A Canadian education: Thoughts on bilingual education

Commentary: A Canadian education: thoughts on bilingual education BRUCE BAIN Canadian psychologists have tended to speak with a muted voice in many of the debates facing the nation. There are numerous reasons for this reticence. But it is not my purpose to apologize for or to chronicle the ills of Canadian Psychology. Rather, I intend to describe some recent advances in the study of the relationship of language to mental development - advances that offer promise as well as challenge to the nation. A recurring finding of studies conducted over the past decade is: that the child who receives a bilingual education tends to have a greater flexibility in his intellectual and emotional life than does his unilingual counterpart. This leitmotiv, somewhat novel in Canadian studies but long a part of European research, derives its conceptual origins from a certain understanding of the pieces that constitute the nature of language and mind puzzle. One piece of the puzzle concerns the recognition of the crucial role of language per se in the transformation of an infant full of promise into an adult with that promise more or less realized. It seems that language is not only a means of expressing one's self, but is, under the circumstances of normal development, the main means of acquiring that very self. From this point of view, language is not seen as just a system of abstract rules of grammar nor just a simple speech response. It is seen as both of these - inextricably interwoven with attitudes, myths, values, images, rituals, and all the fortunate and unfortunate happenings that constitute the l:ife experience of a people. A language is thought to represent the tangled web of a particular cultural history, a symbolic trust containing implicit meanings of life experiences. Nothing is implicit to the Journal of Canadian Studies newborn infant however. He confronts the world in a special, immediate way, with his understandings of objects, events, and relationships not yet fixed and ordered. The adult's world on the other hand is explicitly organized in terms of the particular symbolic pattern of his culture. An individual adult may not be able to make explicit the implicit meanings of his culture; but he acts as if he knows, and this is what he communicates to the child. Without necessarily being conscious of his intentions, the adult directly and indirectly shows, tells, admonishes, rewards, and generally educates the child into the implicit understandings of his language group. What is important and what is not, what to be and not to be, imperceptibly become the child's world as he gradually is introduced into its stable regularities. In a sense, each child discovers and creates anew the cumulative and established understandings of his people. This process of rediscovery and re-creation of the meaning inherent in a particular understanding of a life experience is the occasion for each child to give his own meaning to that experience. Each child's understanding of his own self and his own world thus becomes intimately interwoven with the cultural history of his people. Hence it is within a language, which limits a child's freedom by imposing a pattern and historically developed meanings on him, which forces him to select and interpret experiences in terms of the possibilities inherent in a language, that he comes to acquire a unique self and a shared world. Paradoxically, what provides the child with the main means of this acquisition operates to preclude it if the possibilities in it are restricted in scope. If the developing child cannot escape from being encapsulated and encapsulating himself in the singular life experiences of a people, if he cannot but come to know his self and his world except through the implicit meanings of one language , then he tends toward inflex·ibility in his intellectual and emotional life. This tendency does not arise out of language in iso57 lation from other influences on development. The sheer length of time coupled with the quality of social conditions necessary to realize this process of making oneself into a fully functioning mature adult mitigate against its universal occurrence. In many cases (too many for a country as wealthy as Canada...