Essay on "Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood"

Essay 4 pages (1548 words) Sources: 1

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood

Richard Rodriguez, the author of "Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood," uses his personal experience as a literary scholar and teacher as well as the son of Mexican immigrants living in California to take a firm stand against bilingual education theories and their supporters. He employs mainly the means of narration from an autobiographical perspective, along with those of description, exemplification, comparison and contrast and finally of analysis of cause and effect. His personal perspective on the issue at hand is thus the primary tool the author uses to explain and support his point-of-view. There is one important aspect though that leads to the aforementioned rhetorical strategies losing their effectiveness and that is the public character of the matter in discussion. Personal experience that is not backed up by further inquiries and research into the matter can only provide a limited background for supporting a categorical opinion when it comes to the implementation of public programs destined to influence the lives of many.

With his recollection of his first day in school, Rodriguez is successfully making a strong impression from the introduction. The impact on his readers is strong since many of them may be able to relate to that kind of memory, successful in catching attention on what the author is about to subject to attention and debate over. He bases the reasons for his feelings of awkwardness and being out of place in his first day in school primarily on the language barrier he encountered there. On the other hand, any child that is taken out of the protective, familiar environment of his own family and left among strangers, in a frightening new environment, experiences about the same uneasiness and feeling of being lost.

Rodriguez presents the clash between the public sphere and that of his private life as the source of the subsequent difficulties he and his siblings encountered on their way to accept, learn and use a language that was not familiar to them at all. He goes back and forth, using comparison and contrast of the concept of public and private, placing this at the chore of his theory against bilingual education. For the sake of clarity and logical thinking, the author immediately follows this strategy with a definition and a short history of the theory he will to argue against throughout his essay.

When it comes to stating his position in relation to the matter in discussion, in his choice of words the author is careful to leave no place for interpretation. Although not derogatory, this suggests that the very concept he is debating against is in a position for being contested as a legitimate subject up for debate: "something called bilingual education… is a program that seek to permit non-English-speaking children, many from lower class homes to use their family language as the language of school"(Rodriguez, 327). Therefore, considering its goal from the perspective of its supporters, there is no place left for compromise when he is clearly further making a point from completely dismissing this program as being useless. Again, the effectiveness of this strategy is limited because although the reader is perfectly aware of the author's position, the former is not necessarily familiar with important aspects that complete the picture and reach to the causes for such a program having been put up for debate in the first place. The supreme argument Rodriguez further relies on remainss, as mentioned before, his personal experience: "Memory teaches me what I know of these matters…I was a bilingual child, a certain kind -- socially disadvantaged -- the son of working-class parents, both Mexican immigrants"

Although he is constantly using his childhood memoirs related to the use of language inside and outside his parent's house, the author fails to take his personal experience to the level of public interest that the issue of an educational program destined to a whole portion of the American society deserves. His generosity with details regarding his family's situation in the context of a strongly segregated country is working against his theory stating that he is entitled to speak as a highly significant representative of the category he claims to come from: the child of socially disadvantaged immigrants.

The analysis of the cause and effect when it comes to encouraging children to use the public language in school in favor of the language they speak at home is straightforwardly leading to the idea that the better one is able to master the language of the country one lives in, the higher his or her chances of personal achievement. Some elements missing in the lives of the children Rodriguez is speaking for may become essential when it comes to assessing the utility of offering them the chance to use in school, thus in the public sphere, the language they are using at home.

Further supporting his stand with arguments from his personal experience, the author emphasizes the difficulties his own parents encountered outside their homes, as soon as they needed to ask or answer simple questions at the market or at the bank. He is showing how the barriers of language appear to have always kept them in a separated category in the public sphere, members of a particular minority group. The logical conclusion is that such parents would only encourage their children to learn to master the language of their adoptive country as their native language in order to be assimilated by their host culture.

On the other hand, Rodriguez is completely leaving aside the causes and effects the supporters of the bilingual education program considered. Children from socially disadvantaged families of immigrants may be less fortunate with the general level of education they may be able to receive. The quality of the schools their parents afford to send them to may also differ to a great degree than that of the schools the children from Rodriguez' family attended. Finally, their interest in academic achievement may also be an essential variable. All these particularities concur to making necessary further steps into analyzing the circumstances that led to the idea of a proposal for bilingual education, as opposed to completely dismissing it based on the personal experience of a few people.

Further detailing the degree of influence the lack of English knowledge bore on his parent's lives, Rodriguez' arguments loose in clarity. He claims that in spite of his parents' limitations with the use of public language, his family did not really encounter difficulties in leading a normal life here: "in a way, it didn't matter very much that my parents could not speak English with ease. Their linguistic difficulties had no serious consequences. My mother and father made themselves understood at the county hospital clinic and at government offices." The reader encounters difficulties in understanding where this conclusion is leading in the course of arguing against bilingual education.

On one hand there is no doubt that the longing for academic achievement and his teachers' and parents' desire to make him and his siblings learn to master what he calls the "public language" gave young Rodriguez children the opportunity to learn and benefit from it. On the other, what worked for them may not work at all for others. Those that position themselves on the other side of the barricade in a debate on this issue may use the same line of thought to bring examples of a different kind to support exactly the contrary.

In as far as the comparison and contrast between public and private languages as well as the opposition of their respective contrasting sounds are concerned the author does not follow rigorous patterns. Again, using his personal childhood experience, he does not make very clear to what the alienation between children and parents is tributary in his… READ MORE

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