The reality of the matter is that multiculturalism enriches few people (at least as it sounds like you are describing it), it is Balkanisation in the long run. There has to be a lingua franca, a method of communication everyone uses, in order to keep a lot of bright people from becoming janitors and tree trimmers. I work around an english speaking Mexican born fellow who was denied a chance to advance to a better job because he didnt spell very well. Crap, his spelling was atrocious. He was fairly well spoken, albeit with an accent and some poor grammer, but his writing skills were poor because he spoke spanish mostly when not on the job. *I* know for a fact he was the best choice for the job. I work with his department all the time. But when he wrote a departmental memo he made terrible and obvious mistakes and this made him appear to be ................. hmmm.....unqualified, if I may be kind. This is what bilingual education gets people, and bilingual education is an aspect of multiculturalism.
xponent Want to ask something along those lines. I have a friend who has dyslexia. It wasn't really discovered until late in HS. He is smart; he scored as high as me on standardized test when he had the questions read to him. He has a two year degree in business. He is really dissatisfied with his job* so his wife and I have been helping him. His problem is that he still has trouble reading and from that, I hope, his writing and spelling skills are poor. He has taken some placement exams with assistance. One prospective employer told him, in a round-about not breaking the law way, 'sure you can do great on a placement test but the business can't have someone reading to you all day'. (This is paraphrasing and heard third hand). I am just venting but also wondering about how to get around this obstacle not just for him but for a lot of people. Kevin T. * He is a mechanic, which I was for ten years. To move into a higher pay range, to just receive a raise for the past year, he had to take a test "Factory Mathematics". One of the questions was "What is the name of the first result of a large multiplication problem?" like: 76 x67 ------ 532 <---- What is this first result called? 4560 ------ 5092 I didn't know it had a name; more important what does it matter?
