ABSTRACT
The dismissal of language in educational policy and implementation has been part of an education planning that excludes rather than includes an ever-increasing number of non-English that populate most urban public schools. This chapter highlights the impact of social attitudes on language learning and teaching and how the policy of English only in schools represents vestiges of Western imperialist thought that disarticulates the world of ideas from language which dichotomizes cognition from emotional self. Colonialism imposes 'distinction' as an ideological yardstick against which all other cultural values are measured, including language. The difference between native and cultural language is not peculiar to the colonized, but colonial bilingualism cannot be compared to any linguistic dualism. The debate over bilingual education is informed by the positivistic and management models that hide their ideologies in the false call for objectivity, hard data, and scientific rigor. The chapter concludes that the minority language has to be understood within the theoretical framework that generates it.
