Richard Rodriguez Quotes About Home
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When the Irish nun said to me, "Speak your name loud and clear so that all the boys and girls can hear you," she was asking me to use language publicly, with strangers. That's the appropriate instruction for a teacher to give. If she were to say to me, "We are going to speak now in Spanish, just like you do at home. You can whisper anything you want to me, and I am going to call you by a nickname, just like your mother does," that would be inappropriate. Intimacy is not what classrooms are about.
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In some countries, of course, Spanish is the language spoken in public. But for many American children whose families speak Spanish at home, it becomes a private language. They use it to keep the English-speaking world at bay.
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But America isn't a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.
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Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family's language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home.
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