Aria qoutes

The article Aria by Richard Rodriguez is an article that tell the story and depicts  the many difficulties that a child faced growing up in bilingual education faced.  Richard starts off by explaining how he felt that his native spanish dialect was unnatural in the society in which he now lived, and ow he was expected to know the more commonly known english language.  He states “ I consider Spanish to be a private language. What I need to learn in school was that I had the right-and the obligation- to speak the public language of los gringos.”   Richard then goes on to elaborate on this statement as he got older and said “ Because I wrongly imagined that English was intrinsically a public language and Spanish an intrinsically private one, I easily noted the difference between classroom language and the language of home.”  To me this is the most relatable to the author as I attended a Hebrew day school as a child in which we were taught half the day strictly in hebrew only and the other half in english only.  There was defiantly some pressure put on a child to balance two languages they are attempting to understand.  While at home it mostly english the some hebrew.  Rodriguez gets to the point of how school intervention at home by making the family speak in english has affected the house life.  The kids achieve understanding of the language faster than the parents do which creates a boundary between kids and parents as they cant communicate.   In his ending statement he brings up how assimilation can be bad but if done properly it is essential to be a part of your public society.  “ But the bilingukists simplistically scorn the values and necessity of assimilation. They do not seem to realize that there are two ways a person is individualized. So they do not realize that while one suffers a diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality.”  This makes me wonder how we can look at the bilingual education process and revise it so one does not lose their personal individuality but are able to be a part of the public.