Despite controversies over current educational practices, Texas 
boasts a rich and vibrant bilingual tradition—and not just for 
Spanish-English instruction, but for Czech, German, Polish, and 
Dutch as well. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth 
centuries, Texas educational policymakers embraced, ignored, 
rejected, outlawed, and then once again embraced this tradition.

    In The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 
1836–1981, Carlos Kevin Blanton traces the educational 
policies and their underlying rationales, from Stephen F. Austin's 
proposal in the 1830s to "Mexicanize" Anglo children by teaching 
them Spanish along with English and French, through the 1981 
passage of the most encompassing bilingual education law in the 
state's history. Drawing on primary materials, Blanton presents the 
Texas experience in light of national trends and movements, such 
as Progressive Education, the Americanization Movement, and the 
Good Neighbor Movement.

    By tracing the many changes that eventually led to the re-
establishment of bilingual education in its modern form in the 
1960s and the 1981 passage of a landmark state law, Blanton 
reconnects Texas with its bilingual past.

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CARLOS KEVIN BLANTON, associate professor of history at 
Texas A&M University, currently lives in Houston.


Number Two: Fronteras Series, sponsored by Texas A&M 
International University


What people are saying about this book

". . . a necessary corrective to the fallacious idea, still tenaciously 
held in certain quarters, that bilingual education is some kind of 
un-American aberration born of twentieth-century ethnic activism. 
Indeed, as he concludes, it is 'thoroughly American education' with a 
long, though complex, history."—American Historical Review, 
February 2007