[MCP] Immigrant parents and education

[steve greaves]

John's points are critical.  
  
  But I want to address frank M's apparent racism in the following  quote:  "education does not seem as important in these [immigrant]  households".
  
  This is either a racist claim and intentional slur against immigrants,  or it is based on some serious ignorance at least about  families  from Mexico and Central America.  Or it is based on a naive  interpretation of statistics that indicate a lower income level and  higher dropout level among Latino students as somehow evidence of a  failing in the families of those students, rather than a failing in our  social structure as a whole.
  
  My experience and an understanding of political economic history as the  larger context of problems in educational inequality are two bases for  my strong disagreeemtn with frank M.
  
  In my experience as a teacher in Richmond, California, Hispanic and  indigenous Mexican and Central American immigrant  families are at  least as serious if not far more serious about their kids' education  than any other ethnic group I've worked with, including whites and  blacks, the latter of whom are also disadvantaged in multiple ways  (e.g., by racist standardized tests, by many white teachers' and  educational administrators' lack of training in multicultural  communications and class structure, and historic ignorance about  democracy's inherent need for diversity, as well as by the Eurocentric  biblical-fundamentalist/sexist, racist social welfare system that's  been breaking up black families since the Reconstruction era). 
  
  Immigrant families from countries to the south, at least in my  experience as a public school teacher, have a very high regard for  teachers and for schooling here, as they had in their home  countries.  But pressed culturally and financially, as well as  linguistically, their struggle doesn't make it as easy for them as it  is for white English-speaking families to create ideal home conditions  for study by the time their children reach their teens in this  xenophobic eurocentric society.  
  
  But even ideal home conditions for successful study are insufficient in  a society whose economy is so distorted that it  seethes with  racism, fear of foreigners, and a government that with OUR tax dollars  subsidizes multinational corporations, banks, agribusiness,  manufacturers, while insisting Mexico and other nations stop  subsidizing their local industries (it's called "free trade" when the  U.S. subsidizes its megacorporations and extorts other national  governments to stop protecting their citizens from U.S. corporate  pirateering), 
  
  Addressing racism directly is unlikely to result in any further deep  and lasting positive changes in our society, with its culture of  systematic impoverishment of the majority, as long as we remain  ignorant of how to rein in the corporations and make them accountable  to the localities where they operate.  They will continue to come  and go as they please with "job-creating" industries while sucking  local resources without any local accountability, and conversations  like MCP's will go on endlessly bemoaning racism and ethnocentrism,  while the ruling class props up token minorities everywhere it counts  in the collective illusioning of America as the land of opportunity and  technofatalistic scientismic progress.
  
  In friendship,
  -Steve Greaves
  
  
John Lindsay <jclind2 at msn.com> wrote:  You're conflating two different issues.
  One is that children of immigrant parents are learning a language  that their parents cannot speak, and therefore have to serve as  interpreters for their parents and any external source seeking to  communicate with their parents. 
  That external source mght be school officials, apt managers, the police, etc.

You  can't jump to the conclusion that because the parents cannot speak  English that they don't care about their chldren's education. In most  cases, the parents are attempting to learn English while working 2 or  more jobs....and thus are learning English at a much slower pace than  their offspring.
  One local community college set up a program where children of  immigrants could attend school free, but, of course, the local talk  radio hosts whipped up a frenzy of anti-immigrant fervor against such a  program. 
  If the surveys the school conducted had indicated that "immigrants  don't value an education," they wouldn't have established such a  program.
  John L. 
    From: Fmagrino at aol.com
Reply-To: "Multicultural Pavilion's discussion group on equity, social justice,and multicultural education." <mcp at edchange.org>
To: mcp at edchange.org
Subject: Re: [MCP] Immigrant parents and education
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:08:48 EST

If  in fact there is role reversal, we now have children making decisions  usually reserved for adults ... adults with maturity.  Could this  be why education does not seem as important in these households?   Kind of like a Peter Pan in Neverland scenario?
  frank M.


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