Should You Support Bilingual Education?
There are many, many benefits of bilingualism, but we wanted to focus on just a few today. A bill in California will be put on the ballot in 2016 which will repeal proposition 227, which effectively banned bilingual education in California. For 26 years, California had been a state which guaranteed bilingual education for all its students — an ambitious idea which garnered mixed results.
Many people in California were left with the idea that bilingual education itself was a bad idea, instead of focusing on how it was implemented.
Basically, we shouldn’t confuse solid bilingual education, where students emerge with their native language intact, but also with a strong fluency in a second language, with the idea of trying to educate some students in their native languages, hoping that they will eventually transition to the target language. In that case, though well-intentioned, students can end up without a fluency in the target language, and we agree that this benefits no one.
Amazing Benefits of Bilingualism:
Creative Genius --
Now, we’re not saying that Language Tran employees are creative geniuses…but, well, we’re not saying they’re not either :). It’s a fact that being bilingual enhances your creativity and gets those creative juices flowing. Your mind thinks so far out of the box that you basically forget there is a box. It’s that amazing.
More Fun To Be Around --
Yes, it’s true. People who are bilingual tend to be more social. They have to be, in order to go through the process of learning another language. But all that learning enhances their sensitivity in the other culture, too, which makes them more pro-social than they were before. Some multi-lingual people even feel that they have a different personality depending on which language they are speaking. In any case, speaking more than one language increases your sociability.
Smarter Than Superman --
Or something like that. People who are bilingual are smart. More grey matter, more white matter, more smarts. You just have to be, if you want to synthesize all that information. Usually, bilingual students outperform monolingual students in academic testing. Now, here we must say that sometimes there is an initial lagging behind, while the bilingual student is temporarily behind in both languages. But this is a temporary lag, and with time, bilingual students tend to shoot ahead of their monolingual peers.
Those three benefits to bilingualism lead to things like deeper friendships, better jobs, a more well-rounded take on cultural and international affairs, and an awesome appreciation for heritage and culture. So take the plunge and start learning a new language today…who knows? One day, you might even have the chance to work for us!