David Magallanes
Editor’s note: Amigos805 welcomes guest columns, letters to the editor and other submissions from our readers. All opinions expressed in submitted material are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the viewpoint of Amigos805.
The original form of the following article was published in the Focal Points Newsletter for Professional Women, September / October 1994, of the Ventura County Professional Women’s Network (of which I had been a member). The article may be from nearly twenty years ago, but the issues remain, and in some ways have become even more critical since this was written.
By David Magallanes /Guest contributor
In Part I of this article, I began describing the challenges facing education, particularly in California, and especially in areas like ours where the size of the immigrant population is significant.
In our community, the local colleges are evolving into academic “halfway houses” — serving as an emotional as well as scholastic transition from high school to the university, or as a bridge to the array of vocational opportunities afforded us in this area, or as a step toward personal enrichment. [Note: now, nearly twenty years after this article was written, the colleges have lost many of their vocational classes, and “personal enrichment” is largely not available with so many students pursuing academic degrees competing for far fewer class offerings.]
A less familiar role of the community college is to train, to one degree or another, the vast population with limited English-speaking skills. [Note: at this present time, at least one of the local colleges is seriously considering eliminating or at least greatly reducing the number of English As A Second Language (ESL) classes.] Although many of these recent immigrants have not had the privilege of twelve years of formal education before arriving at our doorstep, they are nonetheless intelligent and anxious to become productive, tax-paying members of the community in which they live.
Some are too old to attend high school, and they know they would not survive in a university environment. They want more than adult night school twice a week. They are serious about mastering English and obtaining an education. There are also those immigrants who, because of the language or cultural barriers, appear to us as poor or uneducated, but who in fact were highly trained professionals in their homeland. The community college is an essential training ground for these former doctors, lawyers, teachers and engineers who find themselves toiling in the fields and factories alongside their compatriots. Their stories are fascinating and should make us long-time citizens appreciate more profoundly the opportunities that are available to us in this country.
Next: Education Today, part III
— David Magallanes is a writer, speaker and retired professor of mathematics. You may contact him at adelantos@msn.com