editorial

End English requirements at Panama's universities

The results are in and the overwhelming majority of University of Panama students are flunking the English proficiency test they must pass to graduate. For years now a large percentage of would-be public university students have been denied admission because they couldn't pass the English proficiency requirement.

People might argue that the requirement is relatively new and it ought to be given a few more years to work. But the problem is that a current generation of youngsters with talents that should be developed through higher education are being denied a chance to attain their full potential and the cause of Panama's development is being harmed by this denial.

Let's be honest about what this requirement is, and always has been: it's a back door way to cut back on public higher education.

Were the English requirement anything other than a filter to cut public university funding the Moscoso administration, during the term of which it was adopted, and the Torrijos administration, which, along with the PRD administrations of the University of Panama and the Tecnologico, has implemented it in a most destructive way, would have come up with the resources to carry out the mandate in good faith. But they haven't. Especially in the Interior, there are schools without English teachers who can actually speak English with any degree of fluency. Any proper implementation would have concentrated on improving the skills of our English teachers, including subsidies for many of them to get English immersion in English-speaking countries, particularly in the Caribbean. Any proper implementation would have encouraged members of Panama's large English-speaking community, citizens and foreigners alike, to learn the art of teaching and help make up for the shortage of qualified English teachers in the public schools.

The English requirement was a rabiblanco idea, proposed by a legislator who does not himself speak fluent English. But of course, those rich Panamanians who send their kids to English-speaking schools would be the long-run beneficiaries as the requirement gives their offspring less competition in the work force, the professions and society by eliminating the kids from the public schools from the universities. It's not something that the gringos demanded, but a selfish social experiment designed to harden Panama's vast class divisions.

The worst of it is the inherent discrimination that harms the poorest of this nation's people, those who live in the indigenous comarcas.

Ask anyone in those, the most destitute Panamanian communities, what they need and one of the things they will likely mention is elementary school teachers who speak their languages. So many kids come from homes where Ngobere, Kuna, Embera or one of the other indigenous languages is spoken and are immediately lost in Spanish-language primary schools, and most of them don't do well in school. There is an urgent need for teachers in the early elementary grades who speak indigenous languages to bridge the gap for kids who come to school knowing little or no Spanish. The national government has belatedly recognized that this is a problem by moving very tentatively toward bilingual education in the comarcas.

And now the PRD government and its University of Panama rector with the fake doctorate are telling kids who are bilingual in their native indigenous tongue and in Spanish that, unlike all the other kids who apply, they must be trilingual to get into the university. The net effect is that the critical shortage of teachers who speak the indigenous languages can't be addressed, the number of indigenous university graduates is kept low and the cycle of poverty in our most impoverished regions is reinforced.

Nobody should have to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language to get into or graduate from one of our public universities. That policy is destructive to our national interests and to countless individuals.

Panama's national interest as a major international crossroads is a population that includes people who speak a lot of different languages, so that we can attend to the needs of sailors and travelers of many nations and conduct business in many tongues, and so that we can improve the lot of our original nations. This can't be accomplished by decree. It takes careful thought, substantial investment and most of all, a sincere interest on the part of people running our education system.

Every student in Panama should be required to study at least two languages, one of which must be Spanish. English shouldn't be forced on anybody --- it's already the most popular second language and will continue to be. Let's skip the coercion, diversify the options and invest in improving the quality of instruction.

The problem with US foreign policy

Actually, there are a lot of problems. The idea that it's possible to effectively guide the affairs of people in other countries --- even were that a desirable thing --- may be the central fallacy by which Washington operates. That Americans on the whole are notoriously unable to speak foreign languages may be the single most salient fact behind the widespread belief in that mistaken idea.

However, the real problem is that given that backdrop of woeful mass ignorance, US foreign policy tends to be driven by domestic policy considerations. American politicians feel the need to appeal to various political or ethnic lobbies with specific foreign policy concerns.

The two best known examples of powerful domestic forces with special foreign policy concerns are the pro-Israel lobby and the Miami Cuban exile leadership, but although those groups have been notably successful in promoting their foreign policy objectives they're really not that unique. The United States was drawn into World War I largely because the British controlled the wires over which most news of Europe's war got to the American people and because of that the Anglophiles got the domestic upper hand over the Americans of German and Irish descent who mostly wanted to stay out of the war. There was a time when there was an American communist party with certain positions of influence within the labor movement and a primary allegiance to the Soviet Union. Nowadays virtually every oppressive regime in the world has a Washington lobby backed by American corporations that have business ties to it. In recent months, the antiwar movement played a substantial role in giving the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama, because it found Hillary Clinton's vote for the Iraq War unacceptable.

Recently the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the most dogmatic and powerful lobbies, was addressed by the presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential nominees. Senators Obama and McCain both pledged their support for Jerusalem being united and the capital of Israel. Some critics called this pandering.

That it may have been, but supporters of the Palestinian cause really ought to advocate something like that as well: an undivided Jerusalem, with a special legal status, in which the capitals of both Israel and Palestine are situated.

The extent to which either candidate meant to support the ethnic cleansing and annexation of East Jerusalem in their presentations to AIPAC would be the extent that they pandered to the lobby by accepting something unconscionable.

Long ago the United States accepted the role of guarantor of Israel's existence and the continuation of that guarantee, as distinguished from the uncritical support of everything that Israel does, is an important cornerstone for the possibility of an Arab-Israeli peace. But of course, having taken one side Washington can hardly be a credible mediator and to the extent that it has tried to do so it has spectacularly failed.

Israel is not part of the United States. The United States should not consider the Palestinian and Syrian territories seized in the 1967 Six Day War to be part of Israel. To the extent that there is any confusion about these matters in the United States, the underlying problem is the undue influence of a domestic lobby.

Similarly, there are long-standing ties between Cuba and the United States. The oldest European settlement in the USA, St. Augustine, Florida, was originally Spanish-speaking and governed from Havana. The Cuban-American communities in Florida, New Jersey and New York long antedate the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

Historically, one of the currents in the bilateral relationship --- a minority one in both societies, to be sure --- has been the advocacy of US annexation of Cuba.

The Miami Cuban exile leadership doesn't directly advocate that, but its most influential leaders would like to replace the current left-wing dictatorship with a right-wing dictatorship that's politically aligned with and subservient to the United States. Too many American politicians of both parties pander to those obnoxious aspirations for domestic political reasons.

The worst of it is that for too long, and especially during the Bush administration, right-wing Cuban exiles have been allowed to dominate all US policies toward all of Latin America and the Caribbean. They've given horrible advice, which is one of the main reasons that so much of Latin America has elected governments that reject US policies and US-led international organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The Miami exile leadership does have a substantial following, but they don't speak for Cuba, they don't represent all of the Cuban-American community and their assumption that most of what happens in Latin American public life is a function of or reaction to plots hatched in Havana (or now Caracas) borders on what psychiatrists would call paranoiac ideation.

The American people want to change the old power relationships that have locked Washington into failed policies for a long time. Although it's the legitimate democratic right of every American to hold and advocate opinions about US foreign policy, the country would be much better off if it had leaders who pay less attention to how narrow domestic interest groups might react and more attention to fundamental principles of international law, the weight of world opinion and the best long-term interests of the United States as a whole.

Bear in mind...