The English learning in Puerto Rico and the local political culture
One of the critical deficiency of the education system in Puerto Rico is the teaching of English as a second language. Puerto Rican children are suppose to study English as one of its basic course since the primary level to the high school and even university level. Although that facts, according to the most optimistic study, just the 30% of Puerto Rican are fluent in that language. There is many factor that contribute to this problem.
First, some sectors in Puerto Rico romantize the reject to learn English of the people. The fact that just a minority of the population are considered bilingual after more than one century on American domination, it, for some nationalist sector, something to be proud, something that reaffirms our cultural roots. Ironically, the most of this nationalist intellectual send their sons and daughters to the best private school in the Island where they learn very well the language of Mark Twain, and then study in the best university of the United States thanks to that exclusive bilingual education that are inaccessible to the average Puerto Rican.
Second, the more pro American sectors in Puerto Rico are afraid to accept that Puerto Ricans are different to the average American students due to the fact that we are not native speaker of English. So, the education system most imitate the successful example of the University of Puerto Rico, and teach all the language that are not Spanish as foreign languages. A English class for Puerto Rican and all non native speaker should not be the same class of Kentuky or New York’s student. It’s not the same a course made to improve a language that we already know, than a course to learn a new language that we don’t speak. As an illustration of that, we can mention that English’s course n Puerto Rico require at the primary level to indentify the sentence’s part such a the subject of the verbs, but why someone who doesn’t know what a sentence means should care to indentify a subject in that mysterious sentence? It simply lack of any sense.
The English language learning, as the most things in the island, highly politicized due to a bad political culture that act against to best interest of the people of Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans, as all the people in the world, need a good system of language education in order to be competitive in a global village dominated by rich Anglo-Saxon nations and their European and asian allied.
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