The Politics of Homogeneity: A Critical Exploration of the Anti-bilingual Education Movement

A key platform of anti-bilingual education rhetoric is the apparently ineluctable link between majority, or dominant languages and subsequent social mobility. Many critics of bilingual education argue, quite convincingly it seems, that the ongoing promotion of a minority language – that is, a language with less power and prestige in a given (national) context – is actively detrimental to the mobility of minority language speakers (see, for example, Schlesinger, 1992; Barry, 2000). These critics assert that proponents of bilingual education are therefore consigning, or ghettoizing minority language communities within the confines of a language that does not have a wider use, thus constraining their social mobility. The stated logic of this argument goes something like this: