Quotes “This autobiography is about language” (p. 6). “Bilingual education – a scheme proposed in the late 1960s by Hispanic-American activists, later endorsed by a congressional vote. It is a program that seeks to permit non-English speaking children, many from lower-class homes, to use their family language as the language of school” (p. 10).

Quotes “Today I hear bilingual educators say that children lose a degree of ‘individuality’ by becoming assimilated into public society” (p. 26). “Supporters of bilingual education today imply that students like me miss a great deal by not being taught in their family’s language” (p. 17).

Quotes “It was unsettling to hear my parents struggle with English. Hearing them, I’d grow nervous, my clutching trust in their protection and power weakened” (p. 13). “I intended to hurt my mother and father…for having encouraged me toward classroom English” (p. 53). “It’s not possible for a child – any child– ever to use his family’s language in school. Not to understand this is to misunderstand the public uses of schooling and trivialize the nature of intimate life – a family’s ‘language’ ” (p. 10).

Quotes “I remember the black political activists who have argued in favor of using black English in schools” (p. 34). “I have heard ‘radical’ linguists make the point that black English is a complex and intricate version of English” (p. 34).

Quotes on culture “In the late 1960s nonwhite American clamored for access to higher education, and I became a principal beneficiary of the academy’s response, its programs of affirmative action.” “I was recognized on campus: an Hispanic-American, a Latino, a Mexican-American, a Chicano.” “The poor have neither the inclination nor the skill to imagine their lives so abstractly. They remain strangers to the way of life the academic constructs so well on paper.”

Questions Do you agree with Rodriguez’s notion of public vs. private language? Do you agree with Rodriguez’s notion of the scholarship boy who become alienated from the “less educated” including parents? What is your opinion about bilingual education?