research of "objective" benefits" lead to the possibility of a psychological-biological superiority.
Another problem is, of course, a creation of a gradation of lingual sensitivity: multi-lingual, bi-lingual, "learned" bi –lingual or multi-lingual, and, lastly mono-lingual.
If indeed immigrants, as Prof Sommers says, contribute to a better understanding of language by "irritating it," than they can continue to do so in a paradigm which would advance what Prof Sommers calls "admiration."
A focus on admiration, on mutual admiration, is indeed positive. Not, however, citing "research," and advancing a political power shift that only encourages a political reversal – the oppressed become the oppressors, and vice versa, instead of promoting dialogue.
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