The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836-1981.

The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836-1981. By Carlos Kevin Blanton. Fronteras Series. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. Pp. [x], 204. $29.95, ISBN 1-58544-310-7.)

Carlos Kevin Blanton has sought to emulate C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. As Woodward used the trope of race to construct a so-called usable history to argue that racial segregation for blacks had its genesis in the late nineteenth century, not earlier, Blanton uses the trope of education to argue that bilingual education is not new but had its beginnings in the post-1836 period in Texas. Therefore it, not the English-only curriculum, is the central educational tradition in the United States. Blanton, like Woodward, hopes that his book will influence public policy. Blanton's book, however, is marred by the tension among three subtextual and almost subconscious theories: the liberal perspective that education is for integrating ethnics into society; an ethnic nationalist perspective of resistance to acculturation and integration into society; and an attempt to be an objective but policy-oriented historian, like Woodward.

Blanton writes that Woodward's book "offer[s] an ideal model for anyone seeking to illuminate the past of some present controversy" such as bilingual education (pp. 3-4). He also accepts Woodward's historical philosophy that "history lives on in the present, that the questions grappled with in the past never really die" (p. 3). Using this model and philosophy Blanton's central argument is that bilingual education existed in Texas in the post-1836 period: as he writes, "The bilingual tradition in Texas during the nineteenth century was rich and vibrant ..." (p. 153). He argues that by the end of the nineteenth century the bilingual tradition was derailed by "[t]he confluence of the ideology of Americanization and its intellectual parent, the Progressive Education movement ..." (p. 74). As a result "Language was racialized," as was education, and "young Tejanos performed miserably under English-Only," which was "grossly ineffective and ultimately racist" (pp. 88, 91).

Under the administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 1968 Bilingual Act "decriminaliz[ed] bilingual education," making it the central part of American education, Blanton points out (p. 154). However, he asserts that bilingual education is not "a magical sword to cut the shackles of past wrongs and present difficulties ..." (p. 155). Blanton's central fear of the English-only approach is that "It is not enough that Tejano children learn to speak in English; they would have to learn to 'think' in English as well. Thus, the full application of English-Only's more extreme theoretical principles involved the policing of thought as much as the policing of speech" (p. 82). Blanton believes that bilingual education is multiculturalism and that both represent the "classic ideals of American public education" (p. 155). This is Blanton's central political and policy argument. He does not adhere, he says, to Arthur M. Schlesinger's argument that bilingual education is one of the bases for "The Disuniting of America" (p. 3).

The most interesting part of this book--regardless of Blanton's overzealous interpretative faults in Part 2 ("English-Only Education") and his arguments that are not fully supported by his evidence in Part 1 ("The Bilingual Tradition")--is Blanton's use of education as the central trope in the way that Woodward used race to push the limits of historical study for the understanding of current controversies.

RICHARD A. GARCIA

California State University, Hayward