Here.
I listened to the whole thing, but I still do not get it. Unz is a Republican, but he’s not much of one. He sounds more like a liberal Democrat. They had a debate for the Senate race recently, and all of the candidates seemed to be trying to out-liberal each other, including Unz. I do not understand him at all, and I have no idea what to make of this guy. Mostly I have no idea why he is a Republican at all.
I might almost vote for him, but I am still mad at him for his anti-bilingual education initiative, which was completely unscientific. We have done 120 studies on bilingual ed, and 106 of them proved it was superior in attaining both the home language and the target language. Compared to L2 students who did not go through bilingual ed, the bilingual ed kids did better. In fact, the non-bilingual ed kids were hampered and sort of damaged, and they were still having excessive problems with reading and writing English far into high school.
It’s more that it is counterintuitive that it would work at all. Intuitively, it seems like a stupid idea that makes no sense, so people just go with their gut feeling which is anti-scientific. People simply cannot believe the science because the conclusions seem to go against common sense.
A phased bilingual ed program where they gradually have more and more classes in English until they are fully phased in in 5th or 6th grade seems to work best. The idea is that you test the kid coming into school to see which language is stronger If English is stronger, you put them in straight English classes. If the home language is stronger, you put them in bilingual ed. The idea being that you should teach them to read and write in the strongest language, and then they transfer those skills over to English. It works great.
I probably will not vote for Unz, but he sure is an interesting candidate, and he would probably not be a bad guy to vote for. You can promote Unz on this site because he is not a typical Republican.
